wealhtheow

Rounding the Cape

We are getting over the cold from hell around here. It started Friday night with an extremely congested baby who couldn't sleep through the night. R and I had rented a movie, and it took us about 3.5 hours to watch it. It felt like punishment for daring to get back to some semblance of LBS--Life Before Sam. On Monday the drippy snotty nose started, and that continued into yesterday. Today there is a little bit of snot-nose, but also a hacking cough, which I'm pretty sure signals the end of the cold proper. Just in time--the day after tomorrow I board a plane for a three-week trip to California.*

TIPS FOR BABY COLD

• Vick's Baby Rub--we put this on at night and it definitely seems to soothe him
• Plug-in menthol vapor Thorny--this really makes a difference in sleeping through the night 
• LOTS and LOTS of saline spray in the snout--he screams when we do this, but it loosens the congestion and helps the swelling 
• Hose the nose with the bulb suction--again, he screams like we're torturing him, and it breaks my heart, but the difference in his breathing is major. We do this in the morning when he wakes up and before bed, and if he's having a lot of trouble breathing in the day. 
• Cool-mist humidifier. We're keeping this on all night in addition to the plug-in thingy.  
• Breastfeeding like a mofo. I breastfeed on demand anyways, but I'm very conscious about doing it every couple hours when he's sick to keep him hydrated. 

We're rounding the corner--Sam slept 12 hours last night, and is on his third (third!) nap of the day--although the first one was only about 10 minutes before the cat woke him with her loud meowsing and attempt to fit into a cardboard box next to his head, so I guess we're really on his second (second!) nap of the day. 

*What's this? A three-week trip? Yes indeedy--a three-week, two-sets-of-grandparents trip. Saturday Sam and I (and R, since he's dropping us off and helping with the luggage) will be getting up at the ungodly hour of 4:15 to get to the airport to catch a flight for San Francisco, where my parents will be picking the two of us up and making the 5-hour drive up north to Arcata. The two of us will hang out there for 10 days, then we're flying down to LA, where Rick will meet us at the airport--his plane gets in about 45 minutes before ours. We'll be with Rick's parents for another ten days. 

I'm both looking forward to and dreading this trip. Obviously it will be nice to see family, and I am definitely looking forward to spending some quality time in California (hello, good produce). But it is three weeks! That's a very long time to be away from home with such a little man. We'll be totally out of our routine

 Boy waking up--draw your own conclusions about reasons for dread....

Lessons

• The coffee table now belongs to the boy, but mama needs a drawer for herself too.
• A runny-nosed child can keep the whole house up at 1:30 am--but mom and dad still need to be nicfe to each other. 
• When baby doesn't feel good, there's just no substitute for mom.
• Dancing always makes everything a little better--just like ice cream 
• There is no measure of how much I love my baby boy, but I never appreciate my sweet gentle quiet cat as much as when the boy is fussy and wakeful. 

Naps, or the lack thereof

Ah, hubris, my old friend. We meet again.

Currently I have an extremely tired baby in his crib. He wails for a few minutes, then falls asleep, then wakes right back up and wails for a few minutes. This child has not napped more than 20 minutes at a time for 3 days. Clearly I never should have written about how he's turned into a great napper, blah blah blah. That was tempting fate and all the gods. Good freaking lord.

It is supposed to be in the high nineties all weekend, with heat indices up to 110. So later we're heading over to his fairy godmother's house to play in the pool. This will be the puppy's first time in the pool, so naturally his dad and I are overexcited. I know he's ready for this, because yesterday in a fit of desperation I dumped in the tub with some toys and a couple inches of water--his first time alone* in the tub. He loved it, so I can't wait to see how he reacts to the "big boy" pool. 

Also on the agenda for this weekend is some major babyproofing. The kid is figuring out how to open drawers, so I need to empty out the drawer in which I keep my stationery and put some toys in there for him. That way Sam can have something to explore, which I think is better developmentally than keeping everything locked up. But I do need to lock up the media cabinet and put away any remaining knick-knacks that are at baby level. 

I hate to tempt fate again, so let me just write that I think perhaps someone is not awake. So perhaps it is time to wrap this up and start with the chores. 

