Second-guessing

The thing that I find hardest with dealing with the MSPI issue is the way I automatically start to worry that something is wrong with his tummy the moment E. is out of sorts. Because, let’s face it, there could be a billion things going on to cause E. to be fussy or to not sleep well, etc. But I feel my gut instinct is always to assume that the problem is related to his digestion.

I’m about as confident as I can be that my diet, and therefore E’s diet, is completely clear of anything even remotely connected with dairy or soy. I am as careful as I possibly can be. But I find myself worrying that maybe E. has a sensitivity to something else as well. It is just so frustrating. The kid LOVES his solid food. LOVES sitting in his high chair, with us, feeding himself whatever we’re eating. LOVES new tastes and textures. He’s an adventurous eater, and will try anything you put on his plate. He handles the baby-led weaning so well- he is super careful about how much he puts in his mouth at any one time, and has become an expert at just spitting out whatever he can’t handle. I read the paper while he eats breakfast these days (in between our conversations of “Mamamamamama!” “Yes, E.?” HUGE smile) because I’m just not worried about watching every bite that goes into his mouth.

And yet. Sometimes he is grizzly after a big meal of solids. He farts like nothing on earth, and while I know some more noises are to be expected, I’m always wondering if this is normal. His diapers are plainly showing that he is digesting an awful lot of what he eats, not just passing it through his system (although there is still a fair bit of that too).

And then there is the nap issue. We took E. off of solids for two days to try to help sort out the diaper rash. On those days, his morning nap was an hour and a half one day, and an hour and forty-five minutes the next. Then he had french toast for breakfast with us, and that morning the nap was 40 minutes. So yesterday I experimented and skipped solids at breakfast. A two hour and ten minute nap was the result. This morning he had oatmeal fingers with blueberries, avocado, pear and his mixed puffs (corn, kamut and an ‘o’ cereal that Hei.nz makes that has no hidden dairy). No wheat, no egg, just in case one of those might be an issue (even though there really isn’t anything obvious to suggest that they are). He was up after thirty minutes.

It’s too early to call it a pattern. This morning’s nap was very late, because he slept in after a rough night. He is still teething like mad- ear pulling on both ears this morning. And his afternoon naps were short regardless of what went on that morning and whether or not there were solids at lunch (I think on the long nap days he just figured he’d had enough daytime sleep already, and the short nap days he was overtired given we have to stretch the second nap out since he now refuses to take a third even if he needs it). But it’s worrying, especially since we were just about to start solids around 5 pm in the hope that this might eventually help him drop one of his two night feeds.

I wonder about the night feeds too. Is he really hungry, or is his tummy bothering him to the point that he wants milk to try and settle it? But that huge stretch he did after learning to crawl (which, sadly, has not been repeated) came on a day when he ate pancakes- wheat and eggs and rice milk. So no tummy troubles that day, obviously. I think I would be really panicking except that he has six other baby friends who are all about the same age or a bit younger, and every single one of them is still up multiple times each night. A couple of them sometimes only have one feed, but there isn’t a single one who is sleeping twelve hours straight, and most of them are doing stretches very similar to E. All the babies are breastfed- not one has ever had any formula-, so they are actually a fair comparison. And from that perspective, E. looks normal.

What he isn’t doing is waking up at 4:30 or 5 am, so gassy that he can’t go back down in the crib but has to be held by me. THAT was classic MSPI behaviour, and it simply doesn’t happen anymore. But it’s not outside the realm of possibility that he is sensitive enough to something else that it makes him uncomfortable enough to wake up more than he would really need to. So then I’m left wondering- is this just normal solids growing pains? Should I be cutting back? Going back to offering one type of food at a time and obsessively watching the results? (This is not a good parenting option for me, since I tend to get obsessive anyway.) What I have been doing is I’ve started to track his naps, his bedtimes and wake up times, and the solids that he eats at each meal, just to see if there is any discernible pattern. And we’ll ask his doctor about it when he has his nine-month well baby appointment in a few weeks.

I am tired though. I don’t think I ever thought that I’d be this close to the nine month mark with a baby who is still consistently up to feed at least twice each night. Partly it is my fault- on the nights where he does wake up more often, or wakes up earlier, I tend to just feed him, because it’s quick and I know he will go back down afterwards. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of wakeups where offering the breast failed to get him back to sleep. So at 2 am, even if I know he’s not all that hungry, I tend to take the easier road. Which is something I’m planning to work on. I’ve just had to wrap my head around the fact that if there is any sleep training to be done in this house, it’s going to have to be done by me.

