My head rests on the pillow
Watching you sleep
A study in curves
Half moon eyes
Delicate arch of eyebrows
Plumpness of cheeks
Dreams wander across the
Mountains and valleys of your face
Eyes flickering
Eyelashes undulating like fuzzy caterpillars
Eyelids crumple, then smooth
Lips purse, smile and purse again
A body so young
A soul so old
What I would give, sweet Sophia
To know what dreams pass there
… of the amazing, roaring baby!
This kid is totally crazy. She turns 6 months old today, and she is crawling, crawling up steps, and pulling to a stand. She has pretty much rendered me speechless.
All of these pictures were taken while she was wearing a prefold and cover, wool long johns, thin cotton sleeper, socks and thick cotton sleeper. Imagine what she could do naked!
Hey ma, look what I can do!
First knee:
Second knee, and she’s off!
So proud of herself. It didn’t last long, though. She crawled off the step 2 seconds later and did a faceplant. She hasn’t quite mastered the going down part yet.
Barely 5.5 months old and she’s already crawling. She can’t even sit up yet!
Is it just me, or does it seem a little crazy for a 5 month old to be doing this?
(Loot from my latest rummage sale extravaganza can be seen in the background. Thank you Theresa!)
It has been five months since you rocketed barreled slid from my womb. The blink of an eye and an eternity all at once. I can’t remember life without you, can’t believe you’ve been here for so long, can’t believe you weren’t born yesterday.
It has been over a year since you first took root in the fertile soil of my womb and began to grow yourself, cell by cell, into flesh, blood, skin, hair, bone … carefully crafting a home for your spirit. A process that I still find astonishing, even more so now that you are here in my arms, nursing at my breast, tugging on my hair, chewing on my fingers.
We’ve had our troubles (reflux, gas and you still love to hold on to your burps for hours), but underneath it all you are happy and mellow. You make this whole having-a-baby thing seem pretty easy … especially now that I’m finally able to eat a normal diet.
You are so entirely different from your sister; water to her fire, moon to her sun. Blue eyes instead of brown. Hair that was dark at birth has now turned golden. Even your body is different. Your legs, plump at the top, taper to a (relatively) slender ankle, and your hands and feet are delicate compared to her chub (still present even after 3 years) … although you are outgrowing your clothes just as fast as she did.
Your personality is different too. Unfettered by the trauma she suffered while entering this world, you are completely and entirely present. When I call up an image of you in my mind I hardly even see your body, instead sensing your energy swaying and pulsing, integrated with the ebb and flow of life. Your blue eyes gaze at me with a quiet wisdom that takes my breath away. You are here in every sense of the word. I sometimes almost forget that you’re a baby.
Despite being mellow you are far from content to sit back and let life pass you by. You possess a steely yet calm determination that amazes me. At just past 4 months you were up on your hands and knees, rocking. And now you are almost crawling, scooching your knees forward inch by inch. You spend so much time like this that you literally have rug burn (that was acquired through your clothes). I should be dismayed but I’m not. I cannot help but delight in your eagerness for mobility, your desire to fully participate in our daily life.
Every moment finds you striving to reach, touch, feel. I lay you on the changing table and you stare intently at the mobile above. You pay no attention to me as I fiddle with clothes, wipe, prefold, cover, instead stretching for the star that is just barely within reach. It dances and sways yet you are undeterred. You patiently follow until you grasp the tip and pull, pull, pull until it finally relents, lands in your palm and is swiftly moved to your mouth. Then you notice that your foot is free. The star slides to the table unheeded, as you grab your toes and eagerly shove them into your mouth.
Your smile is always at the ready, flashing across your face whenever someone smiles or speaks to you. You squeal with delight whenever one of our cats crosses your line of sight, and eagerly grab their tails and pinch their ears whenever they’re foolish enough to move within reach. You are entranced by your older sister, watching her every move and she gets laughs out of you easier than anyone else. You yearn to be at her side, laughing and moving and running with her. At the rate you’re going, it won’t be long now.
You’re already grabbing for my food and drink, and were very enthusiastic about the asparagus and apple I let you suck on, screaming with dismay when I finally repossessed them.
You are still an easy sleeper in the scheme of things, although your burps keep you up and are a source of frustration for all involved. But you don’t fight sleep like your sister, and for this I am infinitely grateful.
In short, you are an absolute delight and despite the hardships of the early days, it has been a joy spending these last 5 months getting to know you.
