Things Babies Hate

This is not me and Raleigh when Joe gets home from work. (Partly because we aren't creepy spider aliens.)

It was supposed to be. Because how do stay-at-home moms have sweatpants and messy houses at all? They stay at home, where there's nothing to do but clean, exercise, or watch TV. There is 0 excuse for any stay-at-home mom to ever do anything but have sparkling carpets, chiseled abs, dinner ready, and to be all dressed up when their man comes home. Especially if they have only one vehicle and the man takes it during the day. But yet I kept reading about these women who can't find time for a shower and who eat the leftovers of their kids' lunches for breakfast around 4 PM, who live with dirt on the floor and dishes in the sink. "Wow," my pregnant self thought, "What is wrong with them?"

Everything was going to be so nice and perfect. Clean house, healthy meals, painless budget, so much time to write. The first day of Joe being back at work after his paternity leave would be the first day of my long and rewarding career as a flawless homemaker.

So, on that first day, the door closed behind Joe and I waved at him as he drove away. Then I looked at my baby. We had been left alone together; the world was pretty sure I could keep him alive! How exhilarating.

I changed the baby's diaper and fed him, then carefully put him down when he fell asleep. I spent the next half hour trying to put together a workout outfit from the 3 things in my closet that actually still fit. Then I popped in an exercise DVD. I was most of the way through the warmup when I heard the baby wake up. I left the video going while I ran to get the baby and put him on his mat where I could watch him and work out at the same time, then I tried to coordinate myself with the video people. So far, so good. I was stretching and watching Raleigh out of the corner of my eye. He was flailing his arms and legs around. He started to suck on his hand because he was already hungry again. His face turned in my direction, even though he couldn't see very far yet, and he had this worried expression on, so I started talking to him. "HI RALEIGH!" I said, punching at the air in time to the music. "Hi baby boy! You are so sweet!" But yelling happy things at him only worked for so long. The hand-sucking intensified. He'd start crying soon. So I sighed and paused the video and fed him. He fell asleep and I finished exercising and got a quick shower. That 30 minute video took more than twice as long as it should have, but at least I'd gotten through it.

By the end of that day, I had run the washer and dryer. I think I'd also collected most of the dirty clothes from around the living room. I hadn't: vacuumed, cleaned the kitchen, written, found a work-at-home career, prepared dinner, folded Laundry Mountain, caught up with any of my overdue correspondence, or paid bills. Raleigh had somehow soaked up the entire day.

And so I learned what was wrong with those stay-at-home moms who never get anything done. It's that "mom" part. You see, babies don't grow on milk. They grow on the time they slyly steal from you while you have all these great plans about what you're going to do all day. That is why my baby is enormous.

That's the important thing, though. That Raleigh is enormous. I mean, I figured out that my main thing right now is to make him happy. I think that every smile I put on his face right now will make his little growing brain different and better forever.

As long as his naps are unpredictable, I'll uselessly hold him while he sleeps instead of wasting my time by trying to escape - he'll just wake up two minutes after I start doing something useful, anyway. When he lets me put him down for a few minutes, I'll clean. When he goes to sleep for the night, I'll stay up til 3 AM so I can do things I used to do before I had a baby. See? I'm figuring it out!

My new job isn't to keep this place spotless, or cook a lot, or even change out of my spit-uppy clothes before Joe gets home (the spitup is also encrusted in my hair, so really there's not much of a point.) My new job is to make Raleigh smile. Yeah, I can do other things, and I will keep learning how to be efficient and fit everything in. Mostly, though, I'm going to get nothing done, love my baby, and be stupidly happy.

Game Changed

September 12th, age 5 weeks and 5 days, Raleigh became something completely different. He'd been changing anyway; we noticed that he had longer waking periods instead of the newborn sleep-eat-sleep-eat schedule. Along with the longer waking periods, he developed the ability to be bored. He would no longer tolerate lying on his back in one place for long, or even being held chest-to-chest rather than face-out. He preferred to stare at the ceiling fan (oh man how he loves to stare at the ceiling fan) or the kitchen light fixture or computer monitors. He also started making these sudden excited single-syllable vocalizations, like an OH or EH, just out of nowhere while he was looking around. You wouldn't think that would be something to be just super in love with, but it totally is.

But the big thing, the game-changer, was the smile. Raleigh was on his back looking up at me and I was talking to him and making excited faces, seeing if he could react yet...and he smiled. I kept talking, thinking it was probably just another accident, but his smile widened into a mouth-wide-open big gummy grin.