This is my one big gripe with our co-parenting arrangement. Q. is just not cut out to deal with night wakings. If we have a night where E. wakes up at 10, and I send Q. in to try to get him back to sleep until 11: 30 or so, when we give up, and I feed him, the next day, Q. just says over and over again how tired he is, how he feels like a zombie, how he can’t get anything done, how it was a horror night (even if he went to bed at 11:30, slept through the second feed, and then didn’t have to get up with E. at 6 am but slept until 7).

It drives me MENTAL. It’s too the point that I actually suggested the other day that maybe something happens in the mother’s body hormonally to allow her to cope with the broken sleep and the father doesn’t get the same advantages. Because I’m really tired too, but once I get up, and have breakfast and my Earl Grey tea, I’m usually good to go for the day. I’ve never napped. Not once. I am running an insane sleep deficit, but unless E. has a really bad night (i.e. I spend an hour lying on the floor in his room so that every time he pops awake I can settle him immediately), I just don’t feel all that tired. Sometimes I wonder if there is something physiologically wrong with me.

Anyway, Q. took that suggestion and ran with it. What I was actually saying was something along the lines of, “I get that you are tired, but HOLY CRAP you get so much more sleep than I do, and I don’t understand why the world ends the  moment you have to do anything with E. at night.”, but Q. seems to have decided it is a demonstrable fact that mummies handle broken sleep better than daddies. But we have multiple sets of friends who have kids, and with nearly every one else, the father handles much of the night wakings, because he functions better on broken sleep than the mum does. And I guess I had been assuming that this would be the case with Q. I never expected him to get E. out of the crib and bring him to me so I could nurse him when he was a newborn, like some of these dads did, or to do the diaper changes. We agreed it didn’t make sense for both of us to be awake. But I had assumed/expected that when E. hit six months and I restarted work on the dissertation we’d come up with a more even arrangement. And that’s just not going to happen.

To be fair to Q., he would get up with E. if I asked him to- he’s not refusing to take on the duties. I would just rather deal with it myself than have to listen to the complaining the next day, and watch Q. get impatient and short-tempered with E. as a result (interestingly, no matter how impatient/frustrated I am getting with E., the moment I hear in Q’s voice that he’s getting annoyed, I instantly jump to E’s rescue. It has to be hard-wired.). I’m also realizing that if we try to wean from the night feeds, it will have to be me who does this, even though I know it would be easier if the parent who didn’t have a milk bar on offer was the one to go in. But I don’t think any weaning attempts will work if Q. has to do them, because I honestly don’t think he would follow through on whatever we agreed was the right strategy. We’ll see.

What I am going to bring up, if it continues, now that his mum has left and we’re back to splitting E’s care, is what happens if E. wakes up early. If I have E. in the mornings, and he gets up for the day at 6 am, I get him up and dressed and we go downstairs to play and make breakfast, so that Q. has a chance to sleep a bit later. If Q. has E., he brings E. into the bed, ‘just in case he wants to nurse’, even though it has been weeks since E. has wanted to nurse upon first waking up (he’s still full from the 4 am feed). And then Q. lies there in the dark and tries to just relax, while E. babbles and plays with the duvet, and wants to sit up, and I suddenly end up being the parent who is watching to make sure he doesn’t pull the cat’s tail, or leap off the bed, etc. And then Q. does get him up, but I might as well get up too, because I’m certainly not going back to sleep after that performance.

I get that suddenly waking up at 6 am sucks, and it is dark outside and miserable, and it takes a lot of energy to smile at the baby who has decided it is morning. I really do. But we had a rule that E. didn’t come into the bed unless it was a weekend, and that seems to fly out the window any time he wakes up early and Q. is the one who is in charge. And I don’t think it’s fair. So. We’ll see what happens next week.

To put things in perspective, this is one of the very few issues I have with our co-parenting arrangement. Q. is doing an amazing job in so many ways. He supports me and my PhD enough to be willing to co-parent in the first place. He is so good with E. He still cooks dinner every night while I’m putting E. to sleep. He does his half of the chores around the house. He is a whiz at diaper changes. Admittedly I am still boss parent, and probably always will be- I’m the one who remembers when E’s doctor appointments are, who makes suggestions that maybe we should try this, or do that differently. Q. does still spend a lot of time asking me whether I think E. needs a nap, when he next needs to feed, what he should have for lunch, etc. But I don’t have to inspect what E’s wearing before they go out the door. I don’t second guess what he does with E. during the hours when I’m working. I trust him with our baby, implicitly. And I know I have friends who can’t say the same about their babies’ fathers.

