I'm Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaack!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well, here I am.  Back to blogging.  Oh, my, I only made one post in December?  I just checked my stats, and my page hits are waaaaaaaay sad.  Are you still reading?  Please keep reading.  Because I like writing, and writing is only fun if other people are reading.  And, writing this blog is a good sanity-keeper and stress-reliever.  So keep reading and tell your friends.  And follow me, dammit!  I know you're reading, be proud of it!   I'll post more often, I promise.

And if you need me to advertise your blog, tell me!  I'll get you back!   Ok, done with my self-promotion.

So, little Bitty Bebe is six weeks old now. Which is probably why I am finally back to blogging.  As all of you seasoned parents know, the first six weeks is HARD! Very hard to get anything accomplished.  I'll recap a bit about the past month....Do you have a minute?  This is going to be long....

Bitty has a new nickname.  Since she has been born, she has been the snuggliest, cuddliest little thing, as cuddly as a teddy bear, which was the inspiration for her new nickname.  Sophie Bear, Baby Bear,  Bitty Bear are all fair game.

pouty bear

Sophie is so cuddly she hardly ever wants to be put down.  Which actually turns out to be a bit of an issue when it comes to doing much of, well, anything besides snuggling with the baby.  She screams bloody murder and I imagine that she is thinking "I SAID don'tputmedown!!!!!"  I tried a few devices that I thought might appease both of us.

hates it

hates it

hates this too

I decided that the only way that I was going to get anything accomplished was to hire a babysitter.

Sophie and her babysitter

Every new parent anticipates sleep deprivation.  Mark's sleep deprivation, however, defies all other, as far as I'm concerned. He has established a pattern of waking up in the middle of the night, espewing various bits of randomness that I believe deserve note.  All this, taking into account, that he is by no stretch of the imagination the parent who gets up with the baby in the middle of the night.  Agreeable, to me, since I am home on maternity leave and he has returned to work.

My favorite is the time that he woke up, gathered two pillows and rested them on his arms as if he were carrying a tray of champagne glasses, walked around the bed to my side and presented me with these pillows saying "Here, put her in her rocker."  What rocker?  The rocking chair in her nursery?  That is certainly a two person job--one to rock, and one to be rocked.  I told him that he wasn't making any sense and to go back to sleep.

On another occasion, Mark woke up, picked up and cradled our Jack Russell Terrier, Riley, in his arms, and only realized when he felt a furry face and wet nose that this wasn't the baby, after all.

I can now appreciate why people say that parenthood is a selfless job.  Everything we do, every moment of our day (or mine, at least, now that Mark has gone back to work), is devoted to taking care of baby.  Feeding baby.  Playing with baby.  Making baby happy.  Making sure baby plays at the right time so that she is stimulated enough and will sleep at the right time.  I plan my meals based upon what I can make and ingest in the least amount of time, because I will likely have to do it in a graceful five minutes that exist between baby fussy spells.  Sometimes I feel like I do not have my own life...I exist to take care of this baby.

Bitty and I had what I like to call the Battle of Breastfeeding.  Bitty has always had issues with sucking, from day one.  She sucks at sucking.   On her first day, she wouldn't suck at all.  Then, she went to the hospital nursery because of her jaundice and they fed her with a bottle all night, and she learned how to suck to bottle.  She sort of learned how to suck a pacifier (she still spits it out half the time).  They brought her back to me, and she never sucked for me.  Six lactation consultants, hours of finger feeding, and countless tears later, I have ceded.  Sophie wins the Battle of  Breastfeeding.  And so, I now have a very intimate relationship with my breast pump, as I am now what the internet calls an "exclusively pumping" mom.  Which for me, means that I spend twice as much time feeding this baby, because first I have to pump, then bottle feed her.

Basically, this is me every three hours.

  I am bitter about it.  You win this one, Sophie, but I will fight to the death on the next one.  And daddy is very jealous of the breast pump.

Mark and I both began with a  new parent, deer-in-headlights feeling.  Adding to this, is the postpartum, baby blues.  A shift in hormones that, for some reason, I thought I was immune to.  Analogous, I would imagine, to an alien abduction.   For weeks I complained to my husband that I just don't feel like myself!  I found myself in tears over the simplest things.  Bitty cried--a lot.  And it seemed as if she resisted sleep.  We went through about 10 days where she would not nap more than 15 minutes here and there during the day, and cried in distress most of the rest of the day.   I wondered what I had gotten myself into.  I had done so much preparation, read so many books, I thought for sure that I would fall right into motherhood without skipping a beat.  Yet, I felt like such a failure.  Completely incompetent.  And then, trying to fake happy so that my little Bitty wouldn't be affected by a depressed mother.

And then, one day, it all seemed to be gone.  It took the first three weeks, but finally, finally, I felt a sense of normalcy.  Competent in my new role.   Now, I knew (probably) how to soothe my baby.  Now, I could decipher the cries.  Now, I didn't stress about how I should change her diaper, dress, feed, and burp her.  To all non-parents, it IS stressful!  Listening to your baby cry, and not knowing what to do or what she wants  is the worst feeling you can imagine!  Doing everything you can think of, yet in futility, is a terrible state. But, in time, those feelings went away.  And she, also, became more human-like and less fetus-like by the day.

I never had a conversation about this with anyone before I experienced it myself.  Why doesn't anyone talk about it?  In retrospect, it appears that almost every new mother experiences the baby blues, and if you don't, you are one of the lucky few.  Which is why I write about it myself, for mothers behind me.  I had the Baby Blues in a major way.  At first, motherhood is, well, not that great.  But those feelings go away after a few weeks, or so they should.  And if they don't, which is also not uncommon, you may need help from a more serious condition from a medical practitioner.

So, that is probably the most serious you will get from me for a while, but even I had trouble seeing the humor in the first month of parenthood.  Almost suddenly, however, things started falling into place.  Bitty started making eye contact.  She started making those sweet baby coos.  She started smiling (at me!  not just gas, or so I think).  An early semlance of a routine became observable.

I became a mother.