Quick Pic

Trek Camping 2009:
Probably the funniest moment was when Terry was in our tent changing V's diaper, and she jumped up and ran out without a stitch on... the little grin on her face was very cute. She looooved watching the ducks that kept wandering in and out of the campsite. She was not such a big fan of her fan club - the two 6-year-old girls who just wanted to sit next to her and pat her arm and touch her hair and tickle her and talk to her... a bit much for our little introvert!

So Tell Me About Your Day...

The voice on NPR describes agonizing cuts in research funding - post-docs and graduate students losing their stipends, labs shutting down - as I drive to the library to print out my research grant application. I notice that the registration on our car expired ten months ago and so try to stay within 10 mph over the posted speed limit. I run into the computer lab, thinking "wouldn't you know, it figures." As I dash from there to the FedEx office, four copies of the application in hand, my cell phone chimes with a text from my husband: "Val asleep, bring pizza, very hungry." Pizza??? I think irritably. Where am I supposed to get a pizza? Why can't he call for delivery? Because the delivery person would ring the doorbell and that might wake her up. I picture my sleeping baby and oh, how I miss her. Almost home.

I spent the last five hours in front of the computer at a coffee shop, hammering out the final details of the application. I'm not so good at details. Even though I was hurt when someone described me to a mutual acquaintance as having my head in the clouds, the shoe fits. So I spent most of my time working on the conceptual framing of the grant application - thinking in grand theoretical strokes, broad abstractions. Language, identity, meaning. I nearly forgot that I had to submit a detailed budget as well. And a bibliography. And my CV. And the cover sheet.

Ok - home now. I creep in the back door as quietly as I can, and slide the frozen pizza onto the counter. I grab a slice of bread and find my husband sitting in the lazy boy with the baby asleep in his arms. I feed him the bread as he catches me up in a whisper on the afternoon and the babysitter's report. So frustrated - baby didn't sleep at all until after 4:30, and then only when held.

I kind of hit a breaking point though when I go to the bathroom and find the toilet bowl filled with crap - Crap! I'd forgotten to flush before leaving the house (see, there's some kind of leak or drip going on, so we turn off the water between flushes, and have to remember to turn it on again when needed)... I think with horror of the babysitter lifting the toilet lid to find... THIS. Then I see the cloth diaper in the bathtub... and remember I'd forgotten to tell her that there were more disposables in the backpack by the door... I feel so defeated. The adrenaline rush from finishing up the grant in time to overnight it by deadline drains from my body. I feel exhausted. How is it that I am so incapable of running a household?

I flush the toilet, then go downstairs to hang up laundry (see, our dryer is busted, so instead of getting it fixed we're line-drying everything...). Upstairs, I draw the curtains - or, rather, the sheets that we are using for curtains - and turn on the oven to heat for the pizza. Baby wakes up. She looks right at me, cries, reaches out her little arms. I gather her up and sit down to nurse her. Here little bare feet are the most precious thing I have ever seen or held. I feel myself begin to relax. And so it is evening, another day.

Back in the Burg

I wonder how many times I have used that same title for a post?

So we're home again, once again re-configuring our sleep arrangements yet again. Ironically, V. slept really well the night we got home - just like she did the night we arrived in Ithaca. Apparently what it takes to make this baby sleep in long chunks is drive for seven hours and put her to bed late. She did really well in the car, though. Except for the exploding diaper incident on the way home... she traveled the last 45 minutes home in her dad's T-shirt...! It was actually really cute, with her pink hair-bow and black "robe."

Lovely warm day today - went for a walk to the grocery store and she fell asleep in the stroller. Hopefully she wasn't too traumatized when she woke up and found that her babysitter was pushing her instead of me! I handed her over and ran off to a coffeeshop to get some work done...

That darn tooth has still not poked through!!

Playgroup

Sorry I haven't posted in awhile; I had a major deadline yesterday that had me nose to the proverbial grindstone with not much extra energy or extra computer time.

