butterflylike network

First nightmare, first time noticing hands, first time aiming hands at mouth, first quasi-giggle, first time distinctly looking over at a sound.

First week her eyes are definitely not blue any longer: they look to be green. I wonder if this color will stick or if it’ll keep on changing towards brown. That green eye color would be from me but the look around her eyes is, I think permanently, from A.

The quasi-giggle: while I was singing along to her to a CD I just got her of one of my favorite albums from when I was little. She likes being sung to. Oh and we are in Hungary for the whole month of August, which is how I’m able to acquire all kinds of books and music for her that I loved as a child and always imagined having for my own children. Looking over at a sound: my father was trying to get her attention with a funny mouth-noise. And he succeeded. My father was able to do this in part because see above: we are in Hungary.

I expect she shan’t giggle very much again or look over at sounds consistently for some time yet. As best I can tell such things first happen as if by accident and don’t get fully connected up in the necessary parts of her brain for a while thereafter.

All of this occurred during the twelfth week of Faustina’s life. She is exactly twelve weeks old today.

And we are neck-deep in motherhood here, as you can tell. I cannot imagine how people go back to work right around this time, and I think very many do in the U.S. I doubt I’d be able to go on breastfeeding as I am now, and, apparently: most women in the U.S. don’t (nyt).

We are in Budapest, for the whole month of August.

It turns out I did not bring quite enough baby clothes, ones that are warm enough, that is. It turns out it gets pretty cold here. This turned into a shopping opportunity, with a couple of cute red babygros in it for Faustina. Which of course needed to be laundered before she could wear them, and wear them she must because it isn’t all that warm here. I had a bunch of other items to wash and I wondered, briefly, if this first time in the wash for the red babygros will mean that everything else will be stained pink.

And then I realized that many of her things already are pink.

She only likes them sometimes, when she’s agitated by a belly ache (in her case: a literal one), and needs that to resolve so she can rest already. And late at night, for just a little while, right before falling asleep, and she spits it right out when she finally doses off.

Otherwise, never.

So much for the wise recommendation that pacifiers only be used for sleeping.

At the book What to Expect the First Year. For the most part it gives some really sound advice but man, sometimes it reads like the how-to manual of maternal insanity.

To wit: not letting your child fall asleep while nursing so that you can put them down awake and they practice soothing themselves to sleep by themselves. Even the book admits that the part with the not falling asleep while nursing isn’t as realistic as it could be - because babies WILL fall asleep while nursing and there’s nothing you can do about it. They won’t wake up to pretty much anything - at least, once she’s got sleep on her mind, mine won’t. Besides, it’s so cozy an comfy for both her and me to hang out together for a while.

And that’s where my beef with the book lies. It took me a while to figure out why - but reading this kind of advice bothers me more than I expected it would so figure it out I did.

You see, the baby just feels cozy and comfy on her mom after having had a good meal. And she likes to be cozy and comfortable because it feels good. But if I don’t let her get used to this kind of comfort, then what am I teaching her? That feeling good is bad? That this is a world where, if you let on that something makes you feel comfortable, you will be punished by having your comfort taken away?

I will never teach her that, even if it makes her come to sleeping on her own later than other kids. She sleeps alone in her crib most of the night so I think there’s a good chance that letting her sleep in my arms for a bit after nursing is not wrecking her just yet.

There’s other bits like that in the book, all of them reflecting an attitude that you should raise your child to be okay with being slightly deprived. I bet they mean well but it reads so institutional. And even worse, it makes me feel like no matter what, I’ll be doing something wrong as a mother because there will always be some rule I’m not following, or if I follow it then I have to go against my instincts. Neither of which is a good place to be. And I think it’s irresponsible to claim authority and then give advice that’s pretty much unfollowable even by the author’s own admission, especially to new mothers, who can drive hemselves crazy just fine without any help from anyone else.