I arranged for it to be just you and me today, in the hopes of finding a few minutes to write this. Knowing that we don’t spend much time alone, I took you for a walk around the neighborhood, snuggled in my wrap. Fall is here in full force and the air was brisk, the sky dull and gray. We took our time and I brought you close to bushes and trees, let you finger the plumage of tall grasses and grasp leaves that grow dry and rattle in the wind. I wondered how the colors, sounds and smells seemed to you, the tracks they left on your brain that might be recalled again, some distant day in the future. Seeing things through your eyes sharpened my senses and everything else fell away as we moved slowly down the street, simply being.
The other day your sister asked me if the heart was still in my belly. I looked at her, puzzled, and said I didn’t know what she meant. “The one the midwife put there,” she said, and I suddenly understood. Sophie, your heart may beat outside my body now, but you will always be with me, will always be a part of me, until the day I die, and beyond.
Love,
mama
What a different child Sophie is. M is nearly three years old and we are still battling over sleep. My heart spasms with fear when M wakes during the night, wondering if she will settle in ten minutes or two hours. She hates sleeping. Hates it. For naps she sometimes falls asleep in my arms screaming that she doesn’t want to sleep. When she wakes up two hours later she picks up right where she left off, as if she had never slept at all. Sleeping is admitting defeat.
But Sophie. My dear, sweet Sophie. Sleep comes to her like a calm, quiet fog rolling off the water. She welcomes it, embraces it. In the early days she would sleep anytime, anywhere. Then things got tricky for a while, especially in the evening. She wouldn’t sleep between the hours of 6 PM and midnight unless she was in someone’s arms. That finally started to ease up a little, and then naps went out the window. She didn’t stay asleep if I set her down. Okay, no biggie, I just wore her for naps, trusting that it would get easier. And even then it was easy, comparatively speaking. Getting M down for a nap at this age was an ordeal. I would put her in the Moby and walk and walk and walk and walk and walk. She refused to lay her head on my chest, looking all around and eventually dropping her head backwards and staring straight up, struggling to keep her eyes open. She would finally succumb, her head flopped away from me, and still I had to walk, waiting and biding my time before I dared to gently, so gently, lift her head up and onto me. And heaven forbid if I didn’t leap to my feet and bounce if she stirred, or else I risked the wrath of her roaring to wakefulness, tired and cranky and pissed off that she had been tricked into sleeping. And set her down? HA. HA. HA.
With Sophie I just put her in my new wrap and went about my business, doing dishes, tidying the house, taking M for a walk. Sleep came effortlessly and noiselessly; she cuddled against me and let it take her.
Almost two weeks ago she started sleeping through the night. Going down between 9 and 10 PM and waking between 6 and 7 AM. Nurse and then back to bed for another 3 hours. Astonishing, simply astonishing. I still get slack-jawed when I really think about it (although you wouldn’t believe how cranky I got on the one night she deviated … how quickly we become spoiled).
Over the weekend I emerged from my twice-weekly bath to find Mr. Gearhead sans Sophie. “Where is she?” I asked. “Well, she seemed really calm and quiet, so I put her in the Kanoe and left.” “You did what?” I sputtered, my mouth agape at his audacity. “I dunno,” he shrugged, “I haven’t heard anything out of her.” I stood there stunned while he walked down the hall and poked his head through the door of her room. He returned to me. “She’s out like a light.”
And so he has given me courage. I see her yawn (usually about an hour and a half after getting up), scoop her up, change her diaper, stick the binky in, drop her in the Kanoe, bounce it for a minute and walk out. As in, I leave the room. And then … she goes to sleep. She usually wakes 30-40 minutes later. I go back in the room, re-bink her, bounce the Kanoe and leave again. And she goes back to sleep, usually for an hour or more. Sometimes I can repeat this and get another hour.
Astonishing. Simply astonishing.
At first I would tense whenever she stirred or if I did something to wake her. I would feel that anxiety in my heart, my chest tight and unyielding. But now I am learning I don’t need to have that fear. She doesn’t hate or fear sleep … she welcomes it, wants it, and is grateful when I provide the opportunity to do it. It is such a simple thing, really, and I still don’t understand why it’s so damn hard with M. My baby sleeps when she is tired and is awake when she isn’t. In fact, in the course of writing this post I have tended to her three times. The last time she wouldn’t settle, so I picked her up and changed her diaper. She fussed a bit and farted a few times. I picked her up off the changing table and she rested her head on my chest and fell back to sleep. After a few minutes I set her back in the Kanoe, and here I am, typing again - with two hands! But I know oh so well that it isn’t always like this. That it often isn’t like this.
