Tag Archives: Babies

Who’s The Boss?

15 Dec

3 and a half weeks!  I truly wish I could blog more, but I also wish I could brush my teeth before noon and that’s not going to happen, either.  So better make this one count.

Forever ago I wrote about my dad wanting Elisabeth to call him “Boss”.  I responded with a loud rejection of this moniker, noting that I’m the only boss in my household.  To which E. has since responded, “You think you’re the boss? I’ll show you who’s the boss!”

When E. was first born, she was silent.  For days, she barely uttered a peep.  Which totally freaked me out.  Why wasn’t my baby crying!?  Babies are supposed to cry!  Something must be terribly wrong!  Everyone told me I’m lucky, just relax, enjoy it.

So I did.  I had the perfect baby.  And not just in temperament; I’d like to note she also had a perfectly round head at birth.  A non cone-head, non crying infant!  With amazing neck strength to boot!  And so alert!  AND a champion eater (her mother’s daughter, indeed).  Doctors want to see babies regain their birth weight by 2 weeks old.  At 11 days, E. had not only regained to her original 8lbs 1oz – she had far surpassed it:  8lbs 8.9oz.  The Doc told me they want babies to be gaining 15-30 grams a day; E. was gaining 43.

Good news all around: E. had a healthy appetite, and because she was gaining so quickly, I was given permission to extend the length of time between her nighttime feedings to 5 hours instead of 3.  Woohoo!  Sleep was in my future!

My vision of blissful days and restful nights were quickly dashed.

Whereas until then she had been sleeping so deeply she had been difficult to wake to feed as required, she began waking herself every 2-3 hours demanding chow.  Eat MORE?  How is that possible?!  43 grams a day and she isn’t satisfied?!

She also began discovering her lungs right around this time.  While still not really crying, she began fussing a bit.  Then a little crying here and there.  OK, fine.  That was tolerable.  Then a little more crying.  Just as her silence had, her cries freaked me out.  Why was my baby crying?!  She didn’t cry before!  Something must be terribly wrong!  She waited until my mom returned to California and my husband was at work to bring out the big guns: She woke up from a nap screaming like I had never heard her scream, prompting me to drop the sandwich I was making and sprint up the stairs, slippers flying behind me. to save her from whatever was tormenting her so.

She was fine.  Just testing me.  And so the power shift began.

It’s 3PM and you’re sitting down to eat lunch? I think I’ll wake up from my nap now.

That vibrating chair used to calm me, but now you must hold me. 

I’m going to sleep all day; You just try to wake me.  A bath? Amateur.  I can sleep through a bath.  Yucky Vitamin D? Doesn’t phase me.  You see, I’d really prefer to play at 2AM.

“Diana, schedules take a long time to establish with babies,” my mother, while still visiting, would say.  “But the book says to start a routine now!” I would cry in frustration, convinced my inability to keep her awake after daytime feedings was permanently stunting her growth and setting her up for a lifetime of insomnia.

You want to put me on a schedule, Mom?  I laugh at your schedule!

E. had lulled me into a false sense of peace those first serene days, only to snatch it away when I thought things couldn’t get any better.

Well-played, Elisabeth, well-played.  It’s a good thing your 43-grams-a-day cheeks are so cute.

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Clueless

6 Dec

Yesterday Elisabeth* turned 2 weeks old, and so far has made it through her first weeks relatively unscathed – a miracle, if you ask me.

I have two younger brothers.  I started babysitting when I was 12.  I have always been comfortable around babies – taking care of infants was a breeze!

And then I had my own.  Now I am a model of ineptitude.

Want to semi-suffocate your child while dressing her?  Watch me!  Go through three diapers in one changing session?  I’m your gal!  At least I haven’t let her roll off the changing table or dunk her thumb in hot coffee (ahem, mom and dad).

How did this happen?  Where did the ease with which I used to handle babies go?  This child has rendered me completely clueless.

