12 months and counting...

if you haven't noticed by now, i'm a big fan of saving up months' worth of information and then cramming all into one blog (read procrastinating). so, here is a "summary" of my days in this first year as a mother. they are just a taste of the triumphs and shortcomings that scattered their way into my forever altered daily life. no book, website, advice, or planning can prepare you for the day-in, day-out journey of motherhood, and these are the lessons i learned through trial by fire. don't judge me too harshly...

the first month
~worry~ i am not sure how i neglected to prepare my brain for this. however, one does not spend the days of pregnancy thinking about how much worry is going to accompany the sweet bundle of joy you have eagerly been waiting to deliver for 9 plus months. to be honest, the level of worry really quite shocked me. i guess the magnitude of responsibility just overwhelms you once they arrive. every single moment of their lives depend on YOU. i couldn't help but worry if he was uncomfortable or in pain or eating enough or growing properly. every peep or squeak or snort made me think something must be terribly wrong. granted, we did have a baby who spent the first day of his life intubated because he couldn't breathe efficiently. that kind of beginning doesn't exactly put your mind at ease when it sounded like he ceased to exhale. overall, i think the mother bear instinct to protect and nurture, no matter what the cost, truly consumes you from the moment they come out....and the sum total of so much desire and willingness to give them your absolute best is just a whole lot of worry. so it begins....
~ breastfeeding~ i will be the first to admit that i had a great misunderstanding about the ease of breastfeeding before i tried it myself. i was one of the great critics of women who gave it up because it was "too hard." after all, it's nature's way....it should be simple, right? simple, yes. easy, no. the concept is what is simple: your baby has the means to alert you when hungry for food. you have the means to provide said food. HOW-EV-ER, there is a multitude of learning that goes into perfecting this relationship. one of my lactation consultants put it this way, "the first six to eight weeks, you are teaching your baby how to eat." say what?! i thought they were supposed to know how to eat! that's what they are "naturally" born to do! but she was right. there is an art to positioning them just so, to teaching them how to latch, to making them drink when they would rather sleep, to keeping them satisfied. it is a dance that had to be rehearsed over and over and over. it. is. work. i distinctly remember the moment when all of the work finally paid off. the first time i plunked blake down in my lap and he knew just what to do and how to do it with minimal assistance from me, i couldn't help but beam. it just seemed so....easy. ;)

the second month
~sickness~ every time you feel like you're starting to get the hang things in the parenting world, something is bound to come and bring you to your knees. my first (of many) experience of this nature came in the form of a little something called gastroenteritis. for those not privy to webMD terminology, that's stomach virus. stomach virus attacking a helpless, one month old baby. stomach virus that lasts for 13 exhausting days. we've all had one of these in our lifetime. it tears up your insides and knocks you down. i wouldn't wish a tummy bug on anyone, least of all my newborn child! it is pure torture watching a baby (MY baby) clenching his tiny body in half with stomach cramps every few hours. i remember hearing him cry after a few days in and his cry had changed to this sad, sad hoarse little cry. HEARTBREAKING! he slept far more than normal (and that's saying something for a four week old). he snuggled constantly (sniff). he blew through diapers. and this is where i add salt to the bleeding wound...before this episode, i had not been using diaper cream at all. i guess in my new mother head, diaper cream was only needed if there was a problem. it never occurred to me to use it for prevention. and because of the now caustic nature of his diapers, and the constant changing/wiping every half hour, and the lack of preventative measures.....this precious, undeserving child developed a horrendous rash, on top of his already ailing body. how do you forgive yourself for something like that? how?? as i sit here typing this, i am shaking my head at the naivete of this bad mother moment...only to realize that i will be humbled by experiences far more "stupid" a hundred more times before this life is over. my poor child.
~swaddling~ everyone knows that babies like to be swaddled. i knew it too. i had gotten those velcro-wrap swaddles and dozens of receiving blankets before he was born. i was armed and ready. but when he came home, for some reason i thought he wouldn't like it. here was my (completely ridiculous, new mother) reasoning: in all of his ultrasounds, his hands had been up by his face. in the hospital for the first week, he had slept on his side with his hands by his face. thus, i deduced that he liked to sleep with his hands free. (here i am yelling to my old self, "he doesn't know what he 'likes!' he's been living in a watery cocoon for 9 months!") anyways, i recall one sleepless night, early on, when he kept waking himself up with his hands. i finally broke out the velcro-y swaddle and attempted to swaddle him...loosely enough so that his hands could still stick out, mind you. new mothers are brain-dead. what good was that going to do? so, after re-swaddling him this way three times in a row, i resolved to the fact that he just didn't want to be swaddled. thus continued weeks of very little sleep because i ended up with him on my chest or next to me in the bed. and we all know that you only half-sleep this way because you are terrified you're going to drop them off the side of the bed or roll over and crush them. zombie level commence. until one night, i had had it. i was going to swaddle him, arms down, no matter how much he protested. he cried for all of 30 seconds, while i was pinning his arms down and wrapping him up. and then he slept. soundly. revelation. i am ashamed to admit that it took another month before i realized i could (and should) swaddle him like this for naps during the day as well. i spent weeks with him either tucked in my moby wrap or not napping at all which made for one cranky baby (and often, momma). jot another one down in the what-not-to-do-with-the-next-baby category.
~the crib~ in the midst of all this swaddling nonsense, and when b was about 6 weeks old, i came to another realization. blake needed to be in his own room. he had spent the first month and a half in the napper next to our bed. but i was never going to get much sleep if he was in the same room with me. every twitch he made woke me up. plus, i no longer felt like i had a husband. marcus had taken to sleeping on the floor, in another room, or on the floor in another room most every night to accommodate the mother and child nursing and sleeping situation. blake and i practically lived in that master bedroom. it was becoming suffocating. i was also wondering what the point of having a baby monitor and an entire nursery was if we weren't going to use them. so i emailed marcus at work and announced the move. i charged up the monitor, toted the napper downstairs, and put the rocking chair back in blake's room. operation big boy crib was a success. a small part of my normal self started to creep back in that night. the self i had long forgotten was in there. baby steps.

