abc family

Bummered

The other day I saw a mother with a newborn at Mass and ached to have a little baby again, even though when we were going through the hell of Camilla's first three months I never imagined that I'd be able to look back on that time nostalgically, ever ever ever.  But I was nostalgic when I saw that newborn snuggling into his mother's neck, and it made me want one of my own again.

Today I am over it. 

Her Royal Shortness was awake for no explicable reason for three hours in the middle of last night.  She awoke at 2:00am and categorically refused, in the form of shrieking and wailing the likes of which have not been heard in this house for months, to go back to sleep when Bryan tried his usual tricks of patting and shushing.  I desperately wanted to nurse her, but I am even more desperately committed to not ruining our hard-won night-weaning, so I took the baby out into the living room and rocked her, hoping she'd get bored and go back to sleep.  She did not, and stayed awake in the dark until 5:00am when I finally wore her down.  I prayed she'd sleep in, but she refused to do that either, and was up at 8:00 as usual.

The baby got an insufficient but respectable nine hours of sleep.  I got an insufficient and utterly horrible five hours.  This morning I felt like I'd gotten hit by a train.

When Milla was a newborn I logged hours and hours, night after night, of pacing the floor and rocking in the wee hours.  This lasted for months.  It was my way of life.  Considering how I feel today after one bad night with an almost-toddler, I am astonished that I managed to survive it.

Our working hypothesis is that Milla has a mild earache or some bug, since she is clingier and fussier than usual, and not willing to sleep on her stomach like she's been doing the past few weeks.  Hopefully that means this will pass, the more quickly the better. 

I am a wee bit depressed, truth be told.  My baby is being demanding and I can't get anything done around the house, plus I have a hurt shoulder that was getting better but after last night is now worse than ever, plus my sister is leaving town tomorrow and will not be around the rest of the week, plus Bryan's traveling to DC on Wednesday and even though it's only a day trip, it means another single-parent evening in addition to my single-parent Mondays while he's teaching a class.

Oh wah wah wah.  I almost want to laugh at myself, but I really do feel overwhelmed and sad, because of all that stuff and because I've got a solid case of the November blues.  Such a depressing month this is, at least until Thanksgiving comes along.  I love Thanksgiving.

Ending this extreme downer of a post on a good note, check this out.  Looky, Daddy! is having a haiku-a-thon!  What could be more fun?

Talky

Okay, I was kidding when I said I'd talk about the laundry.  You all knew I was kidding, right?  I may be a menu-planning meal-cooking rockstar, but when it comes to laundry I'm at the bottom of the class. I've probably already FAILED the class.  I'd rather talk about pretty much anything else.

Instead, today's post topic is something that many of you will probably find even more boring, but a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do.  I don't have a baby book for Milla, so this blog is in lieu of that, which means sometimes I have to do milestone posts. 

Plus, I keep writing as much as I've been writing every day, and I'll be burned out by the 8th.  Isn't it some kind of NaBloPoMo custom that sometimes your posts are short and boring?  I think so.

Without further ado, here are the words Camilla has at 12.5 months, in roughly the order she has acquired them:

- Daddy (at ~8 mos)
- Mama (usually in a whiny voice - at ~10 mos)
- cracker (at ~11 mos)
- dog (used to identify any four-legged mammal)
- duck (any bird)
- that (said while pointing, meaning "gimme that" or "what is that?")
- nurse (usually said while tugging on my shirt)
- Daniel (her favorite cousin!)
- quack-quack ("what does a duck say?")
- bye-bye (said while waving)
- stir (as in, "Mother, won't you please let me have a chance to stir that fascinating pan that's bubbling away on the stove?"  She learned this one from Daniel, who is so interested in cooking that I think he has a future career as a chef.)

Milla loves to use her words, and always climbs up on my lap so I'll show her pictures of dogs on the Internet.  This one is her favorite.  Here is what she does when I show it to her:

(It's hard to hear, but I'm saying "What's this?")

