little feet, big sky

Ugh. I don’t know where I went wrong.

I’ve been blogging for years and I’ve never stooped so low. I’ve been looking back on past entries and am sickened. I used to write from the heart, write what I really thought and felt and screw all that didn’t like what I had to say. What is this drivel? I’ve been wasting my time (and yours) with this trash – these useless bits of words. *sigh* This isn’t real writing. This is crap.

I’m tired. Emotionally, I’m tired. Physically, I wonder how it’s possible to be tired and wired at the same time. Which means this is perfect time for quality writing. And more devil-may-care.

If my laptop doesn’t die.. *stealing power cord from spouse’s open laptop*

First, let me debunk some of the crap I’ve been writing. Then I’ll get on to where I am now.

Cloth diapering: Still the easiest part of babyhood. The downside is that it’s hard to get her to sleep long in cloth diapers. I’ve tried pocket diapers, all-in-ones (AIO) and suedecloth “socks” to all help “wick moisture away from the skin”, which it does, but just not in the creepy, chemically efficient way a disposable would. So I’ve started using ’sposies at night. And I’ve packed the mini diaper bag with them. I sill feel a little residual guilt over it, but oh, well. I have a much better relationship with Spice when she sleeps 8 hours through and I’m well-rested the next morning, rather than ready to throw her out the window.

Breastfeeding: The second easiest part. But that’s because I’m one of the lucky few that has had zero problems with sore nipples or low supply. Pure blind luck, maybe helped along by the good birth experience bit. If I’d had problems, I’d be running for the formula as fast as the next mom. Well, almost as fast.

PPD: I’ve never felt crazier in my life. Seriously. I wanted to get myself committed about three weeks in, but I didn’t know how to go about it. Do you need to commit some crazy act for them to lock you up, or can you just walk in and say, “Hey, got a room?” Does the act need to be harmful in some way, or would they accept me lying on the bedroom floor for a week as having lost marbles? The herbs I’ve been on have helped tremendously and time.. time has helped, too. Still, I feel a little unstable, like all it takes is some bad news to plunge me back down a bit.

Sex: The spouse and I stupidly tried a month ago. It hurt like bejeezus. Now, we seem to be having trouble finding the time.

10 a.m.
Me: Wanna have sex tonight?
Him: *grinning* No one would argue with that.

10 p.m.
Me: I’m going to bed.
Him: *fallen asleep on the couch*

Everything else: Having a baby isn’t easy. No shocking revelations here. You just have to bear it as much as possible and take solace in the Grand Lie: it gets easier. See, this needs to be rephrased to be accurate: it gets easier… and it gets harder, too. All the stuff that was hard before, figuring out to to bathe them, create a non-leaky diaper, feed them, get them to sleep – all that gets easier. But then more challenges crop up just as you’re getting into the swing of things, like figuring out to entertain them because they now spend more time awake where they’re not hungry/tired/wet. Oh, well. Babies grow.

The big thing now is that I’m lonely. While we know friends with kids, I don’t know anyone with babies. And even our friends are more the “Hey, wanna come over and grill” type rather than the “Oh, god, I really need to vent right now” kind. *sigh* And I desperately want one of the latter, preferably with a 2-month-old. I’ve joined a couple of meetup.com groups, but part of me is too tired/scared to go out. The last time I went out with Spice was two weeks ago and if she got cranky/fussy while we were out, I started to go bats. The past week, we’ve stayed home and I feel more stable, so I’m reluctant to start going out with her again. I know it’s just like getting back up on the bike after you’ve fallen, but… bleah.

Now that we’re caught up, bullshit-free, let’s move on to what’s up now.

I hate family. I’m on the fence about never talking to family again. I made the stupid mistake of mixing family with money again and wholeheartedly encouraged the spouse that we should lend my sister several thousand smackaroos, as she and her spouse are going through a financial crisis and were possibly going to lose their house. Stupid, stupid me. I should really have done my homework, as usual, because it turns out that they’re more in the hole than I thought. As in, owning the babysitter a couple of thousand(!) and having borrowed from other family members, too. This is the kind of hole where you have to let them hit the bottom and help them back up when they bounce. *sigh* I’m more upset at the principle, since we’re doing okay right now. She had promised to make regular payments on it, even a few hundred a month, and her recent email reply was about how they hadn’t paid anything yet, and “please don’t send monthly statements as that will stress me out”. WTF. The spouse is taking it well, which leaves me even more shamed and horrified.

