Parenthood and Marriage

I knew it was going to be a challenge; I was warned enough times.  Everyone talks about how everything changes after you have a baby, and my general response was always “No sh*t” (at least inwardly).  I also knew that even the strongest, most loving marriages are tested by the entrance of a teeny person.  So I’m not exactly surprised.

My husband and I adore each other.  Since Ethan has been born, John has constantly been showering me with compliments and telling me what an amazing mom I am.  He is super supportive and I am incredibly grateful.  But there are still tense moments, for sure.  I don’t always bite my tongue when I feel like he isn’t doing things the “right” way (as if my way is actually the right way, when I have no idea what I’m doing most of the time.)  We both get moody and cranky thanks to the lack of sleep.  I resent him for having slightly more sleep than I have.  And of course, since I am tied to E by the boob and therefore cannot leave the house without him for very long, I find myself sometimes resenting my husband for getting to take off for a few hours at a time, or even go to work (though I can’t say I am ready for that yet myself).

It’s a work in progress.  We still love and adore each other.  He still tells me how amazing and beautiful and sexy I am, and those compliments are not lost on me.  And they are sincere, which make them that much more welcome.  He actually is more in love with me and attracted to me since I had his baby, and I have known women who were not so lucky.

The main problem is me.  I’m not the only one who gets cranky, but I certainly do it more.  I’m the one who occasionally keeps score (though I try hard not to).  I’m the one who almost never feels like any sort of bedroom activity, because when my baby goes to bed all I want to do is sleep too.  So what’s a new mommy to do?  I try to get out when I can, which isn’t often (without E anyway).  I have even had a couple of spa appointments and a hair appointment in the past 15 weeks.  Today I treated myself to a Groupon for house cleaning because OH MY GOD HOW DOES ANYONE CLEAN REGULARLY AND TAKE CARE OF A BABY???? And John and I had one “date” (if you can call going to someone’s wedding a date) without the baby.

So what is the problem?  I love my husband, I love my son – I would do anything to keep them both happy and healthy.  The last word I would use to describe myself these days is selfish – at least with regards to my son – and yet somehow I feel like I need to put myself aside even MORE so that I can make sure I’m being a good wife, too.  But right now it just feels like a very sloppy juggling act.  How do people do this without dropping all the balls?

Of course, the thing that makes it all seem slightly easier…

my little munchkin

No More Excuses!

ugh. I feel like I see a post like this on almost every blog I read at one point or another. But here I am. I’m gonna do it anyway.

I was doing so well! I really was. I was exercising every day. I was eating healthfully. I was keeping our house in some semblance of order. I was rocking the stay-at-home-mom thing.

Then the excuses started rolling in. First one… then more… and now I find that “I’ll start tomorrow because…” has become a sort of mantra for me.

What happened?

So a couple of weeks ago (um, I mean a month?! crap where does the time go!?!) I had two pretty horrible migraines one after the other. I’ve been prone to these suckers since my junior high days but never more than one every few months at the very most. But back in April I had two in a row and they were doozies. I visited the doctor and was given a whole list of things I should not eat and a prescription for some medicine that would make it stop, if I were to get another. For the next few weeks I felt pretty crummy. I didn’t have another migraine, but I always felt on the edge of one. Let me tell you the fear of developing something so debilitating whilst trying to care for an infant is enough to make my heart race. I let myself take it easy.

Around the same time I noticed a streak of blood in Jude’s diaper. Luckily(?) I had experienced this with Gus and knew that I was most likely dealing with a milk protein allergy. As such, cutting out all dairy from my diet came next.

So there I was, feeling pretty icky, no dairy of any kind and a whole list of other foods (normal stuff like bananas, avocados, citrus, and bread…) that I should try to avoid when possible on account of the migraines.

Oh there were more excuses but those were the biggies, and suddenly I found myself watching too much TV. My house is dirtier. The laundry wrinklier (if it makes it to the washing machine). And running? ha. Once a week if I was lucky.

But all that ends here.

New Goals that start YESTERDAY.

1. 4L of water every day.
2. Conscious effort to eat at LEAST 5 servings of vegetables each day.
3.  At least 30 minutes of cardio (walking counts) every day.
4. At least SOME amount of strength workout on at least 4 days each week.
5. Make and stick to my to do list each day (and yes, writing this post was on my list for the day… CHECK!)
6. TV watching *only* if I’m working out at the same time (or if it’s a sporting event – it’s the NBA play offs and we are following.)
7. Sign up for a local 5k on May 20th to see where my time is right now and better assess my base.
8. Sign up for a local half marathon in October with a friend. Train accordingly.
9. Devise some way of having a date night with Masa. I feel like we haven’t had a conversation (that wasn’t punctuated by someone screaming WHATAREYOUTALKINGABOUT!?!ESSCUSEMEEEEEITSMYTURNTOTALK!!! every five seconds) in ages.
10. And last but certainly not least – spend every moment that I get with my boys soaking in how amazing it is to be their mother. (Because really. I mean, if you have a kid, did you ever in a million years believe it would be *this* amazing? It’s like my best hopes for life to the infinite power, these kids. I just love them more than words.)