It is such a relief to let that fear and anxiety slide away, for my life not to be ruled by the constant need to get my baby asleep and keep her that way. Especially since I have a toddler to care for as well. I cannot imagine the stress of parenting a baby like M and a toddler like M, all at the same time.
I don’t know who or what made Sophie this way. I just wanted to thank the Universe for it. I am eternally grateful.
As in, I’m getting it! Overall things have been going well with Sophie, but she’s gassy just like her sister. It’s not like she spends hours screaming in pain, but it’s just bad enough to disturb her sleep and therefore mine. Add in my own long-standing insomnia issues, and some nights I was only getting 2 or 3 hours of sleep. If I got 5 I felt lucky.
This was mind-numbingly painful for me, and my days were pretty fucking miserable. I was also an awful parent, constantly butting heads with M and resorting to tactics I really don’t agree with (punishment, bribes, coercion).
I tried everything I could think of to help Sophie – craniosacral therapy, chiropractic, homeopathy, NAET and the dreaded elimination diet (which thankfully resolved the reflux, but not the gas). I finally just quit trying. My healer thinks the universe is trying to teach me that not everything is my responsibility, that it’s not my job to “fix” things, that I can stop trying to figure everything out, stop trying to be perfect, and just be. I have to say I agree with her, but when trying to manage an infant and almost 3-year-old on 2 hours of sleep, I really didn’t give a flying fuck about lessons from the universe. I just wanted less gas and more sleep!
But I did decide to quit doing everything. I stopped making appointments and ceaselessly searching for a way to “solve” this “problem”. And about 2 weeks ago I stopped using the homeopathics because they didn’t seem to be helping anyway. I even started venturing off the elimination diet. But then I was rewarded with about 5 really hard nights. Again I started wondering what I had done “wrong” and how I could “fix” things. I know this is not a healthy mindset, but it did occur to me that the bad nights started around the time I stopped the homeopathics. Hmmmm. I started them up again, and huh, maybe they were helping after all. And things started to get better. And then things got really good, and now it seems like the gas is essentially gone, and – get this – for the last three nights, Sophie, at almost 12 weeks old, has slept for 6-8 hours straight. No waking, no nursing, just fussing once or twice, which is quickly resolved by re-binking. (Yeah, I swore I wouldn’t go that route again, but you gotta do what you gotta do.)
No way have I even started to make up all the sleep I’ve lost in the last few months, but jesus does it feel good to get 7 straight hours of sleep. I don’t think M slept 4 straight hours until she was over a year old. This? This feels decadent. Luxurious. Practically criminal.
I don’t know if it will continue, although I have to admit I desperately hope it does. With sleep like that, I can do this. I can manage, function, not dissolve into the evil screaming mother with three heads (one of which spins 360 degrees while spewing fire). It still isn’t easy, but it’s at least doable.
(Although everything is on hold while I wait for the dust to settle after my huge dietary transgressions yesterday … I ate three basil, tomato, mozzarella sandwiches (first wheat and dairy in two months) and I also had a chocolate cupcake (first chocolate and eggs in two months). Sophie seemed unusually uncomfortable about 24 hours later, although it seemed to pass (ha ha) fairly quickly. So I am crossing my fingers and holding my breath that it was an isolated incident and not related to the food. I can’t tell you how badly I want to be able to eat again.)
And I have to thank mb as well, for her mention of the Kanoe hammock on her blog. I have been eyeing hammocks since I was pregnant, but couldn’t decide what to get. With her endorsement, I made the plunge and bought a Kanoe, and I think it is also part of the reason for these long stretches of sleep. I heartily recommend it.
Now. If I could just figure out how to get her to take her naps in it, I would be happy. Right? Isn’t that how life is? I just need “this” (fill in the blank) and then I’ll be happy. Heh heh. One of these days I’ll figure out how to just be. Maybe.
And while we wait (for hell to freeze over) here are some recent pictures.
She has the most awesome smile, and we have been seeing a lot of it these days. She’s a very happy baby.
Peace man.
In my opinion, the only thing more beautiful than a nursing baby …
Is one who is sleeping on the b o o b (sorry for the spacing, but I get tired of whackos finding my site whenever I use a word like that) …
Sophie is finally starting to wake up some. She spent most of the first 5 weeks sleeping, and I still can’t figure out why I’m so damn tired if all she did is sleep, but whatever. She still sleeps a lot, but finally has some alert periods. I got my first real smile a few days ago (she has been smiling in her sleep since the day she was born). She opened her mouth, crinkled her nose and smiled. It melted my heart. Sometimes in the haze of these early days where all of your time is spent meeting their needs, you forget there is an actual person in there. I am certainly looking forward to getting to know her better.