In the middle of all this, my mother has her own problems and with her health rapidly failing her, it’s suddenly looking like not such a bad option for her to take a few months off on disability and get her health back up. She needs to keep working a few more years to retire, but maybe a three-month break now would help her physically recover from all the stress she’s dealing with from work. I talked to the spouse and we agreed that, if she did, it would be ok/good for her to stay here for a couple of months with us. She could take time off, spend time with Spice, drive over to see my sister, etc. When she’s ready to work again, she could job-hunt from here, close to the city or the valley. She had previously commented that my sister’s place was a bit chaotic, with all their pets. Yesterday morning, I offer this to her. She says she’ll think about it.

Imagine my shock, and outrage, when I talk to her in the afternoon and she tells me that she’s talked to my sister and she’s thinking she’s going to rent a room from them and stay there. Again, let me restate: WTF. She says the money will help them (we were offering free room & board, in case that wasn’t obvious) and I can’t help but point out that it would be pouring more money down the drain, in their current state. She says she knows, but that she needs to try and help them. I was upset/angry enough to just get off the phone at that point, but later, when the spouse was on the phone with her, he mentioned yet again what was obvious to us: with her $80K+ salary, she could help them more by staying (with us) rent-free for a while, and using what she’d be paying them in rent to pay off her last remaining debts. Then she’d have thousands to throw at them. Ugh. And yes, part of me is just upset that she would rather live with my nutty sister than me. I swear, it’s like I’m a green space monster to her.

Of course, there’s more back-story, but this is the abridged version. Add into it juicy extras, like how how my sister thinks her hitting/kicking three-year-old is autistic and somehow thought getting a new dog would help and you have a full-blown soap opera. I’m sure we’ll get into it later. In the meantime, I’m trying to figure out how to turn off the phone in iPhone, and wondering how long I can ignore their calls before I have to talk to them and explain how fucking crazy I think we all are. Maybe we could get a family discount at the looney bin.

My wonderful spouse helped out the other morning by having breakfast ready and waiting for me in the kitchen. There were Post-Its leading from the bedroom door downstairs, and a note on the stovetop explaining where everything was. He had thoughtfully set up a plate in the fridge, complete with sauteed mushrooms (my favorite), strawberries, slices of brie, a small chunk of butter, sliced tomatoes, a spoonful of cinnamon-currant peanut butter and two soft-boiled eggs. “Just add toasted bread”, the note declared. There was also a pre-poured cup of orange juice in the fridge, and a whole watermelon chopped up and in lunch-sized plastic containers. The microwave was preset for 40 seconds to reheat the mushrooms.

Needless to say, wow.

The days just seem to float together lately. It’s almost noon, and I barely remember the morning.

Spice and I have gotten into a bit of schedule now. We wake at 6am-ish, feed, change the diaper and go downstairs to sleep in a bit more in the womb room, her in her swing and me on the futon. Wake up again around 8, feed and change, spot-clean with water & cloth wipes and dressed for the day (or at least until the next spit-up explosion, usually not until the afternoon). Wander around the house trying to see what can be done one-handed: move laundry from washer to dryer, get water to drink.. umm, that’s about it so far. More burping, then loose-swaddle and down to sleep again. I can usually squeeze in a shower during this nap; if I’m really fast on the shower, I can also get breakfast, but often a long shower is more of a priority for me, mentally.

Wake, change, feed.. wake, change feed. Spice seems to barely sleep for an hour at a time in the afternoons, though swaddling and the swing can stretch it out longer sometimes. I use her sleep times to wash diapers, get something to eat, check mail. Yesterday, I managed to get basil from the garden, wash it, and toast some pinenuts, almost making pesto entirely.