*alone as in his dad or I were not in the tub with him--I was sitting right next to the tub with my arm in there the whole time. I am not that much of a bad mother! 

Things I Have Learned

1. Air conditioning kicks ass, but if you dress the baby in a shorty sunsuit, you can get by without it.
2. My household would run far more smoothly if I used Sam's naptime for chores rather than for farting around on the internet. But my cat will run far more smoothly if I use naptime for some croodle-love instead.
3. Snippets of Nixon tape conversations are really annoying, but I can put up with it to have my husband spend time next to me while working on the diss. 
4. My vast experience with blackouts has prepared me well for dealing with one--I ordered dinner before everyone else realized we'd be out of power all night, and I gathered together all my candles and matches well before the gloaming set in. 
5. When a small cat is lonely enough, she'll sleep upstairs with her mom and dad even though it's hot as blazes up there. 

Back in black

Well, I suppose if I had to pick one, it's better to neglect my blog than my kid. 

Sam is now creeping, sitting up by himself, eating solid foods (kind of--see paragraph below) and starting to crawl. Good grief! With the increased activity comes increased nappage, which is so wonderful I could cry. The past couple weeks the kid has been unbelievably whiny, leading me to mutter soundlessly "What the BLUE FUCK is your problem?" It turns out the problem is that the poor kidlet was tired, so now when he starts getting all whiny and grumpy down he goes for a nap. He cries for about 10 minutes and then conks out. I hate hate HATE letting him cry, but any sort of stimulation will just keep the kid awake, so I really can't rock or feed him to sleep. Actually, I'm just now realizing--I did know he was tired, and I kept trying to nurse him down, but it wasn't working, so I assumed he wasn't really tired, just grumpy. But now I know.

That's the bitch of motherhood--I'm constantly making mistakes, and each one feels like the end of the world. It's so much easier to focus on what I''m doing wrong than what I'm doing right. Case in point: I love my parents, but they did not pass on the healthiest eating habits possible, and one of my major goals with the piglet was to change that. Things had been going along fairly well until we went to the doctor a couple months ago and found out he was slipping on the growth charts for his weight (from 15th percentile to 10th percentile down to 5th). The doctor wasn't too concerned, but told me I should get as much solid food into him as he wanted. That's when it began. I started getting more and more intense at feedings, and Sam started clamming up. I started trying to shove food into his mouth by any means necessary, getting more and more frustrated and ending each feeding session by heaving large dramatic sighs and bitterly telling him "No more solid food, Sam! No more solid food ever! Mummy's going to have to go to college with you to breastfeed you!" Ugh.

This is EXACTLY what I promised myself I'd never do. I get so worried about whether he's getting enough nutrition that I'm not trusting him to eat when he's hungry and not eat when he's not--which is what I've struggled with all my life. I'm inculcating my least favorite habit in the kid, and he's not even a year old yet. So now every feeding is a lesson in patience. I keep telling him to eat as much as he wants, but that he doesn't need to eat any more than that. I keep telling myself that as long as he's active and looks healthy that he's getting what he needs, even if it doesn't seem possible. Usually he takes about 5 bites of food, and then every 4-5 days he eats a walloping amount. He nurses off and on for about an hour in the mornings, and nurses pretty well before he goes to bed, but during the day it's 3 minutes of nursing tops--and he often gets so into playing that he forgets to eat, so I have to pick him up and go by the clock rather than by the baby.

On the plus side, he is constantly smiling and giggling these days. When I go in to get him from a nap, he's often sitting upright in the crib nibbling a bear or reaching his arms out for me to pick him up, and it is beyond adorable. When Rick is around Sam is constantly studying him--what fascinating thing is Dad going to do next? Last night when Rick was carrying him up the stairs, Sam saw Thistle and let out an extremely excited squeak. He goes to bed each night at around 8:30, leaving me some time to clean up the kitchen and read a little in bed. He usually goes about 8 hours before waking up, so if I go to bed at 10 I can get a decent stretch of sleep. Now that he's in his own room the cat can come into bed making as much noise as she pleases (which is quite a bit--she needs to announce her presence before she jumps on the bed, and then announce her presence when she''s actually on the bed). On a good day I can get some housework done while the kid plays around on the floor. Life is settling back down into the new normal.

And now the piglet is waking up.