I am very very lucky. I get that. I really do. I know Q. is doing about a billion things more than the previous generation would have done (as his mother made sure to tell me while she was here, although I don’t think she meant it as a criticism on me). But right now I think I’m dealing with the fallout of failed expectations, and having the nights put entirely on my shoulders makes me feel like our arrangement isn’t quite as even as we set out for it to be.

Now isn’t that interesting?

I spend a lot of time chanting to myself, “E. is not a textbook baby”, mainly when he is doing the exact opposite of whatever books I’ve read say he ‘should’ be doing, or is likely to be doing. This kid just loves throwing curveballs.

But I’ve had my suspicions that he is absolutely textbook when it comes to “getting close to achieving developmental milestones may result in disrupted sleep” statements. I remember when he first started rolling over, he was suddenly pinwheeling around in his crib at night. And for the last week or so, there have been a few times when I’ve gone in to deal with a waking and I’ve found him on his hands and knees.

See, E. has been THIS close to crawling since Christmas. And since Christmas, his sleep has pretty much sucked. Day sleep went right back to naps of thirty minutes, and since he decided this month to drop the third nap no matter when his first two were, that made for some rough afternoons. Night sleep wasn’t probably all that terrible, but it was bad for him- random popups throughout the early evening, especially within the first hour of going to bed, or around 10 pm; an extra feed on a couple of nights; early morning (pre-6 am) starts, etc. Then we hit the point where I last posted, where when he woke up after 10 but before 11, Q. could no longer settle him.

We solved that issue by going to bed (and reading) by 9 pm, so that we couldn’t possibly wake him up. And we still had a couple of pre-11 wakeups, where I just gave up and fed him. The last of those only resulted in a two-feed night, so that’s ok. But just yesterday I was looking at E. and thinking, “You look WIPED.” Big dark circles. Bags under the eyes.

Yesterday, E. figured out how to crawl. Ironically he did this the day after his Granny had to fly back home (she was probably somewhere over the Pacific when he cracked it, after three weeks of us all saying, “He’s SO close!”). He’s still not super sure of himself, but put a power cable or the cat food in front of him, and bam! He’s off like a rocket.

Last night, E. woke up for about 15 seconds around 9 pm, settled himself immediately, and then slept through until 3.30 am, when he was woken up by Q. going into his room to check on him (because we were both wide awake wondering WTF had happened). STUPID. We are so not doing this again! And he’s now been napping for close to two hours.

I’m not going to assume anything (see, I have learned something over these last eight and a half months!), but I am hopeful that maybe getting the crawling sorted will help settle things down on the sleep front. Until he learns to pull himself up. Or cruise. Or decides to start walking.

—

Poor E. is in ‘sposies at the moment so I can use a heavy barrier cream to try and sort out his red little tushie. We had a bit of a feast or famine issue with dirty diapers, and I think all the action just irritated his skin to the point that it couldn’t settle down easily. He is just loving his solid food. He eats the most at breakfast (which is the exact opposite of what the books will tell you most babies will do)- he’s been known to put away an entire piece of toast with hummus, plus an entire poached pear. Or eat half of one of my pancakes and two-thirds of a banana. Or three or four oatmeal fingers plus most of an avocado. The kid is a machine. And we can’t eat a snack around him, as he’ll just sit there staring at us and looking insulted that he’s not being included.

It’s made sorting out a routine a bit complicated, as when his second feed is around 4 or 5 am, he then doesn’t want to nurse when he wakes up. Then he has his huge breakfast, so he doesn’t want to nurse before his nap. Or after his nap, often, as he is still full. Some mornings it’s been 11 or 11:30 before I finally get a decent milk feed into him. I know it is natural to drop feeds when solid intake increases, but I also know that breast milk is still more important from a nutrition and calorie perspective for him. What I would like to do is get him to drop that second feed at night, so that he is hungry by 6:30 or 7 and willing to nurse before having a solid breakfast around 8. As an added bonus we’d all get more sleep. It makes perfect sense to me, but somehow I don’t think E. is going to view it that way.

The last few days he’s started up chomping on the breast if he’s not absolutely starving when he’s offered it, which makes life no fun at all for me, or for him, as I’m pretty stern with him every time he does it. When he knows I’m cross, he’ll smile and try to get me to smile back, and if I stay stern looking, he then bursts into tears, so of course I can’t stay stern. Ah well. We’ll figure it out. If he is really hungry, there is no problem- he just latches and gets down to business. But it is really hard to stay relaxed to encourage a good let-down if you are expecting at any moment those sharp little teeth to have an experimental chew…

—

E. is chatting up a storm these days, and I am starting to think that he is actually using ‘mama’ to refer to me, rather than just using it indiscriminately. The jury is still out on this one. Gosh it is cute, though.