Around 6 or 7, depending on how rough the afternoon has been, I feed her on one side, burp, feed on the other side, burp, and start running a bath. Spice loves the water and so it’s a good way to transition from screaming bloody murder to peaceful sleep. I bundle her up in a sleeper, swaddle her and feed her down to sleep. Because I’ve already fed her so much, she really just nibbles as she dozes; the spouse can sleep her down with rocking and singing, with or without a pacifier.

Lately, we’ve been lucky – she sleeps somewhere between 7 – 9 hours straight. Sometimes, we do a change & feed at 3/4/5am, but I can often get a few more hours of sleep out of her. I figure she sleeps more through the night to make up for the awake afternoons.

Right now, she’s playing under her activity gym. Very cute. The spouse has graciously given me permission to “have the afternoon off” while he takes care of the baby. Very sweet.. but I’m struggling to think what to do with it. I know I should try to book a massage for myself or even just go see a movie or something, but I’m a practical freak. I keep thinking that we’re out of olive oil, the dog should probably make it to the groomers, … the list goes on.

Oh, well. Even errands would be a nice break.

The awful infant swing comes with a different “melodies”, though I wonder who might consider those sounds melodious. I tend to pick something on the nature channel, depicted by what I’m guessing is supposed to be a bird. The first three “tracks” sound vaguely like water running, terribly electronic in their tinkling. I have no idea what the fourth one is supposed to be, but it sounds a bit like an old dial-up modem, complete with handshake signal. The fifth is what I select, and assume to be white noise, which works perfectly for putting Spice into this happy, hypnotic state to doze off to.

The problem? The spouse hates it.

Turns out, what sleepologists everywhere suggest for getting babies and adults to sleep sends my spouse into painful, teeth-grinding nightmare… when he can get to sleep. This has led to several scenarios taking place in our house, all variations on the spouse turning down or off the noise and the baby waking up or not falling off to sleep as easily.

So, I’ve resorted to trying other things. Loud, repetitive sounds seem to be the key. I tried Ozzy in the car with limited success; seems I’m more soothed by it than her. My mother burned me a CD with classical Indian music which works well enough that I haven’t removed it from the car to copy to my computer for fear that I might forget to put it back in the car. Yesterday, she calmed to Morrissey, though that might just have been from horror at my chipper sing-a-long with The Last of the Famous International Playboys. Bob Marley’s Is This Love was only a minor success, so perhaps her tastes aren’t fully developed yet. We’ve also tried birdsongs, jungle river, tropical rain, thundering rainstorms, thunderbolts and lightning… mamma mia.

This morning I scoured Amazon’s MP3 Downloads looking for something like womb sounds. Most of what I found was cheesy crap, stuff a deaf baby would scream to turn off. Then I found it, the perfect baby-calming track, an hour-long continuous heartbeat to the sound of waves. Amazing. Spice calmed and gurgled to the preview, so I splurged on all $.99 of it.

While his father was recently here visiting the baby, the spouse and him set up the downstairs guest bedroom as the movie-watching room. (Futon = bed OR couch.) They set the new projector up, and hardwired surround-sound speakers to the wall. Now, thanks to the Blu-Ray feature on the PS3, we have an amazing setup for watching movies at home, which is great since we probably won’t make it to the theater for, oh, about a decade.

With Spice’s swing in there, she now gets the full surround-sound experience of swinging to a steady heartbeat and enough waves to drown a whale. I think I’ll start calling it the “womb room”…

I rented this from Paperspine on a whim and it’s become my new recommended-for-anyone-considering-a-baby book. It’s especially good for baby blues or PPD, and I even found myself waving a chapter in front of the spouse with a “Hey, read this”, as it explain something that I’d been trying to put into words for over a week now.

Sippy Cups Are Not For Chardonnay is a humorous look at what your new life as a parent really, really is like. From childbirth recovery to picking out an exclusive preschool for your little monster, Stefanie Wilder Taylor tells it like it is. Underlying the constant witticism is some honest-to-goodness useful advice, from strollers and feeding, to in-the-trenches parenting advice that will help you survive the first year.

When it rains, it pours, right?

My mother drove down for the weekend. I can’t begin to describe how nice it was to have her here. Kinda weird, in fact, considering that we’ve never been that close. She spent Friday night with my sister, who’s also going through some rough crap, and came back here yesterday. We didn’t do much, just sort of hung around through Spice’s afternoon fussies, but her presence was invaluble. Right around 5pm when I broke down exhausted and crying.

