If I’d known there would be math…

You know what I hate? The leaf-sucking truck that comes by right as I’m rounding the corner for home after a walk with Nuala in the Moby wrap to convince her of the virtues of a third nap when her first two were crap.  You know what else I hate?  Not being psychic.

Getting her to go to sleep and stay asleep has been a real challenge lately.  After a few days and nights of perfect napping and perfect sleeping (hey, waking twice a night to eat is perfect at this point), she decided early this week that 2 or 3am is as good a time as any to start the day.  And then, that if she was going to give up the waking bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at 2 or 3, she was damn well going to stay up screaming until she passed out on a boob at 10pm.  She went down relatively easily tonight (asleep for two hours and counting! Damn, I just jinxed it, didn’t I?!), but who’s to say when and how she’s going to wake up?  I shouldn’t worry about this, and just deal with events as they happen, but there is the small matter of an aforementioned boob.  Or I should say, increasingly less small matter.  Because the little booger still only eats on one side at a time for most feedings, I end up going for about six hours between emptying per side, and we’re coming up on five hours now.  Do I pump now and tempt fate with a wakeful baby?  Or do I go to bed and actually hope she wakes in a couple hours to take care of business?  There’s a Murphy’s Law factor in here somewhere, but I haven’t figured out exactly where to stick it in the calculations.

Morning update: I should always assume she’s going to wake up in a couple hours.

Syllabic baby

In the last several days, Nuala has started making syllables.  It is incredibly cute, and incredibly funny as well, since she draws the corners of her mouth down like she’s a ventriloquist dummy when she does her “bwah bwah bwah.”  I don’t know where that’s coming from.  I especially love the “bwah bwah bwah” whispers, even when it’s 3am and she appears to have no intention of going back to sleep.  I mean, come on. A baby whispering at us in the dark?  How are we not supposed to eat her up head to toe?

This will probably end badly

Reaching for her reflection in the mirror on the underside.  I guess this is why these things have little harnesses you snap your kid into.

And how does that taste?

The above is a stark reminder that babies aren’t programmed to like any food but breast milk.  We started with butternut squash, which I personally like as an adult, but I don’t remember liking it as a child all that much.  Now apples, on the other hand, I loved then and now.  A few weeks ago, we picked up a big bag of apples (it being high apple season in the upper midwest), which I made into frozen cubes of puree, thinking perhaps it would be Nuala’s first non-cereal solid food.  I am SO glad I didn’t start with the apples.  I don’t know that I would’ve been able to feed her anything else if I’d seen that face right off the bat.  Fortunately, though, we started with squash, which she took to like a duck to water, and by the time we tried apples, I found all of the contortions and flailing funny rather than disturbing.  I wasn’t even able to focus properly, I was laughing so hard.  This was the best of a half dozen pictures.

So we’re skipping over apples for the time being, and maybe going to sweet potatoes, avocadoes, or green beans next.

Hoo boy…

Since Saturday, Nuala’s been eating non-breast milk sustenance twice a day: oatmeal in the late afternoon/evening and now butternut squash at lunch.  After some mild nose-wrinkling at first, the squash has been a big, big hit–so much so that one frozen cube of squash disappears in a few minutes, and yet the tiny gaping maw and grasping fingers remain.  So yea for Nuala’s first vegetable!

I’m sure there’s a space in baby books for “Baby’s First Food,” and I’d happily scrawl “Butternut Squash Puree, made with love by Mom” if I had a baby book.  I want to know, however, if there’s usually a space for “Baby’s First Oh My God Diaper.”  If there is, I’d be marking it down for November 4th, and silently weeping at the end of inoffensive breast-milk poopy diapers.

All I really have to say is that it was an interesting experience, much like the effects of leprosy or the phenomenon of man-eating lions is interesting.

Help me, hive mind.

One way to read this map is to conclude, like Matt Yglesias, et al, that “white men are not very progressive.” But sometimes there are other, more creative and ultimately more compelling explanations for soci0-political phenomena.  I can’t think of any at the moment, so this is where you come in.

Big applause for the successes; ignore the rest

Two great (1-hour plus) naps yesterday, plus a short nap late in the afternoon, a little trouble going to bed…BUT she slept from 8-11, ate, slept till 2 when she woke either because a little peckish or more likely because she’d wet through everything on her and in her crib, ate, slept till 5:45, ate, and went back to sleep until 7am.  We’re calling it a good night.

This morning’s nap has been more difficult, as Homegirl was obviously tired but not wanting to go down at 9.  I don’t have the heart for letting her cry it out yet, so I walked and sang, sang and walked for the next half hour, and finally slung her in the Moby wrap, which put her to sleep in about 2.5 minutes.  And then I tended to my bloody nose.

Part of the great wailing and rending of garments and gnashing of teeth that occurred this morning (okay, it wasn’t that bad, but there were a few tears) included her snatching my glasses off my face and waving them about.  She managed to jam one earpiece up my nose hard enough to break the skin.  I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a bloody nose that way.

What happened here?

Last week, I laid her down in the middle of the quilt (thanks, Aunt Doris!) on her back, went into the other room to do something or other, came back, and found her like this.  Seeing as how she’s not a big fan of rolling from her front to her back, I can only assume that she got a little extra momentum when she was rolling from back to front and just kept going.  Either that, or we have a very slanty floor we’ve never noticed.