+++++++++++++++++++++
Random thoughts in no particular order:
* I’d forgotten how their hands get full of lint and fuzz, and it gets stuck between their fingers and toes.
* I really hate the smell of spit-up. Almost as much as I hate being covered in it.
* I am extremely tired of hearing M screech “Hold ME!!! Put Sophie down and HOLD ME!!!” every time someone besides me (and sometimes even me) picks Sophie up.
* The six week growth spurt is killing me (up every other hour last night to nurse).
* This child is the most awful burper on earth. I have to pat her, jiggle her, bounce her, put her on her stomach, on her back, bounce her on the birth ball, over and over and over. This is not fun at 3 AM. It also means that I’m usually up for an hour every time she nurses at night (between nursing, burping and getting her back to sleep). Oy. It’s a good thing she usually goes 4+ hours between nursing (except for this damn growth spurt).
* I am so grateful that she will sleep in the co-sleeper. Otherwise her gassy wiggliness would positively kill me.
* Block feeding has helped some with the gassiness. But she is still gassy. This is apparently the curse I pass on to my children. I suppose it could be worse.
* When I’m trying to burp her on my shoulder, she wiggles around and has head-butted me on more than one occasion. Neither of us is happy when this happens.
* When I take her off the tap to burp her, she puts her arms over her head and does a huge stretch. Every. Single. Time.
* Holding Sophie and bouncing on the birth ball resolves almost everything that ails her. As long as I keep bouncing.
* She loves looking at the books on our bookcases, but more than anything the child loves looking at the trees and the sky.
* She has outgrown the sleep anywhere, anytime phase. While I still consider her to be a good sleeper, I need about 15 minutes in an environment absent of screaming, yelling and foot stomping to get her down for a nap. Apparently, this is too much to ask an almost-3-year-old. I have no idea what to do with M during this time, and have resorted to locking her in her room or stranding her in her high chair while I retreat to my room to get Sophie asleep. This two kids thing is proving to be tricky …
Sophie has reflux, bad. Think projectile vomiting from the mouth and nose, silent reflux, lots of crying, etc. I have cut dairy from my diet with no sign of improvement. I went the total elimination route with M and am not eager to try it again. I am also trying desperately to avoid medicating her. We have been doing an herbal tincture of slippery elm for the past week with decent results. The problem is it needs to be given on an empty stomach (roughly 1 hour before or after nursing her), and she can’t go longer than 4 hours between doses or things start to get out of control. It seems like it shouldn’t be that big a deal, but trying to meet those two criteria have proven to be next to impossible, especially at night. I am up feeding her, then up again (and waking her) to give a dose. I’ve gotten hardly any sleep the last few nights. Not to mention the fact that she positively hates the stuff, and it breaks my heart to give it to her.
So today I made an hour drive to our holistic pediatrician to get a homeopathic remedy (Unda #46, probably not available over the counter anywhere) in the hopes it will make things easier. I can give it to her topically, so that eliminates the problems with the taste and having to wake her. I started her on it a few hours ago and the jury is still out on the effectiveness. It has been nearly 4 hours since her last dose of slippery elm and she is not screaming her head off – good sign. She has nursed, burped and spit up a little, again with no screaming – good sign. But when I have things under control with the slippery elm, she doesn’t spit up at all. And I can usually set her down once she falls asleep and that is not going so well this afternoon. So I’m hesitant to sing the praises of the homeopathic just yet.
And to make things even more fun, I have birthed yet another gassy child. But right now, that is the least of my concerns.
The physical fatigue is very difficult, but even harder is seeing my beautiful, precious baby in pain and feeling very confused about what I should do for her. I finally broke down at 6 AM this morning and had a good cry. I feel like no matter what I do I’m doing the wrong thing. Do nothing and she suffers. Going with prescription medication feels so very terribly wrong to me. Use the slippery elm and it works, but sometimes I have to let her be hungry for 30+ minutes because I just gave a dose and know if I nurse her it won’t work. And the look on her face when I give it. Add in the fact that I’m not getting any sleep, and it just doesn’t seem like a feasible alternative. So that leaves the homeopathic for now. Needless to say, I am hoping with all my might that it works for us.
Things were going so smoothly for us in the beginning, and I really felt like I finally knew what it was like to have a baby instead of living a nightmare. And now the train is off the tracks again, and I feel like I’m right back where I was with M, albeit with different circumstances. But the same overwhelming exhaustion and constant questioning about what I’m doing are all there.
I can only pray we pull through this soon. Very, very soon.