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