Today we went to brunch with our long-neglected playgroup; they tend to meet right during Val's afternoon naptime. The good thing about playgroup is socializing with other new parents, seeing the development of babies a few months older than V, getting ideas about things to try with her and learning new information.

The downside of playgroup is that I start second-guessing myself about everything. Feeding, sleeping, diapering... We finally bought two diaper covers yesterday to test-drive with the cloth diapers; she's outgrown the ones we have and we've only been using the disposables for a long time. Not that there's been consensus in the household about that anyway... it's hard to cloth diaper if only one parent is into the idea. Anyway, there seems to be more interest in it now. But the sheer variety of diapering options out there is mind-numbing... paralyzing... sometimes it's easier just to do what you've been doing.

Val seems so thin compared to some of the other babies. She definitely likes her rice cereal and is into eating from a spoon. We want to get a food grinder to mush up stuff for her but haven't been able to find out yet. I hear you can get them at Greenstar though - one thing we learned at playgroup today :-) I worry that I'm not feeding her enough.

And then there's SLEEP - the big one. She's kind of on our night-owl schedule. It seems like all the other babies go to sleep between 6 or 7 p.m., but V. goes to sleep between 10 and 11. Then she sleeps until about 9 a.m. Of course, she nurses up to 4 times during the night. Now that she's back in bed with us, I don't really wake up all the way and I actually feel more rested in the morning than when she was sleeping in the crib and I'd get up twice in the night to feed her. But anyway, I wonder if we're messing up her circadean rhythm by keeping this weird schedule? Can we really shift her schedule earlier? She takes a long nap between 4-8. Sometimes she falls asleep at 6 or so, and can sleep until 9, but then she wakes up for at least 2 hours, sometimes more. There have been nights when she wouldn't go to sleep again until 1 or 2 a.m. Which is crazy-making. But we'd definitely have to do some things differently if we wanted to change her schedule.

Green Poop

And now I become that boring person who yammers on about her baby's bowel movements.

A couple nights ago we had a new development in parenthood - green poop! For a few days leading up to this event, her BMs were becoming more frequent, smaller, and more "seedy." That seemed odd but not a big deal. However, the green poop event was accompanied by some serious fussiness - to the point of out-of-control crying at Grandma's house. So I went to the Internets.

This is what (among other things) I found:
"Babies that receive too much of the thin foremilk and not enough of the richer hindmilk sometimes have problems with green stools and tummy aches. If you have been switching breasts a lot instead of letting baby get a good feed on one breast, you may have problems with this."

There were some other possible explanations, but this one sounded the most plausible within our context. The solution? Block feeding.

What did we do before the Internet??? I guess we read books, or asked people we knew. Now the expertise - both lay and professional - at our fingertips is increased exponentially. Pretty amazing.

Oh, and it's working! :-)

introspective

Sometime in the last few weeks (it's all a bit of a blur, really) I asked Terry the following questions:

1) What do you like best about being a dad?
2) What do you like least?
3) What has been the most surprising or unexpected thing about fatherhood?
4) What has been most surprising to you about me as a mother?

And of course, he turned the questions around to me as well. Here's how it breaks down:

1) Him: when she falls asleep on my chest.
Me: nursing
2) Both: interrupted sleep!
3) Him: nothing - had no clear expectations (!!!)
Me: breastfeeding was harder to learn than I expected, and the lack of sleep a lot less difficult to cope with than I expected.
4) Him: how well I (eep) have been coping with the lack of sleep
Me: how well he's handled diaper changes!

at home

So we are home with little Valerie, safe and sound - here she is in "newborn" sized-diapers relaxing on the lambskin that was a gift from Wendy and Dave (we've switched to preemie size for now). Eats, sleeps, and poops! I am getting better by increments every day; the latest achievement is being able to get in and out of bed unassisted! Also, an increase in my blood pressure medication and going off the pain meds altogether has resulted in much better blood pressure readings - FINALLY! It will probably take from 6-12 weeks to get back to some semblance of normalcy, but for now I'll take what I can get. And now to bed, for anywhere from 1.5 to 4 hours until she's hungry again...