Three day weekend!

Spouse is home for three days in a row, hooray!  I took advantage of having an extra pair of hands during the day yesterday to go to the grocery store and pharmacy by myself.  Before that, I took my inaugural postpartum run.  And by the time I was done with all that, I found myself missing my baby like I’d been gone for a week.  Thank goodness I had plenty of time during the night last night to make up for the time I was gone.  Someone did not want to sleep more than 3 hours in a row, and wanted to take her sweet time getting back to sleep after being awake.  We didn’t roll out of bed for good until after 10 this morning, and I still feel like I got about 15 minutes of sleep last night.

Anyway, that first run? I over-optimistically expected to try 2.5 or 3 miles, but figured I should start out nice and easy, so I did the 2-mile loop.  Slowly.  Very slowly.  So slowly, in fact, that I had to remind myself that if I could get through 19 hours of back labor, I could certainly get through 25 minutes of moderately intense exercise.  And that’s what I did: two 11- to 12-minute miles.  Pitiful, yes, but not so bad considering that my running muscles have been on vacation for several months, and really haven’t gotten a good workout in over a year (I got too busy biking to and fro all over town last summer to put some foot mileage on top of it).  Sweet mother, are my thighs sore this morning.  I’m considering installing a lift chair to get me up and down the stairs.  I think Nuala would like it.

So today and tomorrow we’re going to see some friends and putter around cooing at the baby and trying to get the house into shape for what’s to come.  Spouse starts his class this week, making Tuesdays and Thursdays all-Mom-all-the-time days.  Shouldn’t be so bad, really, since Nuala’s getting pretty good about letting us set her in the bouncy seat for long enough to either prepare dinner or eat it, and I’ve gotten pretty good at doing damn near anything with one hand and in increments when I pass by on laps around the house trying to soothe a fussy baby.  Seriously, you should see the upper arms I’m developing hauling this little chunker around.

Naked Baby Time

I have known babies who did not like diaper changes one bit, writhing and screaming through the whole thing.  Nuala is not that baby, particularly when you talk to Naked Baby (that’s her) about whether or not she is naked, and to what degree, and whether she enjoys it.  First, there’s the cooing and singing:

And then, the gummy grins!

She’s growing like a weed!  I have no idea how much she weighs, but I’m guessing in the vicinity of 10 lbs.  What’s more, I’ve had to adjust the shoulder straps in her car seat twice because she’s getting so long so fast.  By my measurement (during Naked Baby Time), she’s grown 1.5″ to 2″ in the last four and a half weeks.  There are some footie sleepers that she never even got to wear because it was too hot when she was small enough for them, and she’s completely grown out of two sets of onesies.  The bulk of the cloth diapers accelerates the  growing-out process, but even when using the last of the newborn disposable diapers (which fit like bikinis by the time we got through all of them), the onesies were just too, too short to accommodate her height.  What does all of this mean?  My breast milk is magic, and by extension, I have achieved superhero status. It’s the only reasonable conclusion.

We cannot possibly be this lucky

After almost a solid week of sleeping 4-5 hours a night, last night she slept a good 6 hours, 11pm to 5am.  The catch? She sleeps right next to me in the bed.  I say it’s a small price to pay for some good quality rest.

The other good news/bad news? Good news: the smiles are coming fast and furious, provided she’s awake and not hungry.  For the hour that she was awake yesterday afternoon she smiled at me almost continuously.  And after trying most of the evening to get a smile out of her, Spouse was rewarded early this morning with some gummy goodness.  Bad news? She’s got some nasal congestion that’s not accompanied by fussiness or fever or anything that would lead me to believe she’s really sick, but because she’s younger than 3 months, we need to call the doctor and make sure it doesn’t shade into pneumonia or croup.

Thanks to the good night’s sleep, I actually have the energy to get some good parental anxiety going.  See how there’s always a silver lining?

Update:  Apparently, I can use that energy for something else.  The doc says use saline and a bulb syringe, and as long as she doesn’t have any other symptoms, we’re good to go.

Hooray!

I’m back in my pre-pregnancy jeans!  I don’t know if most women find this satisfying primarily because of a body-image thing, but personally, when compared with the satisfaction of not having to buy a new round of clothes, I’m about 30-70 in favor of the latter.

Things I never thought I’d worry about

For one, having the sheets soaked not with baby pee or spit-up, nor a toppled glass of water, nor even sweat on an exceptionally hot and muggy night when the window unit has crapped out; no, I would expect all these things as perfectly reasonable events.  I would not expect to worry about waking up in a pool of breast milk so large it’s a wonder I’m not a desiccated shadow of my former self this morning.  I think this is what happens when you combine a rather active let-down reflex, a lowered flap to feed the baby to sleep, and a baby who decides it’s a good night to sleep 5 hours.

Month 1

This is the beginning of a monthly series, inspired by/shamelessly ripped off from Dooce’s series of newsletters addressed to her own daughter (now daughters).  Can I even claim to have ripped it off if it’s not a particularly novel idea, but merely the last place I saw such a thing?  Where’s my copy of the Chicago Manual of Style?

Nuala: Today you’re one month old.  Congratulations! You’re thriving, and you still have a functioning mother and father!