The Balloons Were a Hit

I've always thought that no one-year-old *needs* a birthday party.  The world is certainly not going to implode if a person who is incapable of grasping the concept that it's her birthday fails to have the bash of the year in celebration.  I've gone on record with this opinion, and if you'd asked me six months ago if my child would be having a party for her first birthday, I would've said no way.  What parent of a baby has the energy for something like that?

But, eh, we decided to throw one anyway.  We've got more energy now than we did six months ago, and we also happen to actually enjoy having people over, so it wasn't like throwing a party would be painful.  Plus, it turns out our child is pretty sociable, and loves it when a lot of people are around, especially if some of them are short like her. 

The party was two weeks after her actual birthday for the same reason that Camilla's spent about 8 weeks' worth of nights in beds other than her own, despite being only 54 weeks old.  We go places a lot, and we do stuff, and so do the people to whom we're related, so the 27th was the first day that would work.  I'd like to say that I anticipate in future years we'll be able to have her party on the 14th like it should be, but along with being busy we're also not very organized, so the chances are slim.

Anyway, this year's party was technically for both Bryan and Camilla, since his birthday's four days after hers and I didn't want him to feel left out, not that he cared.  This changed the nature of the event not at all, except that I made two cakes instead of one.

(yellow cake with lemon filling and Italian meringue frosting; chocolate fudge cake roll)

I can't take credit for how the cakes look, because my youngest sister kindly decorated them for me.  I can take credit for the taste, but unfortunately it's hard to share that over the Internet.  I do have bandwidth limits, you know!

I tried to get a picture of the birthday people with their cakes.  As you can see, Milla was not such a fan of that.  I think she was mad that we were keeping her from her adoring fans and her brand-new toys.

She also didn't quite get the blowing-out-candles thing, and had to be assisted by her father.  Maybe next year she'll figure it out.

We gave her cake, of course.  It's obligatory.  I don't think she actually ate any of it, though.  She's such a weird kid.  Tonight she was a huge fan of the homemade split pea soup I gave her, but cake?  Nah.  She mainly just played with the frosting.

What IS this strange fluffy white stuff?

And why do you keep taking pictures of me?

I have to admit that I sneakily nursed her right before we gave her cake, hoping to avoid having a baby with a huge sugar high.  Also, we gave her yellow cake and I'm sure she would have preferred chocolate, but I'm not crazy.  The kid sleeps badly when *I* eat chocolate in the evenings.  Giving it to her would be an act of lunacy.

She did have fun painting herself with frosting, even if none of it went in her mouth.  Thank heavens we stripped her down beforehand.  A quick bath, and she was as good as new.


I figured out the white stuff!  Don't I look pretty?

Thanks to my very sensible husband and his voice of reason in the face of my Hostess Complex, I managed not to over-plan (much) on the food, and thus didn't have to kill myself with preparations, which was nice.  Our daughter had so much fun that I barely saw her during the entire party, and considering that she is the ultimate mama's girl, that's saying something.  It was a nice break for me, too.  I'm thinking about throwing another party just so I can get people to play with my kid.

As it always seems to go at such things, the best moments were the unplanned ones.  And the best toys were not the toys themselves, but the boxes they came in.

Year One has been duly celebrated.  Bring it on, Year Two!

Birthday Video

Camilla's birthday was almost two weeks ago, but I've got to keep up my street cred as a procrastinator, so I couldn't possibly finish her birthday video more than twenty-four hours before her actual birthday party, which is tomorrow.

The song you'll hear on the video is a hymn that's been around for a while, set to music by Fernando Ortega's.  We got the album when Camilla was a newborn, and I was drawn to this song and have sung it to our daughter from the first days of her life. 

For me it is the soundtrack of what she is to us: proof that His faithfulness is indeed great.

Zzzzz... wait. What?