He had a great visit with his Granny. This was a full month where he had an adoring public, between our travels over Christmas and her visit. I think he’s going to find this week a bit boring and quiet with just Mummy and Daddy around.

Before E. figured out crawling he spent days and days either scooching around backwards or doing yoga poses- he has a great downward dog. It was so funny to watch. He got really frustrated at the end, but luckily he then figured out how to move forward a day or so later.

E. looks like a little boy now. You can see that he is much closer to toddler than baby now. It tugs at my heart to see him getting so grown up, but at the same time, he’s so much happier now that he can do things and participate.

The changeling child

Q. and I are in sleep hell at the moment.

For the last month or so (seems like forever) we’ve had a problem with E. waking up pre-11 (which is the earliest I will feed him). The problem is made worse by us waking him up when we go to bed because our floorboards are so loud, so every footstep can be heard in his room, even with the white noise machine. Before the last couple of nights, this wasn’t a huge issue, as Q. would just go in and settle him. Sometimes he had to go in twice, but he could always get him back down, and then he’d sleep either just for a little while to 11, or for another couple of hours. We’ve also started going to bed well before the pop ups normally start and just reading in there, but he’s waking up regardless (at least we know that these wakeups are not caused by us).

BUT, the last two nights, E. has just NOT gone back down. We are talking completely hysterical screaming, even while being held and comforted. Last night I took over, and I could get him to calm down and fall asleep on me in the rocking chair, but any time I tried to put him in the crib, either awake or asleep, he would start screaming again. Both nights, at around 11:30 I fed him and he then went down successfully and slept the rest of the night, popping up only once more for his usual later feed, and then going down after that with no trouble.

He is pulling at his ears and clawing at his cheeks when he does this, so we suspected teeth (he has at least three on the way from what we can see). Last night we gave him infants’ tylenol, and then he was doing the ‘arched back, hands in fists’ scream that often means his tummy hurts, so I thought that maybe the tylenol did have something in it, even though I rang the company yesterday to make sure that ‘flavour’ didn’t mean ‘surprise- there’s soy in this’. But what I don’t understand is if it is teeth or tummy, how it can cause hysterical screaming from 10 pm until 11:30, and then not bother him at all for the rest of the night.

We definitely have some separation anxiety happening in the day at the moment, so maybe that is part of it too? He is also still THIS close to crawling- spending a lot of time doing yoga poses (hands and feet and head on carpet), and I have caught him a couple of times on his hands and knees in the crib, although not the last two nights.

I don’t want to feed him any earlier than 11, because that then pushes the next feed earlier and we end up with a three feed night, which I know he simply does not need. And he’s not hungry when he first pops up at 10- just utterly inconsolable. The one thing we’ve always said about E. is he goes right back down again at night, whether we feed him or not, so this has just come out of nowhere, and I’m not sure what to do. It is a truly awful sound- he just sounds so desperate when he cries- it’s not at all like he normally sounds when he wakes up hungry.

Any and all assvice appreciated. I honestly feel like we have a changeling- the baby we’re dealing with from 10 pm until 11:30 bears absolutely ZERO resemblance to the baby we have at all other points in the day. He’s happy when he wakes up, cheerful throughout the day (if biting us frequently because his gums are bugging him), spending lots of time wriggling around trying to crawl, eating like a champ (he had risotto cakes for lunch yesterday and loved the field mushrooms, chicken and vegetable tagine for lunch today, and he ate an entire slice of toast with hummus and an entire poached pear for breakfast), taking ok naps generally, going down easily at bedtime, and behaving as he normally does during the night, except for this one point.

I was literally next week going to start some form of sleep training to try to end these random pop ups (was going to shift to just comforting in the crib without picking up), but now I don’t know if I can face it. He just sounds so sad.

Protected: E. at eight months!

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The eighth month

Dear E.,

This month has been full of adventures! You are two-thirds of the way through your first year, and even though I don’t think you look all that different from your photos of a few months ago (you’ve always had a very expressive face, and a particular look that is your very own), the way you interact with us and the world around you has changed dramatically. I find myself writing notes in your  journal nearly every day now, as it seems each morning brings with it something else that you’ve learned to do.