Perfection.

He was noticing me.

"Joe," I said, "Come here! He smiled. Talk to him and make faces at him." And Raleigh did it again.

It's like he graduated. Evolved in a second, like a Pokémon. One minute, he was a warm floppy fragile responsibility on the other end of a really short leash, and the next, he became my very own sweet happy little buddy.

We're a team now. I would be incredibly sad if he died. And if he were to ever get a horrible sickness, I would definitely go through it instead of him, if I could. I just want him to always smile for me.

One Month

Raleigh was born a month ago. I had no idea he was going to grow so fast.

Life was easier and more fun without a baby. Who would've thought that having a little helpless person who needs to be fed every couple of hours would make such a difference, right? I miss the freedom of our old life. I miss "us." I think no one can know what a responsibility and what a change it is to have a baby, and how serious of a decision it really is, until they're there.

So, I'm overwhelmed and sad sometimes. And tired and bored and disconnected. And guilty, because I have a healthy and happy little guy and there are so many out there who can't have that and I just shouldn't be allowed to feel anything but 100% ecstatic.

I hate I'm not one of those moms who posts on FaceBook every other day about how I didn't know it was possible to love like this, my heart is 300x bigger and the world is made out of glitter and smiles now. He was supposed to make me feel all different and good and mom-like when he was born. I was supposed to go from "Is this really going to be okay?" to "YYYYYYYEEEEAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!," not just get stuck at "Is this really going to be okay?"

I know it will be. I also know it would be a lot more okay if it was noon right now. Seriously, I shouldn't even publish this post, my mood is so dependent on how sunny it is outside that I'll be a completely different person in 12 hours. But this is when I had time to write, so oh well.

Soon Raleigh will be able to do stuff. He'll smile and notice me. I'll get used to life this way. My body will go back to normal. Everything will be okay.

Also, though, when he's sleeping, he's literally the cutest and most wonderful thing I have ever seen. I can't stop taking pictures of him. When he has one of his little accidental smiles, I smile back and I laugh and I see if I can get him to do it again (can't yet.) When he's making little zombie noises and looking around and flailing his arms and legs, I just stare and think how much I need to get it on video before he learns how to control his limbs. When he's awake, I want to hold him so he'll never feel alone. It takes me twice as long to go grocery shopping now because I keep stopping in the middle of the aisles to kiss his little face. It's nice to cuddle him, to have him all curled up asleep on my chest, finally content. When he wakes up hungry and I lift him out of the bassinet and bring him to lay with me for a sleepy feed, and he doesn't wake up, just latches on with one of his hands resting on me and his little perfect eyes closed...I guess that's when I feel the way I'm supposed to.

Babies Are Hard

Happy 2:23 AM on 8/29/2014, my baby's 19th day of life. He was born August 10th at 41 weeks gestation.

He's good. By that, I guess I mean predictable. Predictable is one of the best things in the world. And he almost never cries, because his needs are easy to figure out and we don't let him go long without having them met.

He's bigger already, at 19 days - 1 more pound, 7 more ounces, an inch grown in not even three weeks. Joe sees it, I really don't. I think he still looks like the pictures from the "early days," just after his newborn swollenness went down and his features became visible.

Our new life is similar to our old life, except with diapers and a lot more dirty towels and, yes, less sleep, and a carseat. The biggest change is that everything has to be scheduled now. It goes: Raleigh wakes up, does his hunger signals if I don't get to him, his diaper gets changed, he gets fed, he falls asleep. Then we have like two hours to do stuff, if we have stuff to do, before he wakes up hungry. (Already, he has more periods of alertness sprinkled in.) If we want to go anywhere, we have to plan hours in advance to squish the trip into one of his sleepy times so we don't end up hanging out in a parking lot while I feed him.

As of last Thursday, our nice schedule has changed. Between about 11:30 PM and 4:00 AM, he gets really upset. When I try to feed him, he starts eating, but then he pulls away suddenly and starts whimpering and banging his face against me and shaking his head back and forth really quickly with his mouth open in his food-finding motion, then he latches on and eats again for a minute. Then he needs to be burped. Then I'll try feeding him again. If he's not interested in eating or burping or cuddling, Joe gets him. Joe talks to him and moves his limbs around and helps him sit up and look at stuff. If that's not working, Joe walks him around the house singing and talking to him, and that almost always puts him to sleep. At least temporarily. During these hours, if he's not held with us troubleshooting him constantly, he just starts crying. Don't worry, this is normal and should be over by the time he's three or four months old, so we only have about 101 more nights of it!