And then there is all her stuff.  The car seat, the stroller, the sling.  It’s bad enough that the kid doesn’t come with an instruction manual – why can’t her gear? (Oh wait.  Most of it does.  I may have let my husband read them hoping he would always be around to do the work for me.  Bad call on my part.)

Yesterday my mom and I took the baby on her first outing to Target.  Big step for baby!  Bigger step for me.  After spending the better part of an hour stocking up on diapers (how did we already go through all our diapers?!) and wipes and the other miscellaneous items one inevitably finds while shopping at Target, I needed to nurse.  I strolled Elisabeth out to the car, unhooked the car seat from the Graco stroller frame on loan from a friend, and then stared at said stroller frame, dumbfounded.  How in the world does it fold?  It was a complete mystery.

Flash back just hours earlier, as we were loading up the car:

“Let’s take the stroller frame!” I suggested, noting how compact and neatly folded it was.

“Do you know how to use it?” My mom asked.

“How hard can it be?” I answered brazenly, and into the trunk it went.

My brash attitude toward the stroller was now biting me in the…  In the name of nursing, I abandoned my efforts to fold the stroller frame and shamelessly left it next to the car for my mom to deal with after she checked out.  Onto the next challenge: nursing in the backseat of the car.  This effort went about as well as folding the stroller.

Soon my mom joined me in the parking lot and tried to tackle the stroller, with zero success.  20 minutes later, I’m sitting in an overheated car, milk squirting everywhere, cradling Baby in one hand trying to keep her eating, iPhone in the other hand looking up stroller demos on YouTube all while trying not to flash the Target shoppers.  Meanwhile my mom is jostling and kicking and pulling and cursing the stroller in vain, desperately looking around the parking lot for someone – anyone – to help.

“I give up! I’m going to just put it in the trunk like this!” she said, removing all our shopping bags from the trunk and stuffing them in any open car space.  A few minutes later, “I can’t get it to fit this way, either!”

“Wait!” I exclaimed, “I found the instructional demo on YouTube!  It says it’s an easy, one-hand fold!”  An easy one-hand fold? And we’ve spent 20 minutes trying to close the damn thing?   I placed an insufficiently fed baby back into her car seat, and after viewing the demo around five times, somehow managed to fold the stroller.  Lord help me.

Later that day, my sling further destroyed any iota of confidence in my parenting skills that remained.  Please note, the sling is literally a piece of fabric with velcro.  It took the efforts of me, my husband and my mom to determine that I am a complete idiot.  Or that is was the wrong size.  Or both.  We spent way more time than was appropriate trying to figure out how to fit Baby comfortably (and safely, of course) into this sack of cloth, to no avail.

“Just get the jersey wrap thingy,” my mom suggested.

“But the jersey wrap thingy isn’t award-winning or featured on The View!”  Despite my sling’s fabulous credentials, I had to give up.  Defeated by a piece of fabric.  Pathetic.  I packed up the sling to return to Amazon, sadly reconciling myself to the fact that the likes of Khloe Kardashian and Denise Richards are smarter than me; according to the sling’s website, they are both users of this particular product.  -Sigh-

A new baby carrier is on the way, and since Elisabeth has become fond of pooping everywhere but her diapers – like the bath, or all over my shirt – my diaper average/change has definitely lowered.  I guess that counts as progress?  As long as I keep her from rolling off the changing table, I think they’ll let me keep her.

*Elisabeth is currently being called many names, all of which may show up on this blog.  Just so you are aware, they include: Elisabeth, Ellie, Elle-Belle, Elle, Lucy, Luce and Chunky Monkey.  Yes, she is going to be a very confused child.  But now that you’ve been notified, hopefully you won’t be a confused reader.

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Labor Pains

1 Dec

Home from the hospital for over a week.  Hard to believe; the eat-sleep-diaper change cycle (or sleep-diaper change-eat or diaper-change-eat-diaper-change-sleep-diaper change-diaper change-eat-diaper change cycle) has made the days and nights all sort of blend together.  With grandparents temporarily in residence, it is quite possible that Miss Elisabeth Lucy is the most adored baby on the planet.  As it should be.

