Category: taking it personally

Dear Nico,

You’re two months old today, and we celebrated this morning by sticking you with needles. You’re well on the recommended schedule for vaccinations, and have been filled with appropriate disgruntlement for several hours now. Which one couldn’t tell from observing you at this moment, as you lie there alternating between dopey staring and snoozing in your swing. But the intermittent misery is real. I’m sorry, baby. It’ll pass. In the meantime, I’ll snuggle you as much as you want, and listen to your little mammal sounds.

You’ve grown a lot. You’re thirteen and a half pounds now, well on your way toward double your birth weight. But it’s more than the weight: there’s somebody home behind those eyes. I love this.

Despite today’s vaccinations-related drama, the word of the month is copacetic. And it’s been an eventful month! You’ve been having trouble with, well, snot. The pediatrician (our mutual doctor, whom I love to no end) thought it might be a deviated septum, and sent us to an otolaryngologist—that’s a fancy name for an ear-nose-throat doctor. The ENT was a patronizing jerk. He didn’t pat me on the head and call me little lady, but only just. He did give us the crucial bit of information on the septum (not deviated), but also didn’t take my concerns seriously, dismissing them as new-parent jitters.

I didn’t tell him off, but only just.

I haven’t been able to reliably put you to sleep on your back for weeks, you see. You would start snorting and whipping your head back and forth, and wake yourself up in the process. At first, this was only when you were on your back; the hack for that was to put you in your car seat, on the bed. I was pretty pleased with that, until you started getting congested in the car seat as well—and let me tell you, hearing an infant’s head thump against the sides of a car seat is not my idea of fun. So then we had you lying on top of me, tummy down. That worked, until it didn’t.

Now, if you’re congested, it’s in every position. But hey, things are changing. Maybe you’ll outgrow this thing. Or maybe it’s cat allergies. We’re about to ban the cats from the bedroom and gather more data. For now, you sleep through more of the snorting. Watching your sleep patterns change is fascinating, and I encourage you to continue working toward three-hour stretches before I go totally loopy with sleep deprivation.

Our medical adventures did not end there. We went to the emergency room this month, but your presence there was mostly incidental: it was for me. Norovirus is nobody’s friend; I caught it, couldn’t keep down fluids, got dehydrated, and got two liters of fluids drip-dripped back into me at the ER. Our friend R. was a trooper, went with us at ungodly-in-the-morning, and helped with baby care while I shivered under heated blankets. The room was so cold that later, when R. left, I snuggled you for warmth. Through all of that, you managed to escape the norovirus with your breastmilk-enabled immunity superpowers.

You’d think this would be enough excitement for one month, but that leaves us with a lot of time to fill. Movies and TV shows have provided entertainment; thank you, online streaming video. Elizabethtown wasn’t bad, and brought back all kinds of memories of my dad, whom you’ll never meet. (A pity; you’d have liked each other.) Soundtrack for a Revolution was gripping and thinky for me—and while I watched it in bits and pieces, you were in my lap, eating, snoozing. We’ll have to talk later about history, personal and otherwise.

We’ve been playing more, too. Sometimes I put you in your bouncy seat and introduce you to scents to see how you react. You love garam masala and rosemary and cardamom. You’re not so keen on citrus, so tea laced with bergamot is right out. And harissa seems to have been downright personally offensive.

You’re showing increasing signs of being a social animal. You’ve been smiling at faces, and not just mine. (They’re all charmed.) You had an entire day without mama, when I went to a workshop, and that all worked out just fine. Three or four different people have now offered you a bottle, and you’re working hard on figuring out why that might be a good idea. But those few times when you’ve cried really hard, because something in your world just wasn’t right at all, I’ve held you and rocked you and sang to you and said, “It’s okay, baby. It’s just you and me.” Seems more manageable that way.

We went on your first outing to the movies, with the M&N dynamic duo. Somerville Theatre, where… we… saw The Secret World of Arrietty, had a packed house for it, so we stayed standing in the back of the theatre. The ushers said it was against the rules, but let us do it anyway in a fit of kindness. This was good: you fussed just a bit, I held you and rocked with you and fed you. I only missed about five minutes of the movie. Nicely done, baby.

(The movie wasn’t bad. There was one weird noble-savage moment, which, remind me to tell you later why that’s problematic.)

Now you’ve woken up, we’ve played a bit and changed you and snuggled dancing around for a bit, and you’re back in your swing completely rapt with fascination at the three small stuffed birds spinning overhead. You’re watching the world with increasing intensity… except when you’re drunk on milk and staring out with the dopiest expression I’ve ever seen on a baby.

Those puckered pouty milky lips you have after feeding slay me. But the complete downfall of all my parenting will be brought about by your tiny lower lip, stuck out when your feelings have been so hurt and you’re having a fit of perfectly innocent petulance mixed with despair of the world ever being right again. I am certain that you will learn to manipulate that deftly in time.

Most of the time you’re pretty happy, though. Sometimes when you’re eating and I can’t see your mouth, I know you’re smiling because your eyes turn into little crescent moons.

This is getting long. Soon I’ll have to become a lot more selective about what goes into these newsletters: there’s just so much. You’ve seen the ocean now. You have many fans. We’re both still figuring out your sleep patterns, and when your bedtime should be.