I have a cold, so she whipped up a ginger and coriander tea for me and took the baby unless I needed to feed her. She also made sure I ate, stuffing me with rice and curry, which I swore between mouthfuls was the best thing I’d ever tasted. She helped me get to bed with Spice early, a godsend since I ended up getting up every three hours to ease Spice’s congestion. Oh, and lots of motherly advice was dispensed and which I was actually grateful for.

And then she left this morning. After making me french toast. *sigh*

As if that wasn’t enough of a mood killer, I promptly managed to slip and fall down our metal staircase, which has resulted in a nasty bump on my arm and the spouse banning me from heavy lifting. At least it’s not broken, but the pain is just one more thing I don’t need right now. :-(

I miss my mommy.

me: oh, look at her. she’s so fucking cute sometimes.
spouse: what are you talking about? she’s cute all the time!
me: you’re obviously not spending enough time with her.

Spice hit 7 weeks this past Monday and wow, has it been a wild ride!

They say that colic in babies peaks at 6 weeks and drops slowly from there, and as usual, she’s been a textbook baby. Last week was a right mess, hence my impulse trip to see Mom and get away for a while. (Though, considering she came with me, I’m not sure what exactly I was getting away from. Hmm.)

This week has been a little better. The spouse has been a little better, which always helps. I’m sure Spice has been going through a growth spurt because she feeds constantly all day. I used to wonder what that meant. How could a baby feed constantly? Wouldn’t they need to come up for air? Or stop to sleep? In case you’ve wondered these same questions, the answer is, in fact, no. They can pause long enough to stare past you out the window for a few minutes and as soon as you reach to pull your shirt back down, they latch on with a vengeance. They are capable of disarming you with a half-smile, breathing through the corners of their mouth and then lazily feeding for another 20 minutes. And sleeping works about the same: cat-nap for a bit with the breast in the mouth and wake up as soon as they’re moved or wake up an hour later to start all over again. I’ve never been so damn repetitious in my life; “She can’t possibly be hungry again!”

But I was rambling about fussiness.

In the breastfeeding support group I was going to, the bible seemed to be Harvey Karp’s The Happiest Baby on the Block ($11). I remember seeing this on Amazon a few times, but skimmed past it thinking that since it was so mainstream, it couldn’t possibly be worth the $11 bucks. Ah, how wrong I frequently am. :-) The same day that I read it, I tried the 5 steps in the book and was amazed at how calm Spice was. And I also realized that we had been doing many of these steps unintentionally, but with the same calming results.

The 5 steps are basically swaddling, side/stomach positioning, swinging, shhh’ing and sucking. If you’ve been around babies before, it’s nothing new, but Karp’s technique is to put them together in a way that makes them more effective than each used alone. We had been swaddling occasionally with good results. Swinging was effective when I was wearing her in a wrap/sling. Sucking worked on the breast and with co-sleeping and nursing at night, we sleep on our sides, tummy-to-tummy. Her body is tucked so tightly against me, that it’s almost like being swaddled. No wonder nights have been so easy for us!

Do read the book. Spice is a relatively easy baby, meaning she often cries for food, a diaper change, or needing to sleep, and rarely for random fussiness or real colic. For the times she has actually been fussy, Karp’s technique has been a sanity-saver.

If you don’t want to plunk down the $$, read it in your local library or rent it from Paperspine.

As happy as I am with cloth diapering, there’s been something that’s bugged me for weeks. I finally found a solution to the problem though…

The easiest way to cloth diaper with a wrap is to fold the prefold into thirds and lay it into a diaper wrap. Unfortunately, this method also often results in a poopy wrap. Poopy wraps mean they have to be washed and dried, and since I’m a lazy one, this means with the next load of diapers, though more enterprising moms could easily hand wash and line dry them. The most poop-proof solution is to secure the prefold with pins or a snappi and then secure the wrap. I don’t remember a single poopy wrap while using this method. However, the downside is the extra step needed in pinning or snappi-ing, especially when in a rush, in the middle of the night in an almost dark room, or in the back seat of a car on a wriggly baby. :-) I tried the trifold-layed-in-wrap for just these situations, but they seemed to make the problem worse; it’s incredibly frustrating to have a messy, leaky poopy wrap to clean up and put away when you’re on the road.