I'm firmly convinced that I did myself a favor by going into this parenthood gig with low expectations about the sleep thing.  There's a lot of "sleep expert" hype about how babies absolutely have the ability to sleep through the night at 12 pounds or 3 months or whatever random number came up during sleep-expert roulette that week, but I read Ask Moxie.  I have friends with babies.  I know that it is a rare kid who hits twelve pounds and obligingly begins giving her parents the supposedly-attendant twelve solid hours of sleep per night.

The result of my low expectations, which had been pushed even lower by the arrival of Her Royal Fussiness, was that I was thrilled when my by-then-fourteen-pound baby started deigning to nurse back to sleep rather than making me get out of bed and pace the house with her, something I was doing at least once a night well into her fourth month.  The fact that I'd also figured out how to sleep with her curled up on my arm so that I barely had to move to get her latched on made me even happier.

For the next six months all was well.  Milla transitioned to sleeping in the middle of the bed with her parents curled obligingly around the bottom corners, then we fashioned a crib-sidecar and she started using that space for sleep, and it was all pretty good. 

But when she was ten months, the baby decided to throw us a curve ball and start waking every forty-five minutes.  That only lasted a couple of weeks, but you don't recover from something like that in mere moments.  Plus, time was ticking on, and the longish (5-6 hours) periods of sleep she'd given us on a couple of occasions turned out to be cruel teasers.  We were implementing some tactics from The No-Cry Sleep Solution, and they helped some, but we appeared to have hit a plateau.  Camilla was waking at least three to four times a night, not counting the unpredictable (somewhere between zero and three) number of times she woke between her bedtime of 8:00pm and ours of 11:00pm.

And except for a small handful of teases, I hadn't slept for more than three or four hours straight in a year.  Low expectations had served me well when dealing with an infant.  I never drove myself crazy trying to get a baby who was only a few months old, and high-needs at that, to adhere to some preconceived notion of how she should be sleeping.  But now that we had an almost-toddler, and with the effects of long-term sleep deprivation taking their toll on me, it was time to do something a little more drastic.

There's one thing that we will never do to get our child to sleep, and that is let her be scared in any way, which is why cry-it-out is not for us.  There are also a number of things we'd rather not do, including moving her to another room before she's ready, and taking away any of her comfort mechanisms against her will.

But sometimes you have to do things you'd rather not do.  (Like wake up in the middle of the night to comfort a baby back to sleep.)  Gentler methods may have worked eventually, but gentler methods don't make life better for a baby whose mother has gone batty from sleep deprivation.  Which is why we decided to night-wean.

This is the method we're using.  It fits with the way we like to do things around here.  We started (dun-dun-duuuuuun) last night.

We were both apprehensive (we all would have been, but the baby had no idea what was coming) but the first night went better that I could have hoped.  The method involves letting the baby cry while you comfort her with patting and shushing from right next to her, and it says some babies can cry up to an hour at a time, but Milla cried only five minutes the first time, two minutes the second time, and one minute the final time she woke up.  I know because I was watching the clock.

Our own customization of the plan involves Bryan and me switching sides of the bed so that he's sleeping next to the baby in her little crib-sidecar, and he takes the job of comforting her back to sleep in the middle of the night.  For these first three nights I still have to move over and nurse her a little before he commences with the patting and shushing, but then I get to hand the job over to him.  Since I've been doing night duty single-handedly for about nine months, this feels like a huge break to me.

Bryan is unfortunately a little tired today, and it will probably get worse before it gets better.  But he agrees that it's worth it to keep me from going nuts and selling all our furniture on eBay, or whatever the manifestation of my insanity would be.

I wasn't sure how I'd feel about night-weaning, if it'd be too hard on me to be making my baby so mad, but when the time came at 2:00 this morning, it felt right.  A couple months ago, it probably would have felt wrong, but now it's time.  I know it is.

A reasonable amount of zzzzzs are coming my way soon.  I can feel it.

Multimedia Blogging

(Also known as: Total Cop-Out Photo Post)

I seem to remember we used to have some babies around here.

These days it's all, "Babies, what babies?  We are not small helpless infants.  We are practically adults.  Fear us!"