Last month you were so pleased to be able to sit up and play with your toys on the carpet in the living room or on the mat in the kitchen. Your Daddy and I really noticed (and appreciated!) the increase in your independence. This month you decided that sitting upright was boring. You, my son, are ready to move! You still aren’t quite crawling, but you are very very close- so close, in fact, that your Daddy and I will be baby-proofing the house in the next day or so. I think you’re going to skip any army crawling or creeping and go straight to hands and knees. It all started about the middle of the month, when we discovered that if you were on your tummy on the hardwood floor in the kitchen you could push yourself around, which made you very excited. The only problem was you always went backwards! Soon you were trying to get onto your hands and knees, and when sitting you started wriggling around, trying to get into the right position. Right now you can push yourself up to sitting from your tummy, get onto your hands and knees from sitting (where you either get your left leg stuck behind your right knee, or you end up rocking back and forth on your hands and knees) or from your tummy, and even get onto your hands and feet, with your legs straight, like a monkey. Now I can’t expect you to be in the same place as where I left you, as you will wriggle around on your bottom, or drop onto your tummy and then either roll or push backwards to where you want to be. We’ve spent a lot of time over the last week or so moving you away from the cat bowls, the water dish, the houseplants, the magazines on the bookshelf, etc. Your Daddy and I regularly look at you, trying so hard to get moving, and say to each other that life as we know it is about to end!

This was the month that solid food finally became fun rather than a source of stress. Your tummy is much better, thanks to our obsessive label reading, and so we’ve been able to explore all sorts of tasty things. We’ve stopped waiting three days before introducing any new food, as you’ve coped so well with everything and haven’t shown any signs of allergies or tummy upsets. Thus far you’ve tried avocado, carrot, eggplant, apple, pear, chicken, turkey, red pepper, salmon, tuna, egg, pasta, green beans, broccoli, banana, oatmeal, sweet potato, potato, butternut squash, orange, cantaloupe, cucumber, strawberries, and blueberries. You absolutely love cucumber and eggplant, and you make a beeline for anything orange on your tray. This always makes me laugh, as apparently when I was little I went through a phase of only eating orange foods- so much so that the tip of my nose took on an orange hue! So I guess it’s not surprising you can’t get enough of sweet potato, butternut squash, carrots, and orange slices. We’ve continued to take a baby-led weaning approach, so everything is put on your tray as a finger food, and it’s up to you how much you eat and what you choose. You get offered food at breakfast and lunch now, and we’re really impressed with how dextrous you are, and how quickly you’ve learned to pick things up (even slippery foods) and get them in your mouth. You can adjust your grip according to the texture and softness of a particular food, and you often use your second hand to help guide the food to your mouth. You have really mastered the art of chewing this month, even though you only have your four front teeth, and you almost never gag. It’s not an exaggeration to say that you love your food- you start reaching for whatever we’ve put together even before it’s on your tray, and you will often show your Daddy and I what you’re eating and chat about it in between bites. The appreciative noises you make when it’s something particularly tasty (like pear) always make us laugh. It’s easy to tell, too, when you’re done with eating- you start mashing the food on your tray rather than trying to put it in your mouth, or you’ll drop it over the side (which you almost never do when you’re actually interested- you are such a careful eater and astonishingly tidy) or you’ll try to pull your bib over your head.

I think my fondest memory of this month is of the three of us sitting together for our first Christmas lunch- just our little family- and watching you demolish the roasted carrots, sweet potato and butternut squash, and the baked salmon that we put on your tray. You had the same meal that we did, and it was exactly what I had hoped for when we took the baby-led weaning approach, and when I imagined our first Christmas together.

Physically you look quite different this month. You didn’t have a doctor’s appointment, so we’re not sure what you weigh, but you definitely look like you’ve chunked back out when we look at your wrists and your thighs and your cute little buddha belly. It could just be you’re about to have another growth spurt, but I also wonder if finally getting the MSPI issue under control has helped your weight gain. You’re certainly taking in a lot of breastmilk- I’m still eating as much as your Daddy at meals, along with frequent snacks, and yet I can’t keep the weight on (the only exception to this was over Christmas when I worked very hard to eat all the MSPI-friendly cookies your Grannie baked). Your relatives bought you quite a few 12-month onesies for Christmas, all of which fit you already, and the 12-month pants are only just slightly too long. Your hair continues to stick straight up at the back, and we love the gap between your two top front teeth (although we’re less enamored of your new habit of grinding your four teeth together- it makes a horrid noise and we very much hope this will be a short phase).