Turns out I wasn’t imagining it: there really have been more babies recently. More babies were born in 2007 than in any year since 1957, which was the peak year of the Baby Boom.

The article says this new baby boomlet is likely the result of a combination of factors: lots of immigrants having babies, lots of women in their late 30s and 40s having multiples, and more women around who are actually in their 20s and 30s starting to have babies. I think there’s a fourth factor too: people are fed up with the economic problems, the political problems, and the general hopelessness. So to inject some hope into life: they have babies! Alternatively, we want to populate the world with our kind to push out all the people we’re fed up with because we perceive them as the cause of the economic and political problems…

France denied citizenship to a Moroccan woman who wears a niqab because

She has adopted a radical practice of her religion, incompatible with essential values of the French community, particularly the principle of equality of the sexes

The government commissioner reporting on her interviews with social services prior to the decision said

“She lives in total submission to her male relatives. She seems to find this normal, and the idea of challenging it has never crossed her mind.”

But… if, in the view of the French government, it’s a problem that she’s being oppressed by men, then how is it a good idea to punish her for being oppressed by men, and not the men who oppress her? Her husband was never denied citizenship, after all. Not that I think that would have been a good idea either. You get people to accept your values by convincing them to, or rather teaching them how, not by shutting them out of that possibility altogether.

I got the following ad in gmail today:

Drive a Lamborghini - www.LongIslandLamborghini.com - All models, new or preowned Aggressive pricing, best selection

Apparently google’s contextual ads aren’t working so great today. Because how could this possibly apply to me? Not that I’d reject a Lamborghini if someone were to give me one. But I don’t foresee buying either a used or new one anytime soon.

In other news - there isn’t much other news, which is why I’m noticing google ads at all, which is a very good thing indeed. One wants life with a baby to be as uneventful as possible, it seems to me.

Have you heard of the problem of acid reflux? For babies, I mean. Because can you imagine how painful it must be for a baby to have heartburn? Not to mention loud. For the parents, that is: baby will let out piercing cries at random intervals while flexing every muscle and joint in her body when in the throes of an attack of heartburn.

Not that I blame her. I can’t imagine how awful and terrifying it must be to be gripped by a heartburn spasm and have no idea what it is or why it came when all you were doing is peacefully sucking on your mother. Or in my baby’s case, sucking like it’s a sucking sprint event at the Olympics. She’s just that good at it. And then, during the last week or so, her valiant race to the milky finish line keeps getting interrupted by acidic burning at the top of her stomach that makes her cough up the milk she’s just extracted from me.

So, following the doctor’s recommendation that holding her upright will make her more comfortable, I’ve figured out a way to breastfeed Faustina while she’s mostly upright. This is important since most of her reflux attacks occur while she’s eating. And it worked like magic: no baby heartburn for nearly 24 hours now.

My life is full of minor epiphanies these days.

Of course, as soon as I find one such solution, I’d better get myself ready for the next one because anything I come up with only works for so long. Like the carrier problem: I have to alternate between several different ways of wrapping/slinging/babybjorning. One day this works, another day that works, and no two days are alike: I’m thinking of sewing a Mei Tai too, for even more variety. Clearly, Faustina is a girl who prefers to keep her mother on her toes.

(Joining for the first time - because I’m finally awake enough!)

small tender raindrops -

a mother weighed down with milk

instead of fireworks

___

Also known as:

We were going to drive to a friend’s house to watch the fireworks by the beach. But it’s rainy and there are thunderstorms coming. So we’re staying home instead.

And:

This picture is now a week old but she is still just as pretty: the girl with the 80’s-style baby mohawk. She’s going to be six weeks old on Sunday, and in our town the fireworks took place on Wednesday since it’s assumed that everyone leaves for actual 4th of July. But since the weather kind of sucks… lots of people didn’t.

