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.

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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.