When you've had an unhappy baby in your arms for hours while trying not to leak milk all over everything and trying to stay awake and not be too miserable from tiredness and boredom because all you can do with your arms around a baby is watch TV and get stabbed and scratched by stupid little sharp newborn claws, "Let me take him" is one of the best sentences you've ever heard. Teamwork is wonderful.

So I guess things have kind of gone downhill. It's easy to appreciate a baby when it's happy and nice. And sleeping. It's not so easy when you're tired and you feel like you can't satisfy its needs, and it doesn't like you anyway because it has the responsiveness of a houseplant and can't even really look at you yet. Even if you have the liberty of sleeping when the baby sleeps and of not getting out of bed til like 2 in the afternoon, it's kind of enough to give you a little postpartum depression. I want him to be happy, I want to feel like I'm successful, and I want him to sleep. It's 4:18 AM and none of that is really going on right now. At least I'm enjoying the songs Joe's making up.*

And the baby's smiles. After I feed Raleigh, while he's sleeping, he smiles for a couple of seconds at a time. It's an accident, he has no idea, but I stare at him while he's sleeping just to catch a glimpse of those fleeting little smiles. Yesterday, I think we even heard him laugh for the first time.

Raleigh, I hope someday you'll read this and know: we're just waiting it out with you. This is a dumb situation, but we're doing our best to make you happy. Today, we bought some foam corner things to stick on the upper kitchen cabinet we walk you past 399 times a night, because we were afraid we'd accidentally hit your head on the corners while walking. Also, the diapers you wear are Size 1 Pampers Swaddlers, and they have Sesame Street faces on them, and right now the Cookie Monster on your diaper has a drawn-on mustache and beard because right before you were born we started this inside joke of drawing mustaches and beards on everything.

-----

One more thing. Earlier, I tried to take a nice picture of Raleigh, like a newborn picture. I've been meaning to get pictures while he's still almost newborn size. I wanted to get something like this:

Credit: http://www.carolinetran.net/blog/2012/10/santa-monica-newborn-photographer/

 And instead I ended up with this:

Which could be a lot better with some editing. But still, not even close. We laughed so hard.

(*I know it gets better, this is just a phase, he won't be like this forever and it will go by faster than we think, and I know it could be a lot worse. None of that goes very far toward making it easier while it's happening.)

40 Weeks, 2 Days

(Spontaneous labor statistics from spacefem.com)

Not in labor yet, which at least gives me more time to have fun with statistics.

I think it was Saturday, the day before Raleigh's due date, when I really became comfortable with the idea of having a baby. So that's great! I'm kinda looking forward to having him here. I think it will be nice.

Before that, honestly, I was terrified. The entire time. Ultrasound days - you'd think they'd be happy - but really, I'd see Little Squish in there and I'd just think of all the ways I was going to accidentally mess him up and how when he grows up he might not even like me even though I just gave him 18 years of my life, and how, in the meantime, we'd have to sacrifice so much for him and he'd cry a lot and poop everywhere and destroy everything.

Like, you know how getting a new pet is a major gamble? You just became responsible for this living thing for at least the next 10 years. What if your personalities clash, or you just aren't compatible with that type of pet? What if it eats your furniture or can't be house trained? All you can do is hope that you're able to make each other happy more than you frustrate each other, and give it the best life that you possibly can. And then, at the end of those 10ish years, the pet is gone. You might be super sad and wish that the pet could live forever, but on the flip side, if the pet was terrible or a bad match, now you have been relieved.

Well, that's...kind of what it's like with a baby, I'm guessing...except there is no 10 year life span. You are creating a human who will basically have the power to destroy you not just for the next few years, but for the rest of your life. Maybe there won't be a personality clash, and maybe you'll be compatible with parenthood, but what if you don't like each other or you end up being a terrible parent?

That. Is. Terrifying. And it's all I could think about.

But then, out of nowhere, I got tentatively happier. I guess my reasons are selfish. Like that I think it will probably be pretty nice to hold our baby. I think it will be fun to watch him grow, hopefully to be a lot like Joe, because I like Joe a lot. I'm looking forward to seeing Joe as a dad - he's going to be fantastic. I'm more optimistic about our family's future now than I have been at any point since we found out that we were going to have one.