A few days ago, I tried a new fold: the bikini twist. I thought it seemed really flimsy when I first looked at it, but it works great! You simply lay the baby on the prefold, bring the front up between their legs, twist it 180 degrees and voila! I keep the wraps & prefolds ready to go, so that I can slip them under her bum at the same time and just close the wrap to secure without pins or snappis. The twist forms a “poop pocket” in back that keeps the poop in the prefold about 90% of the time, which is pretty good, and the twist in front fits trimmer between the legs with more absorbency than a newspaper fold.

I wish I’d thought of this ages ago! :-)

Bear in mind that I have three babywearing apparatuses: a Mamma’s Milk pouch sling, a custom Oh My Mommy Clementine mei tai and a brown Moby wrap. Spice was fine in the Moby for the first couple of weeks, but the Moby is a crazy piece of work to quickly throw on and go, since it’s so incredibly long and drags on the ground. Plus, I’m sure I could get the hang of it with time, but unless I had someone to straighten the wrap on my back so it wasn’t bunched up, it was seriously uncomfortable to wear more than an hour – a huge negative for a sling that’s so much work to get on and off.

The pouch sling is pretty good all around. Mamma’s Milk makes one of the few adjustable pouch slings, with hidden velcro so that there’s no rings, buckles, etc. Again, Spice was okay in it the first few weeks in the cradle hold, but fights it like a mad woman now. I’ve tried her in the tummy-to-tummy position, but she screams and claws at my chest and neck until I take her out. Finally, yesterday we had some degree of success with a careful facing-out position. I know you’re not supposed to have a newborn facing out, but she was half sideways, has good head control and was tucked in bum-first, with her feet lotus up. She could lean against me, and it worked well enough to get her from the breastfeeding support group to the car with one hand free. I’ll keep trying her in it, because it’s by far the fastest to grab and put on. And I’m holding out for using it for hip carries when she gets bigger.

My newest addition is a custom mei tai I bought on Etsy. A mei tai is an ABC (Asian-style Baby Carrier), generally a square/rectangle of cloth with four straps sewn on. Two straps tie around your waist and the other two go over your shoulders, cross at the back, come forward and tied around the baby’s back (newborn) or under their bum (toddler). Basically, it’s like an Ergo without all the bling. I bought the spouse the Ergo and it’s gotten virtually no use because a) he doesn’t remember/want to use it and b) it’s got too much bling. I hate things with buckles and stuff, so I wanted a mei tai. By far, BabyHawk has some of the coolest fabrics and some of the best reviews, but I wasn’t about to drop $115 on Yet Another Carrier that Spice would scream at. Thankfully, there’s Etsy, home of Lots of Cool Things made by SAHMs at Low Prices. I browsed around and settled on a cute custom mei tai with a pink/white/brown stripe pattern and black straps. After some confusion on my part in regards to how many mailboxes I have outside my house, it arrived and Spice screamed each time I put her in. Joy. Until it occurred to me to make it a little shorter by folding up the bottom and putting her in again facing out, bum in first. Success! I carried her around for about 10 minutes like that until she started to fuss. No point in pushing my luck, right?

But the swing. *sigh*

I want to carry her, my precious little bundle o’ joy, but she just won’t stand it! Bleah. And there’s only so much in-arms I can do without having at least a hand free, so.. we got a swing a couple of weeks ago. I felt super guilty about it, until I accepted the fact that this is not a battle – it’s about her being happy and comfortable. I almost always try to soothe her to sleep in my arms, but sometimes she’s just too cranky and tired and keeps fussing. I tuck her into the swing, pop it on the fastest speed and put some lullabies or white noise on, and she’s asleep faster than a drunken me passing out on the bed. She’s not going to be 10-years-old and needing to swing herself to sleep, right? And I keep trying the different slings every week since she seems to go through phases of what she likes.

But in the meantime, I still hate the swing.