You figured out how to do so many things this month. At the start of the month you began reaching into your shape sorter (still your favourite toy) and pulling out individual pieces, rather than just tipping it upside down to get them all out like you normally did. My friend Michelle brought you a great toy (which your Daddy has christened the ‘brainless elephant’) and it only took you a couple of sessions of watching us drop in the balls before you could do it. At your Grannie’s over Christmas you mastered in one morning pulling a string hand-over-hand to bring a toy close enough to grab. You have perfected a fake cough, and you’re starting to wave ‘bye-bye’ when prompted, although you’re still a bit unsure about this. When people come in the front door and say hello, and then pop back behind the wall to take off their shoes, you will twist your body and crane your head to see where they’ve gone. Your pincer grip allows you to pick up puffed millet pieces from your highchair tray, and to poke at various bits of my anatomy, although thankfully you’re not yet interested in the fluff on the carpet.

Best of all, on the very first day of the new year, you started babbling. For a couple of days previously you were beginning to babble when you were sucking on your fingers while settling for a nap, but on the first of January, it was a mini language explosion. You’ve definitely got ‘ba’, ‘ga’, ‘da’ and ‘ma’, although you are still very fond of the occasionally R2D2 impression or the shrieking that reminds me of the velociraptors from Jurassic Park.

One of the big events of this month was your first Christmas. To say that I was excited would be quite the understatement! You didn’t really have much sense of what it all meant, but you enjoyed trying to open your presents (managing on two occasions to eat quite a lot of wrapping paper without us noticing), and, as I’ve already mentioned, Christmas lunch was a big hit. On Christmas Eve we went to a family mass, and although you were very overtired (having refused to nap that afternoon), you were your usual cheerful self once we left the house, and you spent most of the service smiling at anyone who made eye contact. You absolutely loved the week after Christmas when we visited your grandparents and aunts- you’re still not a great traveller in the car, but that was the only negative part of the trip (that, and the one horrible night when it became clear that I’d eaten something that wasn’t MSPI safe and you were in pain). You were spoiled, but not too much, and you managed to keep to your usual nighttime and nap routines even with the hustle and bustle and changing of households. There’s still not much sign of stranger anxiety, although you always look around for your Daddy or I when playing, and you will grizzle and fuss if both of us leave the room. You also tend to start to cry and fuss the moment I walk into a room, even when you’ve been happily playing with your Daddy and your Grandpa for an hour beforehand, and only a cuddle with Mummy will bring out the smiles again (secretly your Mummy loves that she gets this reaction). You currently have your paternal Granny visiting, who is just as besotted with you as your Canadian relatives, and we’re very aware that you’re going to be most unimpressed when she leaves later this month, and you realize that it’s just boring old Mummy and Daddy again after a solid month of endless friends and relatives wanting to play with and entertain you.

There haven’t been many changes in your daily routine. You still take either two or three naps, depending on how long the first two are, and it’s anyone’s guess whether you’re going to sleep for thirty minutes or two hours (most naps are either forty-five minutes or a bit over an hour). You still wake up consistently twice a night to feed, usually around 11 or midnight and then again somewhere between 4 and 5, but lately you’ve added all sorts of random pop-ups early in the evening, sometimes even within the first hour after you’ve gone down, and often your Daddy has to settle you a couple of times right after we go to bed. I certainly wouldn’t say that there’s been any improvements in your nighttime sleep this month, and the haze of sleep deprivation continues to hang over your Daddy and I, although you always seem to be bright-eyed and ready to go in the morning, even after your worst nights. What I do find completely adorable is that you’ve developed a habit of holding on to my forearm with your left hand (you usually have your right thumb in your mouth) as you fall asleep. I’m not sure if you like the feel of my skin, or if you’re just looking for a bit more reassurance as you drift off, but it melts my heart every time you reach out for me.

Your Daddy and I continue to marvel at the little person that you’re becoming. You are so happy, so engaged with the world, such a ham- you revel being the centre of attention. You are so precise in the way you use your hands to eat, or to play with toys, or just in the way you study your fingers. When we see you sitting by yourself in the tub, or standing alone holding on to the couch, it seems like years ago you were our tiny newborn. We regularly find ourselves saying things like, “Do you remember when during baby naked time all he could do was lie on his back and flail and it was a big deal when he found his toes?” while watching you flip and twist and wriggle. We love watching you make sense of your world. You are rapidly moving away from babyhood towards the toddler years and beyond, and so I find myself in the wee hours of the night treasuring the quiet moments where it is just the two of us in the rocking chair, and you curl your body up against my chest, and tuck your head under my chin, and I can nuzzle your hair and kiss your head and breathe in your gorgeous baby smell and listen to the rhythm of your breathing and feel the quiet rise and fall of your chest as you sleep, safe and secure. You are loved, my son, so very very much.