the third month
~be prepared~ taking blake to the grocery store/on errands with me was a regular occurrence. his diaper bag was always stocked with pacifiers, diapers, gas drops, spit-up rags, clothes, you name it. i actually loved going out with him. i could pretty much guarantee that he would fall asleep on the car ride or shortly after being in the shopping cart. he was ever the peaceful, sleeping baby that people peered at and cooed over. so one afternoon, i took marcus' truck to walmart to get the oil changed and decided to do some major grocery shopping while i waited. i had chosen not to pack a bottle for this particular trip, because we rarely were away from home long enough to make it to the next cycle of feeding, and i didn't anticipate this trip being any different. so we left the truck, loaded up in the cart, and he fell asleep. i went about my merry way, casually strolling up and down the aisles (grocery shopping is therapeutic for me, by the way). before i knew it, i had a cart laden with the entire food section and a baby waking up from his nap. and then he started whimpering. i tried the paci. not what he wanted. i decided to try changing his diaper. still crying. then i decided to just nurse him, standing in the bathroom. one employee came into the restroom and, when she saw us, notified me that there was a family restroom next door. (what is it with people and breastfeeding?!) anyways, he wasn't satisfied with the nursing. i thought it might tide him over, but it actually made him more upset. so i had no choice but to hurry through the check-out line. but it's pretty difficult to "hurry" when your cart is overflowing....and you still have to pick up your truck from the oil center. needless to say, my "always peaceful" baby was screaming bloody murder for the entire check-out process. i was mortified. i think everyone around me felt sorry for me, but i couldn't help but think they were annoyed and thinking all kinds of things about my terrible parenting skills. the cashiers on either side and the people behind me were offering up suggestions to calm him down. i knew what he wanted though. after 30 grueling minutes (it was probably more like 3) , i finally decided to just take him out of his seat, slather on some hand sanitizer, and stick my finger in his mouth. it worked. for as long as i could make it work, it worked. then he cried on the way back to the automotive department and while i was loading up the groceries. for some reason, he decided not to cry on the way home, but that was okay with me. poor starving baby. sigh. we never left the house without formula again. i also have never had a screaming baby in public again. lesson learned.