Nothing says "you're having a kid" quite like suddenly seeing a crib in your room

Also - totally unrelated - I want to see how good I am at pushing out babies. It seems there are two main views of labor: 1. The probably more logical one, as a necessary evil to get through as painlessly as possible to get to the baby, and 2. A challenging life experience to conquer. I'm taking the second view. (Or at least starting there, and then switching to the first one once the second one starts seeming really dumb.)

Childbirth will be a new and scary and extremely personal situation, and without having experienced it, I feel like I'll be better able to handle it if I maintain as much control as possible and allow as little invasion as possible. That means staying at home for most of labor. It could go quickly, but since this is my first baby, I expect it to take pretty much forever, like hours and hours and hours and hours. It really seems like I'd rather spend all that time comfortable and undisturbed instead of in an environment where there are strangers and needles and they want to put the needles in me.

I've learned about timing contractions, about when it really is time to go to the hospital, and about when it really is too early to go. I've stocked up on Gatorade and applesauce and juice. I even got this giant inflatable kiddie pool to set up in the living room because our bathtubs are tiny and water is supposed to be super helpful for labor pain management.

Won't it be funny if I end up not even using it

I may very well end up perfectly happy in a hospital bed with an epidural, watching my baby be born like it's coming out of someone else because it sure isn't hurting me, but I'm glad that I've given myself a chance to have "THE EXPERIENCE" and see if it really is worth it...or if I just need to take the logical route next time.

A Probability Jump

There are only four more days, give or take a few, before we're parents. Let's not talk about how that's really weird and I don't get it and life is still normal, exactly like the world isn't about to be turned upside down.

First thing every Sunday morning since we found out about the baby, I've checked for my two weekly emails detailing what part of development he was on, what he's doing in there. I loved finding out when he was able to hear, when he could dream, smile, or suck his thumb. And I'd get out the tape measure and show Joe about how many inches long the baby had grown. Now that there aren't really weeks left (probably,) what I'm really interested in is when I'm going to go into labor. I found this super cool chart that tells you, based on a survey of like 6,000 people, the probability that you'll spontaneously (not induced) go into labor on any given day. The probability jumped a whole percentage point today! (Source: http://spacefem.com/pregnant/charts/duedate1.php?minweek=38 )

The site also tells you the most popular days to give birth. Joe's and my guessed dates are both on the list. I'm going with 40+2 (August 5.) Joe's guess is 39+5 (August 1 - the day after tomorrow :O !) Both dates have a 4% chance of labor.

Now, in case numbers bore you, have a picture of the baby smushing out from my abdomen.

And this one, the cool thing I can do where my stomach gets pointy when I flex a certain way.

In Between

So...hi. This is awkward. It's been nine months since I've been here.

I never had much interesting to say - this blog is domestic, self-indulgent - but I still feel it's important for me to write our story. To keep it. Especially now.

Snapshot: I'm 27, Joe's 28. August 17th will be our 7th anniversary. Our marriage has been 92% fantastic. Our life is fun, secure, tranquil, comfy, routine. Like living in one of the squares of a waffle. I love it.

Last year, as my first real academic accomplishment, I was so proud to have earned a real estate sales certification. By now, I've realized that real estate is a pretty bad fit for me. Joe's on his 4th year in the Army. Seems that's another bad fit. With 22 months left on his contract, we've started to work on an exit plan.

We bought a home last year. We have a dog and a cat and two birds, some grape bushes!, two living rooms, two spare bedrooms. One of those bedrooms is full of boxes. The other bedroom was painted and curtained and made into my office. I couldn't find the perfect "resale beige" paint, so I went with what I really wanted - a perfect delicate blue-green. It turned out that the blue really was perfect...turned out that I was painting a nursery for the baby I'd given up on.

There are 55 days until his due date, August 3rd.

Now, we're in between. In between "us two" and "we three." Between home office and nursery. Everything we've known, and the rest of our lives.

It's summer. Outside the back windows, our yard is overgrown and green and hazy with humidity. The sun sets slowly. We play video games side-by-side like always, watch movies on the couch, cook and clean together. Everything is still so normal. But ten times a day we walk past the calendar months I printed out - April to September all taped together on the fridge - and every night I cross off another day. So many have been crossed off already.

It's been seven years of just us, of adventure and figuring stuff out. Strange to think how soon that will change. We're ready (as anyone can ever be,) but I'll always remember, always keep these last days of ours, these perfect summer in-between days.