"We do not allow you to take a photo where both of us are in focus at the same time.  Such a thing would ruin our street cred as troublemakers."

"Instead, one of us will look extra cute to entice you to snap the picture, and in that second the other one of us will move the tiniest bit and ruin it."

"That is, of course, assuming we consent to sit in a chair at all.  Don't count on it. 

"All requests for photo opportunities must be submitted in writing.  We will get back to you once we have learned to read."

Camilla isn't walking yet, but she is uber-mobile.  This is both delightful and a complete pain in the neck.  For instance, she'll be an entire room away and I'll think, hey, perfect chance to unload the dishwasher, but as soon as she hears the quiet click of the latch releasing, she's by my side in nanoseconds.  After the time I turned away for an instant and looked back to find her perched on hands and knees on the open dishwasher door, I know not to let her near the thing.

The fridge is even more of a recipe for disaster.

"Hmm, lemonade or limeade?  I can't decide."

"Oh, hi Dad.  Would you like a snack?  I'd be happy to get you something."

"I don't know what the big deal is.  I'm obviously way too adorable to ever cause trouble."

Ha.

All things technological are naturally most desirable, and I've precipitated a number of near-nuclear meltdowns by my outrageous refusal to give the baby access to my laptop keyboard.  Such a mean mother I am!

(As my own mother used to say, "M-E-A-N spells Mom.")

She does often get hold of things like lens caps, see below.  The thing I really love about this picture is the tiny dog in the background with her tiny dog nose all out of joint because the baby is temporarily usurping her status as princess of the house.  My parents-in-law love that dog, but they love their granddaughter even more.

The funny thing is that the one person willing to shower love on the dog when the baby is around is the baby herself, but the dog won't hear of it.  ("Small person.  Stealing attention.  Enemy.")

Also, you'd think the dog would be grateful for all the dropped food she gets to eat off the floor when the baby is around, but apparently not.  Oh, well.  Maybe if the poor canine is lucky, some day the baby will share her lens cap.

Looking Forward

People have started asking us if we plan to have more children.  The first person to ask me the question seriously startled me.  I glanced around to make sure she wasn't talking to someone else, because me?  I still have a little tiny baby!  Look at her, she's an infant!  Not possibly old enough to have a younger sibling!

Reality check.  The "infant" is closing in on one year old, is dedicating herself full-time to the important tasks of learning to walk and talk, and at 22 pounds weighs more now than her 15-month-old cousin.  It's not ridiculous for other people to wonder if want to have more kids.

The short and absolutely true answer is that of course we want to have more kids.  We're open to the idea of as many as God chooses to send us, and we'd be thrilled if another baby came along in the not-insanely-distant future.  This is what we generally tell people when they ask if we're trying for number two.

The details of the situation are more complex, as details tend to be.  For starters, ecological breastfeeding is doing its job with a vengeance around here.  In my current cycle-less state, we could be "trying" until the cows come home and there'd be about as much chance of my becoming pregnant as there is of Camilla sleeping through the night before her birthday.  (Snort.) 

But even after my cycle comes back, we don't have an Ideal Plan for More Children, When and How Many.  Considering that according to our original Ideal Plan our first child would be about three years old right now, we've decided that Plans are useless to us in this area.  We have no illusion of control over how new members of our family are created, since Creation is decidedly not our domain.

I find myself thinking and speaking of our next child in terms of "if" rather than "when."  I've got no picture in my mind of whether, let alone at what time, our next child might come along.  Some people might call this pessimism, or being shy of hope, but I don't think that's it.  I think it's a result of an important lesson that waiting for Camilla taught me: that God's got a plan in mind for us and that it's best if He decides what the components of that plan are.

I earnestly hope for more children and I pray for them every day, of course.  But right now I feel okay with the fact that whether we have more children is not up to me.   My stubborn refusal to let go of my idea that what I needed and what I wanted were one and the same, along with my mistaken conviction that I deserved the thing I wanted, made finding peace a lot harder than it could have been the first time around.  I'd like to avoid that in the future.  I've found that the lifelong journey toward holiness is greatly impeded by the act of digging in one's heels in rebellion against the One from whom all holiness comes.