Yet somehow, off-hand comments about “the next one” have snuck into conversation.  The next one?  Are you kidding me?  I’ve been told that women simply forget the uncomfortable-ness of pregnancy and the pain of labor – or else why on Earth would anyone ever put themselves through that again?  I am skeptical.

My contractions started on Sunday evening.  Of course – that way I got to stay up all night before going into active labor!  Three cheers for sleep deprivation!  My hospital’s rule was to come in at 4-1-1: When contractions were 4 minutes apart, lasted 1 minute each, and had been this way for 1 hour.  Screw your rules, I say!  My contractions showed no consistency in length or time apart, so after a very unpleasant and sleepless night, I determined the hospital would just have to admit me anyway, and off we went around 6:00 AM.

What do you know, but the doctor I had seen my past two appointments happened to be there.

“Hey!  Good to see you in here before the holiday!”  Yeah, good, let’s move this along.  In triage, the nurse had determined I was 3 centimeters dilated (that’s all?!), 90% effaced and at zero station.  I didn’t really know what any of that means, but judging from her chipper tone, I took it to be a good thing.  Except for the only 3 centimeters.  The doctor confirmed all this and sent me on a walk to move things along.

Walk? After the longest hour-walk in the history of man, I was re-admitted and told that absolutely nothing had changed.  Of course not.

“You have two options,” the Doc informed me.  “You can go home and come back a few days later once you’re more dilated.  Or you can stay here and we can administer Pitocin to strengthen your contractions.  But I know you wanted to do things as naturally as possible.”

Hold the phone.

Go home? And endure this agony for DAYS?  More alarming than that prospect was his use of the word “Natural”.  I hastily corrected him.

“Oh no, no.  I was hoping not to have to be induced, but now that things have started on their own, please do whatever possible to make this be over as fast as possible.  Except the foley bulb.”

I won’t go into what the foley bulb is right here, but it is positively medieval.

“Also,” I continued, “I want an epidural.  Just so we are clear.”

With that, I was whisked away into Labor & Delivery, hooked up to the IV, and pumped with that devil of a drug Pitocin.  Ouch.  After three hours of that stuff coursing through my veins, intensifying and elongating the contractions, I had dilated all of 1 centimeter more.  “But you’re at zero station and 90% effaced!” a nurse announced excitedly.

“But that’s what I was when I was admitted!” I wailed.

“Oh.”  Silence.

The kind doctor decided to put me out of my misery and go ahead and give me the epidural, even though he would have preferred I be a little farther along.  I did not protest.  Through the uncontrollable shaking and husband hand-squeezing (which I thought was terribly cliché, but actually quite helpful), I could not for the life of me imagine why anyone would choose to do this naturally. 

The epidural was bliss.  Pure bliss.  I napped.  It was glorious.  Until it wasn’t.  Somehow, it stopped working and the contractions returned with a vengeance. (Okay, they never went away, but you know what I mean).  My little personal pain pump thingamajigy wasn’t working!  And the anesthesiologist was in an emergency c-section and unable to fix it for another hour and a half.  I tried to keep a brave face for the nurses, tried to seem strong, but it was pure torture.  Again I was struck by the question- why do women choose do this naturally?  And what about the women who don’t have a choice!  I cannot imagine!  Good for you, gals.  And I thought I had a high threshold for pain.

Damon – forever the optimist – left a voicemail for my dad, saying something to this effect: “Diana is doing great, the epidural really kicked in, blah blah blah”.

This prompted the following text to my father: “Damon mistaken. Epidural WAS working but stopped!  This is the only grandchild you’re getting.”

Eventually I was administered something that completely numbed my legs for a good 12 hours, at least.  So worth it.  And a few hours later Elisabeth entered the world.

And it was joy.

But joy enough to consider doing it again anytime soon?  Ha!  Well, okay, yeah, probably.  But hold your horses, people, and give me my time to “forget”.

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