the fourth month
~just let it happen~ if you are a first-time mom and a control freak like me, you are bound to keep a daily log of your child's eating, pooping, and sleeping habits. it makes you feel like you have some semblance of control, when there really is absolutely none. so i did it. i mapped out his dirty diapers, wet diapers, nursing minutes, bottle ounces, nap periods, and night sleep from day one. i will say that i did drop the diaper count after about 2 weeks. the feeding chart dropped off around 3 months. but the sleep chart i kept. perhaps because it is what i had the least control over but wanted the most control over. i tried looking for patterns in his sleep habits by shading in boxes of representative time (there are no patterns, just fyi). i wrote wake times and sleep times and re-wake and re-sleep times. i literally had a memo sheet in my cell phone that i updated every 30 minutes or so. psycho. HOWEVER.....i do remember waking up one day during this month of his life and telling myself, "this is so unnecessary. stop." and i did. holy, amazing liberation. did you know that when a baby wants to sleep, he gives you signs? and when a baby wants to wake up, he does? i did. i just couldn't see the forest for the charts. in hindsight, it seems like SUCH a wasted effort. but then, parenting seems to be an ongoing game of hindsight. i'm learning, people.....
~make it work~ nail clipping. what a dreaded parent obligation. i say this because it is literally like trying to perform microsurgery on the wing of a conscious hummingbird. in the beginning, the manuals and websites all told me to "do it while they're asleep." this is an absolute joke. in the beginning, i didn't dare touch him if he was asleep! and/or i was trying to sleep myself! also, if you will remember, my child had to be swaddled for every sleeping occasion once we got past those first few weeks. so how are you supposed to clip nails that are tucked inside a blanket?? my next choice was to try and clip them while he was nursing. he was calm, distracted, still. seemed ideal. but i could only seem to manage balancing him/clipping when he was on the left and my right hand was free. it just never worked with the reverse. so i was left with a baby with daggers on one hand and mere cuticles on the other. i needed a solution. badly. enter streaming digital media. up until this point, i had really tried to not let my child see the television. it put him into a trance. it overstimulated his senses. but all of a sudden, i connected the dots. this trance could be just the ticket for nail clipping! i looked up some baby einstein videos on youtube and plugged blake in. the response was instant. limp arms, wide eyes, totally and utterly distracted. i clipped to my heart's content. it was so simple! to this day, i still clip his nails this way....because it works! it is the most relaxing part of our week sometimes :)

the fifth month
~spit-up~ babies barf. it's a known fact. mine just happened to be the kind that barfed large volumes and all day long. when he first started to really spit-up in the first month, i looked up how long it was supposed to last...one day of cleaning up huge puddles of milk spew was enough to have me searching for an end. the all-knowing internet specified that spitting up peaks at four months. so we had no choice but to wait patiently (sort of) for four months to arrive. this means we dealt with an increasing quantity of regurgitation for four months and then, somehow, expected it to just stop. yeah right. re-read above and you'll notice that it says PEAKS at four months. if you look at any mountain peak, it does not merely "drop off" on the other side. there is a downward slope, just as steep as the upward slope. and so we had no choice but to wait patiently (ha!) for the rest of the "down" months to pass. he would soak through multiple receiving blankets every day. i'd like to say that you get used to it, but you really are just wishing every day that this would be his last day of spitting up. i finally asked our pediatrician when he thought blake would stop. he laughed (yes, laughed out loud) and said, "usually when they can fully sit up on their own or support their torso upright consistently." he was right. the majority of the spitting up lasted until he was about 8 months....which is when he started sitting without ever tumbling over. it definitely did taper down as those last 4 months went on, but it was a lonnnnng time coming. i have the stained clothes, carpet, and furniture to prove it.
~the sleepeasy solution~ i needed sleep. or i at least needed more consistent sleep. it's hard not knowing when your human "alarm clock" is going to go off each night/morning. it's even harder being the sole person who can put said alarm clock back to sleep. blake required a certain holding and walking routine in order to be put down in his crib. if i was lucky, it would last 20 minutes. if i was unlucky, it would take up to an hour of walking, setting down, picking up, walking before he would stay asleep in his crib. and please remember that babies don't just need to go to sleep once a day. so why, you ask, would i torture myself with this type of time-stealing routine for nearly five months? here is my reasoning...everything (and i mean everything) says that letting a baby cry him/herself to sleep is only appropriate once they reach four months of age. i KNOW that there are tons of parents out there who do it at 2 weeks old or whatever, but for me, i was waiting for the four month mark, come hell or high water. it just seemed developmentally appropriate to me. so i waited. and then, since he was born a month early, i waited four weeks longer, just for good measure. i wanted to be absolutely sure i was committed to the cry-it-out thing. consistency is key (for all parenting purposes, really), and i didn't want to be second guessing myself. so on the weekend before his 5 month birthday, i began a process called the sleepeasy solution. it is a step-by-step guide about how/when your child should sleep. and it is, let's just say, incredible. i don't need to go into the details of the book to sell you on it. i will simply tell you the results: 12 hours of sleep every night for 8 months and counting. plus two 90 minute naps per day like clockwork. heaven on earth? i think so. this baby has been trained! and to tell you the truth, those first several months of cuddling and rocking him to sleep are equally as priceless. i'll never get those moments back again. i think this finally counts as one of my triumphs in parenting. yay, me :)

halfway done. more to come...