Ask any new parent and they will tell you - sleep is a thing of the past. Memories of lazy weekend mornings spent snoozing in bed until noon are filed away alongside memories of late night adventures in clubland and going for hikes at an adult pace without carrying a small child and all their accoutrements. When Claire was born, I expected the worst. Sleepless nights followed by hectic days chasing an active kid around the park. Feedings every hour or two for months on end, never sleeping for more than 2 or 3 hours at a time.
And yet I find myself here: with a baby who sleeps. A baby who sleeps well, almost every night. Who sleeps 6 hour stretches regularly, and who only wakes to feed once or twice in the night, despite sleeping right next to the source. Could it be true, I asked myself? I scarcely dared to tell anyone, lest I break the spell.
Seven weeks on, Claire hasn’t changed a bit. She still sleeps well, goes to sleep without a great deal of fuss, often falls asleep in her bed by herself and doesn’t nurse nearly as often as I thought she would.
The thing is, I’m almost afraid to tell other moms because, well, won’t they hate me? Or worse yet, will they think that I’m doing something they aren’t, and beat themselves up for having a kid who doesn’t sleep well, or who keeps them up all night nursing around the clock? Sleep is the parenting holy grail, something parents chase after and try to attain at almost any cost, and it has fallen right in my lap. How did that happen? The lottery of genetic recombination, I suppose, and a whole lotta luck.
If I knew how to guarantee that other women could have a 4 hour labour followed by a baby who sleeps through the night I’d write a book and sell it like hotcakes.
I’ve added some more photos to my flickr album, mostly of our adventures with Andy when he came to visit.
In other news, Tom has now gone back to work and the babymoon is officially over. Hard to believe that four weeks have passed already and Claire will be a month old two days from now. After having some serious doubts and fears about my ability to cope with a strong-willed nearly-three year old and a new baby, it seems to be manageable. I’ve been reading kids are worth it! by Barbara Coloroso, which helps me stay sane and grounded instead of flying off the handle when my patience is tried.
One of the things I’d planned to do if I went overdue was attend a reading by the authors of Great Expectations: Twenty Four True Stories About Childbirth. Since I wasn’t as overdue as I feared I’d be, I got the book out from the library and read it over the first three weeks of Claire’s life. With my own childbirth experience so fresh and raw in my mind it was especially poignant to read about other’s experiences, and it made me so incredibly grateful and awestruck that my own birth experience was totally and completely free of conflict and complications
Reading those birth stories when my own pregnancy hormones were plummeting and the warm fog of being full term was beginning to clear away made me feel like taking a stab at writing my own birth story. The writers who contributed their stories to Great Expectations are all highly talented and skilled, which is inspiring in itself. Trying to write and assign words to an experience so visceral, so spiritual and so far outside our normal realm of experience is a daunting task. The vast majority of birth stories online are either hour by hour accounts of dilation progress, interventions and nursing shift changes, or completely vague descriptions of communing with the earth goddess. Talking about the actual experience of giving birth is truly trying to describe the indescribable, but these writers did an amazing job, and I’m going to take my best shot too. (more…)
I’ve posted some more photos of Claire on Flickr. It’s so hard to capture the essence of a days-old newborn - the wrinkly, dehydrated hands that seem so ancient, the tiny weight in your arms, the incredulous expressions, the first “milky face” with lips all smunched up from nursing when the milk finally comes in, a small dribble of milk escaping down the side of her chin.
We went out for chinese food yesterday and my fortune cookie said, “Past experience will be helpful in your job.” It’s true - after getting two onesies soaked while trying to change a diaper I finally realized that she almost always wants to pee after waking up and will pee as soon as her diaper is removed. The solution? Hold her over the potty. Now I am finding myself EC-ing a newborn when I didn’t plan to start for another two or three months. I wonder whether second babies are easier because they’re born that way or because we are now parents of two and are a bit more confident.
So today we had our first family outing since Claire was born. Not trying to bite off more than we could chew, we decided to walk to the elementary school around the corner from our house - a distance of maybe one block. Bea wanted to ride her new bike with the training wheels, and Tom had rigged up a broomhandle on the back so he could help push without wrecking his back. I wanted to try using my short blue Didymos in a cradle carry, which I hadn’t really mastered when Bea was small. Claire was just being her baby self, eating, sleeping and pooping at semi-regular intervals.