There are other things I’d like to accomplish too, like a baby book and showering each day and things like that. but let’s start here. If you don’t hear from me, you’ll know I’m working hard at doing all the things.

oh pictures? sure.

This first one was taken *right* before Gus (who was on his first underwear outing) had a leeeetle bit of an accident. Yes, he was still on Masa’s shoulders. Ah, parenthood.

The fam on a walk around the marsh.

JuJuBe says hello.

My Big Boy – almost three! Ack!

So anyone else have any goals they want to share to give me some moral support? anyone?

hello?

Something a Little Different

Last night, I went to bed feeling a bit downtrodden. Not because of some tribulation of motherhood or spat with my husband. No. I was disappointed in my city’s basketball team. (not that one, the other one.)

Now, I am not historically a basketball fan. I absolutely SUCK at actually playing the game. But over this abbreviated season, my husband has pulled me into rooting for our city’s underdog team. They were finally making good and it was fun to watch. But last night, as I lay down with Gus and a couple stories, they were being obliterated in the first game of the playoffs. So yeah. I was a bit disappointed. Not devastated – it’s not the Dodgers, after all – but, you know, a little bummed.

This morning, however, I awoke to the news that, after having been down by something like 28 points (I am too lazy/busy to fact check so don’t hold me to it) they actually came back to win the game in the last minute. I felt an involuntary smile spread over my face. Not like I’d just given birth or been proposed to – but, you know, sort of happy.

The Dodgers are my first (sports) love, and let me tell you that I can watch clips of awesome moments – some that I’ve seen in person, and others that I missed – and get chills. Honest-to-God chills. I feel happy and excited. And when they, in recent years, have choked hard in the playoffs, I have been known to sit in the car to hear Mr. Scully call the last of the season with a heavy heart.

It’s not often that you read about sports on a “mommy blog”. Many women like sports, sure, but when it comes to sharing stories and chatting around the water cooler with friends, we mommies tend toward the kid talk more than anything. I’m the same way. But this weekend was a very good weekend in sports for my city and it reminds me why I like following athletics in the first place. Because it’s something completely meaningless in the grand scheme of things, but that can really draw me in and allow me to express emotion.

Put it like this. When was the last time you jumped up and down and screamed in either complete elation or abject fury?  Sounds weird, maybe, but that sort of expression feels good to the soul sometimes. And when you pair it with the fact that, in real life, the subject of such outbursts means less than nothing, it feels even better. Life is so full of the heavy, both sad and wonderful. Sometimes a girl needs to just let loose over something a little different.

Maybe I’m not making any sense. Maybe you have to feel it to believe it. I guess my point is that I sort of get why the Super Bowl has the number one largest TV audience in history. And I don’t think it has much to do with the commercials.

Don’t Ignore the Silent Ones

This week is National Infertility Awareness Week.  I feel like a bit of a lame participant, honestly, since I am not “out” about my struggle with infertility.  As much as I want to show my solidarity, I don’t like posting really personal things on my facebook page for the whole world to see, so I will not be promoting awareness of infertility the way I should.  On twitter and on this blog, I am an open book about it.  But most of my real life friends and extended family have no idea.

So this week, ironic though it may be, my “Don’t Ignore…” message is to not ignore the silent ones.  There are so many of us out there, struggling with a diagnosis or a total lack of clear diagnosis, but wanting nothing more than to have a child of our own.  This year my husband and I were lucky to finally get ours.  And I don’t hide the fact, when nosy (but presumably well-meaning or just plain curious) people ask, that it took us a long time to get here.  And for my really close friends and family, I will even divulge the fact that I had to undergo hormone treatments and we had an IUI in order to get pregnant.  But to most of the world, I’m silent about it.  They just assume I got pregnant the way everyone else does.

But I still want people to know that there are a lot of us out there.  That it isn’t okay to bug your married friends about when they’re going to get pregnant already.  Or that it isn’t wise to post every single bump or ultrasound picture that you have on your facebook wall.  Or that it is insensitive to complain constantly about your pregnancy symptoms to your friend who has yet to get pregnant – she just might be suffering inside and desperately want those symptoms herself.

So yes, perhaps I am a hypocrite to try to spread awareness and call something solidarity without actually sharing my story with the people in my life.  But I am still part of this community, silent or otherwise.  That may annoy some people, but it is what it is. I still struggled and pined and cried along with the best of them.  And that still matters, and will always matter to me.

And now my little miracle is calling for me, so off I go. 

How I Weaned My Toddler (last year…)

There was a comment recently on a post I wrote over a  year ago regarding Gus’ extended nursing and eventual weaning. The comment made me realize that I had not really ever told the rest of the story, and there’s no time like the present!

When I wrote about weaning a toddler in early 2011, I mentioned that there is so little out there to guide a mother through the very tough and personal decision to wean an extended nurser. Much of the literature seemed to guilt me for wanting to initiate the weaning process myself. I knew there had to be some happy medium. I don’t profess to be an expert on this. I’ve done it exactly once. But I’ll share what happened with Gus and me when the time came, in the hope that it might calm some fears out there, or at the very least – as I said in that original post – let us know that we’re not alone.

