One Perfect Mess

Archive for March, 2010

Ah, the question parents start hearing about the time their babies are two weeks old. People are idiots. Even people who have children ask this godforsaken question even though they know better. It is like saying “How are you?” It is just automatic. For those uninitiated (read: those who still have some control over their own lives, AKA those without children) let me go ahead and answer this question for every parent of children under five.

Absolutely! My baby has been sleeping through the night since he/she was born.

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Well, of course, except for when he/she is teething. Which is of course about half the time during the first two years of life.

Oh, or unless he/she is in the middle of a growth spurt and has to nurse more frequently.

Orrr, unless he/she is sick. Then, understandably,  nobody gets any sleep.

Oh and then there are developmental milestones that cause sleep regressions, ha ha ha, hee ho, you know how that goes.

And of course there are the phases where they suffer separation anxiety. Periods of time when they transition from two naps to one and sleep gets all manner of fucked up. Oh and lest we forget Daylight Savings Time. That is always a fun little transition. Then there is the appearance of nightmares, midnight trips to the potty for the newly trained and new babies waking their older sibs up. Don’t even THINK about letting the precision of a well timed bedtime routine get out of sync by letting the kids stay up late or by going on vacation. That will guarantee you at least of a week of things being out of whack.

Oh and by the way: the actual definition of sleeping through the night? Five hours of sleep in a row. You can bet the farm that a new parent came up with that little gem of reality for you. Five hours in a row? I could rule the world on five hours of sleep in a row. Sleep porn. That is what that is.

So yep, my babies have always slept through the night. Except, you know, when they haven’t.

We DVR The Office. It is the only show we ever watch except occasionally CNN or a sporting event. We just got around to watching the episode where Jim and Pam have their baby and I was really struck by how well Jenna Fischer nailed the performance of a new mom learning to breastfeed. From what I found online it doesn’t appear that she is a mother yet so that makes it all the more impressive to me. Her facial expressions and body posture were spot on. I know that feeling of panic, frustration, and sheer adrenaline that is going down when you have a newborn crying furiously that you can’t get to latch on and when I watched Pam’s character I totally related. I found myself wanting to yell to them to get the LC in there and to keep trying over and over and over.

My firstborn would. not. latch. I tried everything. All kinds of squishing and re-aligning. All manner of begging, pleading and bribing. My baby lost weight. Enough weight that the doctors got worried. We had to go in for weight checks every day for a week. It was a nightmare. Finally I gave in and gave her a bottle because she was starving. And I pumped. And pumped. And mother effing pumped. So she had my milk, just out of a bottle and it took her forever and a week to drink one. So I’d pump for half hour out of every three hours around the clock. My husband would feed her while I pumped when he was home. But when he was at work I got to spend half hour pumping, then half hour feeding the Weebles the dern bottle which she didn’t want to take. Then I would collapse in a puddle of tears for two hours and repeat. This went on for SIX WEEKS. I saw the LC before we left the hospital at least twice. Then I went BACK to the hospital three other times to meet with them. The final time I made the appointment the lady said “your baby is HOW old? well you can come in but at this point I doubt they can help you.” I tried boppies, my breast friend pillows, lying down, football holds, strangle holds, upside down  hell every position you can imagine. She’d latch every so often, then immediately fall off. It was the hardest, most frustrating thing I have ever done. Making it even more frustrating was the fact the LC could get a latch right away. BUT that involved at least four hands and believe it or not, I only have the two so I never could replicate all the different things they told me to do at once.

Every feeding I would sit down and try to nurse my daughter. Then, when she and I were both past the point of frustration I would beg to Andrew to take her and give her a bottle while I drug my sobbing pathetic self into my walk in closet to pump and play solitaire. One day she latched for a couple of minutes and nursed. Cool, I thought. We’ll still give her a bottle, but at least she got SOME directly from me. This progressed over the span of two or three days until one morning she latched and nursed and nursed… and nursed until she passed right out. And she never looked back. She was having nothing to do with bottles after that, noooo thank you. She is 2 1/2 and I am proud of the fact that she is still a champ at nursing. We practice child led weaning not only because I know it is the right thing for our family but because we fought long and hard for this opportunity and I damn well don’t intend to dismiss it offhand. I wish all new moms would have available and take advantage of the great support I had. Your baby is worth it. The biggest misconception I had about nursing before I became a mom was that it would be easy and it was anything but. I think educating moms that things might be bumpy, and it might get really stressful but to stick it out. After all “This too shall pass” is Parenting 101.

I′ve really gotten to be a big fan of Jillian′s circuit training method so I have decided to put it to use around the clock. For example, I have turned my evenings into one extended circuit training session. It goes something like this:

Set 1 : Lie down in bed and close my eyes
Set 2 : Toddler wakes up wailing, run up the stairs to her room to calm her down
Set 3 : Lie down with her and close my eyes
Set 4 : Husband comes in to find me because baby is up and wants to nurse
Set 5 : Run downstairs to nurse baby

Repeat until 7 AM. This exercise is no joke, Jillian would be proud.

Welcome to the new home of my blog. I have been planning on moving for quite awhile but hadn’t found the motivation to actually get it done until I realized my one year blogging anniversary was right around the corner. Then, of course, it was a frantic race to get everything set up. We aren’t totally done yet so you’ll have to pardon our chaos for a bit. You’ll notice things shift around from time to time as we get things how we want them. Both Andrew and I are new to WordPress but we are picking it up fairly quickly. Seasoned pros feel free to let us know how badly we’re doing! Now that I have this out of the way I should probably go find my kids… I haven’t seen them in a few days.