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.

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.

Faustina slept for six hours straight last night.

I woke up this morning and it was strangely not dark - something I’m no longer used to when first waking up after I put my weary head to the pillow at night.

We’re learning that the main thing with Faustina is that we need to relax around her. So maybe she’s fussy. Then we just have to play with her, whether we’re over at a friend’s house, at home, or at the movies.

She loves when we dance around to music with her. She gave her father a huge smile today, for the first time ever, when he danced around with her while I was brushing my teeth, getting ready to feed her.

Then last night we took Faustina to the movies: we wanted to see Mongol. We’d been encouraged by friends who never let having children stop them from doing anything they wanted to do and I’d been working on a theory that this would be manageable, provided I’m willing to use myself as a human pacifier.

And my theory, bolstered by our friends’ encouragement, totally panned out. In fact, I’m sorry we didn’t do it sooner.

We sat all the way in the back, where it would be easiest to manage a fussing baby, and where no one would have any idea if I was breastfeeding. Faustina sat in her car seat and slept through about half the movie. Then she woke up and was hungry and alert so I breastfed her and held her so she could look around. All while I happily went on watching the movie. It turned out that she prefers really loud music. Whenever the soundtrack got quieter, she started making impatient noises. Which led me to speculate that she might want to be a rock musician when she grows up. I mean, some of the music was some very loud stuff with an energetic, even angry beat to accompany battle scenes. That’s the kind of music she prefers.

It also turned out that for Faustina, the most interesting part of a movie and cinema is the projector. We sat  right underneath it so she could see it quite clearly. Which led me onwards from the rock musician idea to believe that she’ll be a film director.

The movie itself: it was okay. Kind of slow at points and too focused on certain slightly fantastical or romantic elements of the legend of Ghenghis Khan’s rise to leadership. I would have preferred a more fast-paced and historical approach. But it was entertaining. And the soundtrack: really good. And not just because it’s loud enough to lull a four-week-old baby.

The other thing that’s turning out to lull her: a bath! We have a simple, plain kind of baby tub from Ikea, with no toys or attachments or safety harnesses that seem to me to be of not much use except in that they can get moldy, and also make me feel like I’m being taken for an idiot who’s definitely going to let her baby drown in a small tub of water. I mean, you don’t FILL the tub, just put a shallowish layer of water at the bottom, and you hold on to the baby the whole time. But if that water in that is nice and warm and just deep enough, Faustina gets all comfy in it stares, fascinated, at the world around her, and lets herself get all happy and swishes around while we keep pouring water over her with our cupped hands. It’s really fun. And afterwards she seems much calmer, which means there’s a night-time bath routine coming her way.

She dislikes pacifiers. And slings. And being swaddled. Unlike - it seems - everyone else’s baby.

Or so I thought.

And then it turned out I was using the sling wrong: I kept putting her in sideways (lying with her head to one side and bottom to the other) and she prefers to be symmetrical, upright with her tummy against mine. And I was swaddling her wrong: not tight enough. I always had her swaddled so she could wiggle her way out, which woke her up. You’re supposed to do it so tight that she pretty much can’t move, and that seems to calm her down. As it would any baby: reminds them of the tight space they lived in before they were born.

But the pacifier: no magic formula. Not that I mind. She’s okay with it sometimes, once she’s resigned herself to the fact that she won’t get a human nipple for another hour or so. Because mine need a little break here and there and there’s no one else’s around. But there’s definitely no pacifier-love lost here. Though everyone tells me hah-hah, that can change.

She is still my little beauty.

Despite a heat rash (passed in a day), newborn acne (beginning to clear up), and the loudest farts I’ve heard in my life. I even think there’s beauty in the way she cries.

It still feels strange to talk to her: it’s like talking to a doll. But I’ve begun to slip into it sometimes. She has a sense of humor, you see. Smiles and laughs pass across her face, such beautiful ones too. Glimpses of the future, they seem to be. Today she was looking right into my face when a big smile erupted. She’d made the funniest explosion down below and I made up a rhyme for it. A Hungarian one, and as such: untranslatable. But I will swear for the rest of my life she smiled right at me because she thought it was funny.

She can spend lots of time looking, just looking - at the ceiling with sharply contrasting beams, at the one sun-yellow wall in her room, at the pattern book I place in her bassinet sometimes, at the black-and-white drawing of a cat’s head I’d put by her changing table.

And she makes funny noises when she’s not sleeping real deep, like right now.