I’ve been evaluating how I am, since six weeks postpartum is also when the doctor will evaluate me. I have to confess that so far, I’m rather well. I find my baby charming and being a mother exciting. Sure, I’ll have to look for a whole new career now, in six months or a year, I’m thinking, provided money doesn’t become an issue before that. I’ve also been trying to see how I feel about this: I finished my Ph.D. and straightaway got pregnant and removed myself from the academic job market (which I’d been dreading anyway). And I don’t feel pretty much anything about it. I’m excited about having so much time with my child, and I’m excited about having lots of stuff to read in off moments, including the random research article here and there. Not at all on a regular basis, mind you. I keep running into people, old friends I’d lost touch with or people I knew who’d left academia before me, and they’re all happy and still living around here. I consider this a sign, and a positive one.

I know I’m not really talking about my baby but she and starting over are intertwined for me. And I feel okay about both.

The downside (because there is always a down side): my recovery has been slow. I think I’m good at faking it because people I spend time with generally have no idea. I don’t think it’s being tired - although I am, like any new mother. It’s that my body is very slow in getting back even half the strength it used to have. This is the only thing I get frustrated with: that I still feel so heavy and slow, that there’s still bleeding and my belly’s rather largish and I can’t bear the thought of my body doing anything just for pleasure, if you know what I mean. I feel triple bad when people, entirely well-meaning people, tell me that they’d recovered so much faster than I, in just a few weeks they were up and about, flying to Europe, you name it. That’s not been my experience at all: it’s only this week that, finally, just a few days ago, I began to feel like I really might get back to normal one day.

I took Faustina for her one-month checkup today. Where she also got the second installment of the hep-B vaccine.

I love her doctor: a young woman, perhaps a couple years younger than me (women her age always remind me of my sister and so I suspect I have a particular fondness for them), an immigrant (like me) if Indian descent (not like me) married to an American (like me, sort of). See how much I focus on things that are “like” for me? I like those. But more importantly: she takes as much time as I need, for questions, reassurance, even to chat, because that is how you make a new mom comfortable.

She was sick at Faustina’s first doctor’s appointment, the one two days after we brought her home from the hospital, and we got an older doctor from the practice. A sixty-something man, very kind, very old-school. I liked him well enough too, except that of the fifteen minutes he spent with us he took five to discuss Faustina and her health issues and ten to talk about where to go fishing in New Jersey with A. He even wrote down some the URLs of some fishing web sites he liked, on a piece of paper that (in hindsight) must have contained the vitamin information that our real doctor gave us again today.

Sure, he also noted that Faustina is beautiful, and completely normal, and has good suction (seriously: she does have good suction) and was clearly not going to worry himself over a baby who is completely fine. So it’s not that I was mad at him. And in a different time and different place, I’d have been very happy with him as our pediatrician. But I don’t live in that time or place and prefer our real pediatrician, who is chatty and young and talks to me about babies and children and is like a girlfriend. I’ve discovered I prefer girlfriend-ish doctors in general.

At today’s visit, Faustina got weighed and measured. She’s smack in the middle of all charts, in terms of both her size and her growth curve: she’s that elusive Completely Average-Sized Baby. Then the minute the weighing was done, when I picked her up off the scale and held her small naked body close so she wouldn’t get cold, she sprung a leak and peed all over me. Fun, isn’t it? Lucky that a month-old baby’s pee is just a clear, odorless liquid that dries within minutes. Because as soon as that was dry, my right boob decided it was time for Faustina to eat and joined her in leakage.

After that, the only thing that remained were being told she’s fine (again), being given the infant vitamin information (again), and Faustina getting a hep-B shot (again). That last part did not go as quickly as last time because right after she got it she began wailing like she’d just experienced the greatest, most unfair betrayal of her young life. Which I suppose is just about right. Except that afterwards it all got better because my right boob won and Faustina got fed in an empty examination room. I’m finding I’m becoming more selfish and demanding as a mother because I totally made the nurse who gave her her shot carry all our stuff over to the empty exam room for us. Because I had to focus on holding only my sweet little baby and nothing else.