Love always,
Mummy

Tidings of comfort and joy

Christmas and I have a complicated relationship.

When you have divorced parents, who have both remarried, who live an hour’s drive apart, and one parent’s birthday is Christmas Eve and one step-parent’s birthday is New Year’s Eve, the holiday season usually resembles the “if this is Tuesday, it must be Spain” bus tours of Europe beloved by those in their early twenties. I could drive the highway between my parents’ houses blindfolded. I have driven it basically blind, because even though everyone always says the driving is weather-dependent, I cannot think of a single year where we didn’t make the transfer from one house to the other at the appointed time. And we did end up in the ditch one year as a result (my step-mother was never allowed to come and get us again).

There are a lot of family politics that revolve around Christmas, as one might expect with divorced parents. One step-parent (the spouse of the non-custodial parent) liked to keep track of how many nights my sisters and I spend at each house, even though at one house we could get out to see our friends from high school, and at the other house it was basically quality visiting time 24/7. My sisters and I STILL keep track of whose house we are ‘supposed’ to be at for Christmas Day. The first year Q. came for Christmas he met basically my entire extended family and was also subjected to a road trip post-Christmas through southern Ontario to see more of the clan.

I went through a phase in high school and university where I didn’t like Christmas. I disliked the crass commercialism and the ‘buy buy buy’ message blaring from every television. I hated trying to carve up my free time away from my studies into roughly equal portions of parental visits. It too often ended up stressful rather than relaxing.

That said, I have some wonderful memories of Christmases past. Making the annual batch of sugar cookies with my sisters and carefully decorating each one with coloured icing and sprinkles. Going to the carol service at my grandparents’ church on Christmas Eve and leaving to find that the snow had finally arrived. Walking the neighbourhood near my father’s house each year to see the outrageous light displays. Building a snowman the moment that perfect sticky snow fell. Cross-country skiing and skating and sliding. So much laughter with my mum’s family that your sides would ache even before you started eating. Waking up on Christmas morning and feeling that lumpy weight at the end of the bed which meant that Santa had come in the night. Coming home as adults, and racing my sisters to be the first one to try on our new Christmas Eve pyjamas over our clothes the moment we got in the door (my poor mother tried to suggest at one point when I was well into my twenties and all three of us were launched that perhaps we no longer needed the annual tradition of new pyjamas. The motion was scoffed at.). Endless rounds of Yahtzee. Decorating the tree to the sound of Boney M.

Even though the family politics of Christmas drive me crazy, the memories that matter to me from the holiday season always involve my family. Christmas, for us, is about family and food, love and laughter, singing and snowballs. Before my parents split up, and during the years when my parents lived too far apart for us to transition from one house to the other, Christmas never felt hectic or rushed.

And so, when last Christmas came around, and I was halfway through the pregnancy with E., Q. and I made an agreement. No more would we travel to see my family in the days leading up to Christmas. We were done with the manic holiday shuffle and the continuing drama of whose ’turn’ it was to have the girls home for the big day. We were staying home and starting new traditions with our new little family. (Since Q’s family lives overseas, the new rules don’t apply to them.) We’re still travelling to see my family, obviously, but now we plan to leave on Boxing Day and make a more leisurely tour of the two households and the various other aunts and uncles and grandparents who will be in town. Christmas Eve and Christmas Day are ours. The only downside to this is it’s made life for my sisters much more complicated as they not only have to navigate the usual holiday divisions but they also want to see us (especially E.), so they’re doing even more traipsing about. I feel guilty about this, but ultimately they will have their own families too, and someone, somewhere, had to break with what we’ve always done. And yes, this does mean that Christmas for us will stretch over the entire week and there will be presents to unwrap and turkey to eat multiple times in multiple houses, but that now feels so familiar to me that adding one more round of celebrating doesn’t seem remotely unusual. I can’t think of the last time I only opened presents on Christmas Day. Certainly I would have been younger than ten.

Q. and I have talked a lot about the type of Christmas we want for E. Our little tree is up, and all my ornaments from my childhood (most made by my grandmother) are hanging from it. Q. has found a carol service and a family mass for Christmas Eve- it’s important to him, and I’m willing to take my secular self into a church for that one night. We think in future years, once the dairy restrictions are lifted we might start a tradition of home-made pizza on Christmas Eve. E. has new pjs to wear tomorrow night (and Q. and I have bought them for each other as well). Our stockings are hanging with care (admittedly from our curtain rod). Q. is beside himself with excitement at the thought of creating a Christmas lunch that has food that actually coordinates (secretly I’m hoping there will still be leftovers when we hit my father’s house on Boxing Day, as I don’t think I could handle the holidays without any turkey or mashed potato). When E. is older we hope to go skating or sliding after Christmas lunch, and then walk the neighbourhood to see the lights once the dark sets in.