I’ve been fretting about how things are going to change when I go back to work, which tells me that things are basically okay now. This is a big deal, only two months into this whole new-life thing.

Love,
-Mama

P.S. This post took most of the day to write. There you are, asleep again.

P.P.S. I’ve put up more photos of you here. Instead of putting some of them into this post, I’ll take a little nap instead. Because sleep-when-the-baby-sleeps is a Really Good Idea.

Dear Nico,

You turn one month old today. I’ve always loved reading dooce‘s used-to-be-monthly newsletters to her children, so I’m kidnapping the idea (get it? kid… never mind) for my own.

A month and a day ago, I went on a road trip to Portland. I was restless at 41++ weeks, impatient for labor to start, so why not dinner in Maine with Molly, one of my favorite road trip companions? As you have discovered in this first month, road trips make me happy. So you won’t be surprised to hear that my water broke while driving up to Portland. We went right on to have dinner at Duckfat.

Then we came back to Boston, and twenty-two hours after my water broke, after some additional drama, you were here. You came out all skinny. 7lbs 10oz and 21.5 inches, or as Mark put it, a tall drink of water. You had long, looong skinny fingers and toes. Now, they’re looong and fat. You’ve filled out, babe, gaining somewhere in the vicinity of three pounds in your first month (we’ll find out exactly how much tomorrow, at the doctor’s). You have the round baby-fat cheeks and the double chin, and the insane number of dirty diapers to support my rapid-growth observation.

Not only is all that baby fat adorable, it’s also a good idea. You’ll be needing these reserves and then some, as you become more mobile. As it stands, you’re already holding up your head and getting your back to go all rigid for seconds at a time. Your kicking is pretty strong, too, but the head and back mobility means that you can look at more of OMG EVERYTHING—to the extent, anyway, that you can make out the shape of anything further than ten inches away. Some of the things that keep your attention for minutes at a time are lit lamps, the television screen when it’s off (large, dark object against the wall’s light background), the dark curtains at home, and the dried roses hanging upside down off the bookshelf near the chest freezer, where your bouncy seat often gets planted.

You’re pretty copacetic about the bouncy seat, most of the time. You even let me take showers, and sometimes make breakfast and/or wash dishes. There’s a limit to your patience, of course, but given your extreme n00b status, the time you do spend in the bouncy seat is impressive, and I’m thankful for that. Single mamahood has been a big adjustment, and so far you’ve been astonishingly cooperative.

Not that you don’t prefer to be held. You do, sometimes emphatically so. Good thing there’s the Moby wrap. You like that thing, even if sometimes you get mad when I put you in it. You settle down and burrow a bit, and often fall asleep. I’ve done laundry, dishes, cooking, therapy sessions, and walking to the doctor’s, all with you in the wrap.

I do wish I could nurse you in it. You’re voracious, and growing accordingly. You’ve started to recognize the breasts: yesterday morning, you reflexively but repeatedly grinned when you saw me offering you one.

That grin, oh. Your entire face lights up. I can hardly wait until it’s conscious. In the meantime, I’m enjoying the myriad expressions that can appear on your face one after another in the span of a minute. One of them in particular I haven’t been able to capture, because both my hands tend to be busy with your floppy little body. When I help you to get rid of the air you gulp in your eager nursing, you lift your eyebrows and half of your head scrunches up, and you look for all the world like Wallace Shawn. Mark calls this your “what fresh hell is this?” face.

Other things about your first month:

• You’re liking the music I play, and sing along with sometimes, for you. I love it too. Lately I’ve been grooving on Barenaked Ladies’ “Pollywog in a Bog,” which is totally a song about life, the universe and everything, and in my new-mama haze sometimes makes me choke up.
• You’ve found faces—first mine, then others’. You are starting to track objects… sorta.
• You make mammal sounds when you nurse, and also as you fall asleep and wake. You snort, you snuffle, you grunt. In particularly cold weather and/or wind, you make these little gasping sounds. Naturally, I think it’s all adorable.
• My favorite pair of your pants has me calling you Monkeybutt.
• You’re totally going to be a road warrior. Our trip to see family in New York was a total success, complete with epic poops in the car but only at rest stops. Further, like 98% of all babies, you fall asleep almost instantly in a moving car seat. I can only hope for that to continue as you grow.
• You survived my first screw-up! The very first time we went out with the wheeled frame that turns your car seat into a stroller, you were only a few days old, and I couldn’t get the car seat to snap in. No idea what I was doing wrong, since after that time it’s always worked. Maybe I was trying to put it in backwards? In any case, I ended up just sort of resting it on top of the frame. SO VERY UNSAFE. And you know what? We both survived.
• You’re excellent at snoozing.
• You don’t know this yet, but you have the best, most supportive community of friends that a little human and his mama could hope for.
• You seem to be a morning person. Hey, neat! Me too!

I love sleeping with you, and nursing you in the night. I love cuddling you for hours and watching (feeling!) you gain strength and coordination in your legs, back, neck. I love watching you watching the cats watching you. I love hurtling headlong into the unknown with you.

Love,
-Mama

P.S. Pics or it didn’t happen.