Month 5

Nuala,

Of course you’ve been blowing past milestones every month so far, but in the last few weeks, it seems like you’re speeding ahead faster than ever.  This has been tremendously exciting for us, especially since some of those milestones have to do with how you interact with us.  The giggles and squeals, my God.  We used to have to wait until some random mood hit you just right for you to laugh.  Now, there are tricks and patterns to your giggliness, and we find ourselves clowning like idiots to see that dimple and hear that ear-splitting squeal.  Sometimes I’m surprised by the discovery of a new comedy routine.  I had no idea that watching me sweep the porch or rake the leaves was so entertaining.  And new routines have been built into our evenings.  Every night you get a bath, and every night we take turns carrying you upstairs on a shoulder so you can see the other saying, “I’m gonna get youuuuu….I’m gonna get youuuuu….” and you laugh the whole way.  I don’t know what’s so funny about seeing one of us when the other is carrying you, either, but whatever.  It’s awesome.

And then there’s the milestone of the teeth.  Teeth, plural.  Weekend before last, after I’d given up on believing that your snotty nose was in any way teething-related, one razor-sharp little tooth poked through your gums.  We went away on our first overnight trip, and you were a perfect angel the whole time.  You didn’t sleep as much or as well as you usually do, and I thought it was all because we messed with your schedule.  But on Sunday when we got back, I was poking my finger around in your mouth like moms do, and I discovered a razor-sharp little tooth.  By this time, Dad had left for a conference, so he got the news over a phone call. Because Dad was away, I got all the enjoyment of two nights of great difficulty getting you to fall asleep.  Then, somewhere around Tuesday, I thought I felt another razor-sharp little tooth poking through next to the first one.  And now there’s no denying it, you’ve got two brand new razor-sharp little teeth.  I keep repeating this “razor-sharp” thing, don’t I?  It might have something to do with the fact that you’ve caused me intense pain twice today when your zeal to nurse overmatched my letdown reflex.  We’ll have to work on that one.

For the grand finale, you’ve moved beyond the breast milk in the last week.  We were hoping rice cereal and oatmeal–which you’ve eaten like it’s going out of style–would put a stop to your insistence on waking every 2-3 hours overnight, but we haven’t gotten very lucky on that score.  A few nights, you’ve slept 3-4 hours through the night without waking, and those were lovely.  The consensus among friends, as far as I can tell, is that switching to formula in the evenings has helped carry their babies through the night without waking, but I’m hard-headed enough to stick with nursing, even if it means putting off a good night’s sleep for at least several more weeks.  I have Thanksgiving break and Christmas break to look forward to, after all.  I can hang in there.  If I report back next month that I’ve officially gone insane, at least you’ll know why.

Even with the hardship of sleeplessness, you are still the best thing that happens to me every day.  I will be perfectly honest and say that it took me a few weeks to feel all those motherly emotions I knew I was supposed to be feeling about you when you were born.  It was hard to see the ooey-gooey part of becoming a mother when I was overwhelmed with the enormity of responsibility that had just fallen in my lap.  Also, there was the postpartum hormonal crash to contend with, and it took a little while for my head to clear (those pregnancy hormones don’t mess around).  Now, though…I just don’t know what to do with you, and I mean that in the best way possible.  I’m sleep-deprived, I’ve got a million different things weighing down on me all at once with school, our house is a wreck and my to-do list is a mile long.  And still, at least once a day your dad and I look at each other and say, “I LOVE THIS BABY SO MUCH!”

I love you so, so, so very much,

Mom

Forward, back, sideways

Under advice of our pediatrician, we started Nuala out on rice cereal for a few days, then switched to oatmeal, expecting to move on to vegetables in another week. The rice has been a big hit, I think because it’s pretty mild, so it’s basically like eating solid breastmilk.  The oatmeal has been less of a hit, though she’s still eating almost the whole little bowl I’ve been fixing (about 2T of cereal with about 1oz of milk).  It has more fiber, so it’s required a bit more of her gut, which I suppose has led pretty directly to the kind of writhing and back-arching she’s been doing at night.  And also the not sleeping.

Not that she was sleeping all the way through before, but four wakings feels about like eight wakings when you’ve been spoiled with two wakings for a few days.  The only way I can get anything resembling a good night’s sleep is to actually sleep with her in the bed and roll over and feed her when she wakes again demanding to be fed.

Now here’s the rub. I know she can survive through the night without eating.  And we’ve tried to get her to settle again without feeding her.  But when she starts whining and crying, and I go to pick her up out of her crib in the middle of the night, she wraps her little arms around my neck and attaches herself like a barnacle to my face, my neck, my shoulder, and whatever else gets in the way before I can get her latched on.  She eats like she’s never going to eat again, and then she falls back asleep for another 2-3 hours.

The only thing I can think to do is to mix half rice cereal, half oatmeal today, and move on to veggies sooner than later, in case the oatmeal is actually gut-wrenching and keeping her up.  I feed her in the afternoons since my milk supply is a bit lower then, so I guess I could also start feeding her earlier until we go to 2x/3x a day. But otherwise, I don’t know what to do to convince her to sleep with fewer breaks during the night.  I can’t tell you how badly I DON’T want to let her cry it out.  One, because I simply don’t want to hear her squalling all night long, and two, because I need to sleep at night, and a crying baby is going to keep me up more effectively than a briefly-waking-and-eating baby.  Any other good ideas?  Or are we just going to have to wait?