But most of all, I want E’s Christmases to be filled with love and laughter and joy and excitement. This year we’ll make a start at building the memories that I hope he will cherish for the rest of his life.

Christmas 2009 was the worst one of my life. I have never felt so sad, so angry, so bereft, so utterly without direction. I was manic from the medications required for the failed FET. Now, finally, we have our E., and he has healed my heart.

I feel like Christmas is awash with possibilities again, that I get the chance to start over and embrace the holiday without cynicism.

To all my blog readers, I wish you and yours a very Happy Christmas with just the right amount of snow. May your days be filled with love, and your heart filled with family.

Protected: 17 December

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Seven and a half months and all’s well

Things are well here chez Turia. E. is still up twice a night and seems to be trying to move the first feed earlier and earlier- it now seems to be between 11 and 12, and then I see him again somewhere between 4 and 5:30. Am wondering if this means eventually he will push the second feed later, and then drop it, and then move the first feed earlier and then drop it as well, rather than just moving to one feed around 3 and then eventually dropping it. Such are the things I muse on, when I’m not thinking that this child will NEVER sleep through the night.

Our decision not to introduce a bottle made a whole lot of sense back when I thought I’d surely have a baby who was sleeping through the night (or at most up once) by six months. HA!

At least all of his baby friends are up twice as well, so I’m in good (if sleep-deprived) company.

He’s also started waking once or twice early in the evening as well. Sometimes it is the dreaded 45 minutes after he first went to sleep, but often it seems to be at very random times. The second waking is usually our fault- he wakes up if we trundle up to bed at the wrong point in his sleep cycle as the floorboards are insanely loud, and even with the white noise machine that is a lot of sudden noise to try to ignore. He settles very quickly- just needs a pat on the back or one round of pick up/ put down- but hopefully it’s just a passing phase.

I’ve decided that teething results in 30-35 minute naps. We had a week of these- in the middle of the week the fourth tooth appeared, and then yesterday he just went right back to taking hour-plus naps. It is so much easier to cope with weird baby things when you suspect you understand what is causing them.

We are now past the magic four week mark since we started our campaign of label reading, and E. is doing so well. It’s meant that we can have a lot of fun with food. We’ve just now relaxed the whole ‘wait three days between introducing new foods’ because he’s shown no signs of having any problems, and he’s clearly very excited about the concept. Avocado, carrot, sweet potato, broccoli, chicken, pear, eggplant and applesauce have all been tasted and tried, with pear and eggplant coming out as clear favourites from the first bite. We’re doing all finger foods (except for the applesauce, obviously, but with that I hand him a pre-loaded spoon and he’s managing really well). He is very dextrous and careful with his food- he needed a bit of skin left on the pear slices for gripping, but otherwise he’s had no troubles, and is getting the hang of putting a smaller piece back down on his tray and adjusting his grip so he can keep eating it. He’s very close to developing the pincer grasp.

Yesterday morning he was eating pear slices (devouring pear slices is more accurate) and he kept pausing and looking at Q. and I and showing us the pear in his hand and then chatting at us and smiling. He obviously thought it was so tasty, and it was really neat to see him so engaged and happy, even as my heart cracked a little bit at how grown-up he looked.

His tummy has been fine, even with all the new tastes and textures, and it’s obvious from his diapers that he’s starting to actually digest what he’s consuming. All I’m going to say about that is thank goodness we bought a diaper sprayer. And that I miss his pure, breast-fed baby smell already.

But then we get the joy of watching him chomp down on eggplant while making appreciative noises. Parenting is always going to be like this, isn’t it? Excitement and pride at seeing what’s coming, combined with a wistful longing for what you leave behind (except maybe the teenage years…).

I am hoping he is going to refrain from learning to crawl until after the holidays. Trying to baby-proof two sets of grandparents’ houses on the fly will not be fun. Thus far he is being very obliging, but I think he is awfully close.

On Saturday we had some great afternoon light in our bedroom, and I took advantage of it. Pics to follow!

Protected: E. at seven months!

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My heart is full

This afternoon I was sitting in our living room with our tree and our lights, listening to Boney M’s Christmas carols (a tradition in my family), and stacking things up for E. to knock over, and it just hit me.

Could there be a better Christmas present?

We went through hell and back to get him.

He is worth every moment of those horrible three years.

I love him so much.