Besides that, there's the fact that we do have Camilla.  Although I bore her I did not make her; He did, and He gave her to us to have and to raise and to love.  This is entirely miraculous, and nothing short of mind-blowing.  Expecting to have another baby as a matter of course feels rather like expecting lightning to strike the same place two days running.

Being childless was a trial.  Being second-child-less would no doubt make me sad, but if we ultimately have no more children will I stand there on judgment day and say, "Lord, you cheated us"?

I think not.

Parenthood Bites

I can't remember if I've mentioned this before, but my baby book notes that I got my first tooth at 4.5 months.  Right around that age Camilla started chewing on her fists and drooling like crazy, so we thought teeth might be on their way.  We started blaming every grumpy day and every bad night on the forthcoming teeth.  The joke was on us when the first one didn't show up for another three months.

All first-time parents do this, right?  Always thinking the baby is teething when she's not?  Please tell me all first-time parents do this.

Please tell me other parents also bury their kids in laundry.

I was naive.  Drool is not a sign that your child might be teething.  Drool is a sign that your child is young and lacks the coordination to keep her own saliva inside her own mouth.

Thinking seriously about throwing yourself off a nearby bridge because your child has not slept for more than ninety minutes at a time in the past ten days, thereby ensuring that YOU have not slept for more than ninety minutes at a time in the past ten days?  THAT is a sign that your child might be teething.

Those little white things are cute, but won by pain.  Lots and lots of pain, for everyone in the house.

I figured maybe it would get easier as she got older.  But nay: tooths 1 and 2 were bad, tooths 3, 4, and 5 were worse, and tooth 6 nearly killed us.  I am quaking at the thought of 7, 8, 9, 10, etc.  Maybe we can just skip those.  Maybe Milla would prefer to keep them in her jaw and wear dentures instead.  I've heard they're much more convenient for cleaning.

Tooths 3 through 6 were also bad news because I'm nursing.  There is no way to express with words how much fun it is to nurse a person who is test-driving (test-biting?) newly-cut chompers on both her upper and lower jaws.  FUN.  Really, really fun.

Sleep deprivation and sore nipples are a killer combination.

What did I do?  Let's PLAY!

I don't know what the big deal is.  I can remember cutting teeth and not feeling like I had to wake up my parents every hour or two to let them know how unhappy I was about it.  And okay, they were my twelve-year molars, but the principle still stands.  She could suck it up if she wanted to.  She just chooses not to.

Oh, she so owes me.  She'd better not go to college on the other side of the country and break my heart, is all I have to say about that.

Being half a continent away from that grin would definitely kill me.

Camilla Confesses

We haven't had a video post in a while.  I think it's time.

It's a testament to how much I love you all that I deliberately did not edit out the really weird shot of me that gets captured at the end.  I want you to feel good about any less-than-flattering pictures of yourselves that might be out there.

Please don't mention how much my child needs a bath.  I already know about it.  And I promise I will bathe her sometime soon.  Maybe after the grumps are over.  I'm pretty sure what's causing them: tooth number six, which is in that awful halfway-through-the-gums stage.  Excruciating, for all three of us.

If I do say so myself (and shouldn't), she's still darn cute though.

Things I've Developed as a Result of Being a Parent (Some More Desirable Than Others)

1.  A previously unparalleled ability to Hold It.  We were running a quick errand at the grocery store this morning and I discovered that nature was calling, hard.  The bathrooms at this store are gross, so I rushed through the rest of the errand and was home within ten minutes.  Whereupon I proceeded to unload the car, shut the windows and turn on the air conditioning, and wash my hands.  I was heading downstairs to switch a load of laundry before it occurred to me that I was uncomfortable, and had rushed home from the store for a very particular reason...  I'm so used to tending to Camilla's needs first that I often forget about my own, even the most basic.