Well, we made it to the park and back. Along the way Bea fell off her bike, Claire hated the wrap, I couldn’t figure out how to get her more comfortable and ended up getting hot and flustered, Claire needed to eat and then pooped, and Bea peed in her pants while climbing up to the top of the monkey bars because both Tom and I forgot to ask her to go before we left. And to top it all off, I forgot to bring spare pants for her, although I had brought three newborn nappies, a receiving blanket, the camera and a packet of wipes, none of which we actually used despite Claire pooping while we were at the park. So we turned around and walked home, with a bare-bottomed Beatrice picking fluffy white dandelions and blowing the seeds into the wind.
This parenting thing never stops being a learning experience, I tell you.
Baby girl was born at 10:28 this morning after a whirlwind 3.5 hour labour. She is 9lbs and despite a slightly bruised face from having her arm up by her neck at birth baby and I are both happy, healthy and doing well.
We’re going to take a day or two to decide on a name, but will let everyone know when we’ve named her.
With three days to go before my due date, I thought it was time I checked in here to let everyone know that No, I have not given birth yet. While it’s pretty likely that baby will arrive sometime this weekend or early next week, it’s totally possible that she won’t arrive until the week after that, so don’t worry if we haven’t called you with a birth announcement by then - it just means I’m still hauling this enormous belly around the house and hoping for regular contractions.
In the meantime, here’s some pics I took a couple of weeks ago on an outing to Stanley Park. It was a beautiful spring day and Bea and I wandered down to the beach and shared an ice cream before playing in the sand and chilling out. It was one of those days that makes me appreciate how much fun it can be hanging out with an almost-three-year old who can talk and run and interact.
Bea and I went to buy decorations for her Easter basket today, and while we were at the craft store we headed down the sticker aisle to let her pick out a sheet of special stickers. Stickers are definitely the treat of choice around here these days, right up there after chocolate. So Bea picked out some stickers with realistic pictures of cats on them, carried them all around the store while we finished shopping, handed them to the cashier and took them back again by herself, and asked to keep holding them when we got to the car to put the rest of the decorations away. No harm in letting her carry her stickers, I thought, so off we went to Canadian Tire with stickers in hand.
Fast forward through the rest of our shopping and we’re coming out of the customer bathrooms. I’ve got a huge Rubbermaid tub filled up with a tarp, grass seed and 5kg of potting soil plus my massive belly to carry, and Bea suddenly bursts out in tears. “My kitty stickers!” she cries. “Where are my kitty stickers?”
I look in the tub. No stickers. I look around - this store is huge, and we wandered awhile before actually finding the things I needed to buy, so the possible area in which the kitty stickers could possibly be found is huge, not to mention the very likely scenario that they fell to the ground underneath one of the displays. We walk back over our tracks and revisit each part of the store that we went to, checking all the while for the kitty stickers. No stickers.
As we head back to the bathroom to check the last place we went before giving up on the hunt for the stickers, I weigh my options in my head. The craft store is just across the parking lot. We could easily go back and buy another $2 sheet of kitty stickers. Or, we say that they’re lost and we go home without stickers today, possibly risking a major meltdown in the middle of the store.
Thinking back on it now I still feel empathetic - the look of pure loss and sadness on her face when she realized she’d lost her stickers was 100% genuine. I know what loss feels like, and to know that I could step in, godlike, and replace those lost stickers with a fresh sheet from the store was tempting. And yet, I didn’t. We dealt with the sadness and tears, she had a cuddle and then said, “I think maybe a snack would help me feel better.” Cookie in hand, she waited patiently while I paid and looked thoughtfully out the window while we drove home.
It was one of those bittersweet parenting moments to realize she could be so mature about losing something special. And bittersweet to realize that letting her cope with loss when it’s just kitty stickers will prepare her for losing bigger, more important things later on, when there won’t be anybody who could step in and replace what’s been lost.