It has been far more difficult than I anticipated, this tremendous reduction in hours of sleep available to me, and this thing with being on call literally 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  It’s not that I didn’t understand intellectually what was about to happen to our lives; it’s just that I didn’t quite get how completely everything would get turned around.  I have never been so frustrated over the littlest things, like when an object I need is out of reach and you’re either finally napping on my lap or finally latched on well to my boob.  Or needing to pee when you just. won’t. let. me. put. you. down.  There is no other way to describe most of my waking hours in the last month than that I’ve been held hostage.  Granted, you, the hostage-holder, are the most adorable of terrorists, and bending to your whim is not exactly torture.

Which is not to say I don’t miss my sleep.  I simply don’t know what I’d do with 6 hours of uninterrupted time at this point.  Paint the house?  Rip out and re-tile the bathroom floor?  Finish my dissertation?  The possibilities seem endless!  In the last week, you’ve slept 4 to 4 1/2 hours at a stretch on four separate nights, and I’ve woken up before you on two of those nights wondering why you weren’t awake as well.  I haven’t figured out the secret to those long sleeps, but they’ve all happened when you were swaddled and snuggled up next to me in bed.  I hear I’m supposed to get you into your own bed as soon as possible, but frankly, I’m not terribly interested in that advice right now.  For one thing, you’re only a few weeks old, and getting you acclimated to some kind of schedule at this stage, rather than my acclimating to your schedule sounds like a pretty harebrained idea.  For another, it’s easier to put both of us to sleep nursing lying down, especially if you’re fussy.  And for another, you wake me up wide-eyed, chasing your fists with your mouth instead of crying.  And that’s pretty cute, even when I’m dead tired and in the middle of some dream where we’re hanging out with your pediatrician at a fancy estate with sculpted boxwood gardens talking about starting a day camp for kids.  I have never been so inundated with thoughts about children, waking or asleep.

I am simply amazed at how much you’ve grown and how much you’ve changed already.  I’m amazed that my body is producing the thing that’s making you grow so much so fast, and so very, very glad that the whole lactating and feeding process is going so much more smoothly than in the beginning.  I’m amazed that all of a sudden in the last week, you’ve started looking at me and your dad like you know us.  And that lying down and looking at whatever’s in front of your face doesn’t automatically send you into fits like it did the first three weeks or so.  And the smiles?  Holy cow, they kill me.  Most of them are completely random, and the ones that come when you’re sleeping–along with the laughing in your sleep (really!)–I know have nothing to do with us, but we’ve counted four occasions where we’re pretty sure you’ve smiled back at us, and we could’ve lost our minds, they were such sweet moments.  It must be nature’s way of getting parents through the first month, because I can coast for the rest of an otherwise drag-ass day on one good gummy smile.

I have incredible anxiety about how we’re going to get through the rest of the summer, how I’m going to get work done so I can get through these two classes I’m supposed to teach, graduate next May, and land a job in the meantime.  I have absolutely no idea how any of that’s going to happen, but I suppose I’ll do what I’ve done in the past: put my head down and barrel through, and hope for some moments of inspiration along the way.  Remind me to teach you this particular life lesson when the time comes.

Until then, keep up the good work growing and developing. Can’t wait to see what the next month brings! Could it be more sleep?

Love, Mom

On the other hand, there is this:

And this:

And these:

*Recovered with the equivalent of a “restart”: taking the battery out of the camera and putting it back in.

Woe

The oven is broken–this discovered after a lovely natural gas smell filled the house.  Exactly what you want with an infant around, right? Repair person can’t come till tomorrow morning, and I am certainly not sticking my head in the oven to see what’s what, even if I know how to turn off the gas and take things apart.

I took pictures of an adorable baby grunting her way through “tummy time,” only to have the memory card crap out on me and claim to not exist.

We got a bill from Nuala’s first pediatrician visit claiming she wasn’t covered by our insurance, followed by the first bill from the OB (this on top of what we paid in advance), soon to be followed by the hospital bill (your guess is as good as mine as to the amount).  Viva la private health insurance, where you never know what or how much will be covered!

Spouse has to take a class this summer to fulfill some professional requirements, three hours in the evening, two days a week.

We need to buy a second car some time before the end of July, as I don’t think I’m supposed to be carting around a two-month-old infant in a bike trailer that I don’t have.

And because I’m on a 9-month stipend, I am without a paycheck until the end of August, leaving us to draw on savings to squeak by until then.  Given recent events, it is less of a squeak than a high-pitched squeal.

Product review

Product: Moby Wrap

Suggested retail price: $39.95

Ease of use: If you can put on a shirt, you can put on a Moby wrap.

Comfort for baby-wearer: Having been pregnant, carrying at least this much weight on my front end for a few months, it’s nothing.  Wide fabric doesn’t dig anywhere.  Did, however, require installing an A/C unit downstairs to keep temp at 75º or below (75º being skin-to-skin sweat threshold).

Effectiveness: Baby stopped whining immediately, passed out cold in just over two minutes.  Remains fast asleep a half hour later.

Overall: Highly, highly recommended.

Happy Father’s Day!

In the few brief moments we snagged for breakfast this morning while Nuala was tolerating her bouncy seat, we listened to a snippet of Weekend Edition including a bit of an interview with General Patton’s grandson, who has written a biography of his family for Smithsonian.  The latter is a new father himself, and expressed a hope that he would be able to impart wisdom to his son, born at the beginning of this month.  Spouse, who had by this point retrieved our squalling child from what she now recognized as a torture device covered in deadly woodland predators, let out a weary sigh and said, “I haven’t even thought of wisdom yet.”  At which point we both laughed until we had tears in our eyes.

Happy Father’s Day!