2.  Equanimity in the face of another person's most unappetizing bodily fluids.  A few weeks ago Milla was sitting on my lap when she starting making this weird hacking noise, then gagged and threw up all over my arm, my pants, and my parents' carpet.  My first reaction was alarm: what was choking her?  That resolved, my second thought was for the carpet, which needed a rag and some baking soda, pronto.  Only then did it occur to me that my own person was covered with vomit.  I assure you that a year ago, my priorities would not have stood in that order.

3.  A better relationship with my body. I've always had a pretty good relationship with my body, having been blessed with a healthy group of friends during my adolescence and a amazing husband.  (One time he heard some statistics on the radio about the prevalence of eating disorders and was horrified - he considers it his personal mission to ensure that I, along with any daughters we have, do not fall prey to our society's toxic strain of thinking that makes eating disorders so common.)  (No, I'm sorry, you can't have him.) 

Our period of subfertility damaged my relationship with my body.  My healthy body image was eclipsed by the fact that I had lost trust in my body to do what it was supposed to do.  The blessing of my pregnancy was a first step toward restoring that trust, my successful (if uncomfortable) gestating was a second, but it wasn't until I got through the pain of labor and pushed that baby out that I felt like my body "had my back" again.  (Heh.)  I'd been unsure I'd even be able to get through labor, to manage that horrific-sounding feat of helping another person travel from the inside of my body to the outside of it.  When it worked, I was amazed and grateful and suddenly trusted my body in a way I'd never done before.  And being able to rise to the physical challenges of motherhood, most notably finding the strength to keep pulling myself out of bed and doing what needs to be done no matter how exhausted my body might feel, has helped me even more. 

4.  A tendency to grind my teeth.  I was so nauseated during my pregnancy that I canceled my routine dentail cleaning, and since I didn't go I didn't schedule the next one, and then I had a baby, and with one thing and another I didn't go to the dentist for a year and a half.  I have very cavity-prone teeth, and they'd been hurting me for a while by the time I managed to make an appointment and get there, so I was expecting to hear that my teeth were full of holes.  But no - they were not holey, they were simply disappearing, due to the fact that I'd apparently been grinding them against each other constantly. 

I blame motherhood, definitely.  I think I'm a fairly confident parent, but there are still so many things to stress out about, from day one's Is she latching correctly? to today's Oh no she can't be waking up from her nap already, she's not going to sleep AT ALL tonight!  I carry my tension in my jaw, and apparently my jaw had been happily transferring that tension to my teeth.  So now during the nighttime I wear a very attractive bite splint.  It is not exactly the kind of thing that reminds my husband why he married me but on the other hand, my teeth don't hurt anymore.  That's life: constant give and take.

5.  A constant temptation to bolt my food.  Anyone with a fussy newborn has been there: either the baby is sleeping, or he's being held and comforted by you, or he's crying.  When Milla was younger Bryan and I had to take shifts eating dinner if she happened to be awake when it was ready, and I think that built the bad habit in me of trying to shove my food down as quickly as possible so that I could give him a chance to eat.  Now I find that if I don't watch myself, I'm always the first one finished with my meal even in relaxed settings.  It's certainly not necessary anymore, I just can't break the habit.

6.  New confidence in my own abilities.  I always did pretty well academically, so in high school and college I felt good about myself and what I could accomplish.  Following graduation, I took a job that was both a dysfunctional working environment and a bad fit for me personally.  I was already borderline depressed, and the situation fed and was fed by my depression, so that by the time I quit about a year before Camilla was born, I was so down on myself and my abilities that I wouldn't have trusted myself to write a one-page report on the complicated process of counting to ten. 

Having this baby and being her mother has changed that.  I'm not sure what else I may or may not be cut out for - and maybe I'll find out in the future - but I do know that I can do this.  I can care for Camilla and nurture her, and while there are a lot of good moms out there, I know I am the best mother for this particular child.  That is a remarkably heartening thought.

What about you?  What has parenthood given you?