In that post I mentioned that my latest and greatest “deadline” for weaning my first boy was January. Welllll… January came and went and I could never bring myself to do it. Then February came and went. When March showed up, I was determined to at least start cutting back.

At that point I was mainly down to nursing him morning, night and naptime on the weekends. When we traveled it was a different story and I’d often end up nursing him all night. For the most part, at home, I had weaned him at night. Even if he woke up in the middle of the night, I’d go into his room and hold his hand, or sing, or rock him if nothing else worked. As most nursing mothers know, rocking a baby and *not* nursing him, is sometimes difficult, so I would try to avoid picking him up. This was probably the period of time (including now) during which he slept the best at night.

As we moved toward seriously weaning, the first thing I did was drop the morning feeding. This one made the most sense to me because I could easily tempt my little guy into some other wonderful activity for us to do together. Namely: making pancakes. My kid loves his pancakes and he loves helping make them. So when he started asking to nurse in the morning, I’d quickly suggest we go make pancakes instead. It sounds silly, but it really was that easy.

The next one to go, oddly enough, was the night time feeding. It hurt my heart so much to even think of not nursing my little boy each night. Our routine was always to do a story, nurse, and then go to bed. One night, Gus asked for another story so I thought, what the heck, and tried telling him that if he wanted another story then it’d be time for bed and he’d have to go into his crib. He agreed, much to my surprise. I figured we’d still be in for a fight once the time came, but he was strangely totally fine. It was the first night of his life that he didn’t nurse before bed. While this did not turn out to be a trend, it at least let me know that he wouldn’t be completely traumatized without nursing. Eventually I found that moving the location of our night time ritual from the glider to the twin bed in his room, and allowing for a couple books and lots of snuggling, really made the transition easier. For a while, I’d move him to his crib before he fell asleep and sit in his room as he drifted off. Now he sleeps in the twin, so we’ve developed some brand new questionable sleep associations. le sigh.

But to this day, we still read as many books as we have time for, and snuggle before he falls asleep. It’s my favorite part of the day.

In March of that year, I realized that some wacky things were going on with my emotions as I went through the weaning process. I wrote about that here. I won’t go into it too much in this post, but I have noticed a few articles popping up with this same kind of theme, so it might be worth a google if you recognize the plight.

Finally it was time to drop that last hold out – the nap time nursing. I was totally at a loss as to how to get him down for a nap without nursing. I’m trying to remember exactly what we did. I think that we may have moved him to the twin bed for his naps around that time. We read him a book before nap and then lie quietly. Sometimes he’s cool with us leaving the room while he’s awake. Sometimes he’s not. Most of the time, I have no problem getting some extra cuddles in on lazy weekend afternoons.

On the mid-June afternoon of Gus’ second birthday, I breastfed my first baby for the very last time. We’d pretty much weaned at that point, but he was an over-tired, over-stimulated little boy and when he asked in his sleepy little voice, I knew it would be the last time I said yes. I burned the image in my brain. My beautiful little boy growing up too fast. All legs and arms and none of the baby he’d always been. He fell asleep there at my breast and I could have kept him just like that forever. My little bunny.

Of course that’s not how it works, is it. He’s completely weaned now and on to the bigger and better. Is he ok? Yes. We have our special things we do together. We have our evening snuggles and morning pancakes. He’ll always be my baby, even when he’s old and grey. But I’d be lying if I told you there weren’t tears on my face even now, almost a year later, as I write this. And I doubt I’ll ever think on that afternoon and not feel a pang of loss. But WE didn’t lose what makes us close. WE didn’t suffer. And I really don’t think that he did either. The loss I feel is a selfish one, of time moving too fast and wanting to hold onto every piece of this incredible life.

The last time I nursed Gus, I was about 8 weeks pregnant with Jude. Now I’m building my nursing relationship with this new little man. He’s such a different kid and I try not to have expectations about how our time with breastfeeding will unfold. I know that when these milk machines close up for good, there will be a major part of me grieving. There will be new adventures with my boys, too. So many things I look forward to as they grow up.  I can’t wait, I really can’t.

But it doesn’t mean I am not still trying to catch these impossibly fleeting moments in my hands before they dissipate into distant memory.

Breast is Best

There are a lot of choices involved in having a child – some of them are made for you, but others you get to make yourself.  One thing I knew without a doubt from before I ever got pregnant, was that I intended to exclusively breastfeed my child.  After all, it’s natural and free and easy, right?

No.  Not easy.  Not at all at all at all.

Sure I had heard stories about women who tried breastfeeding and gave up after a few weeks or months because it was just too hard.  I didn’t think to question why that was, I just figured it didn’t fit in with their lifestyles or they never learned to do it right or something.  But now that I’m here, one of the many truths of mommyhood has reared its ugly head – breastfeeding is HARD.

Some day it will be easy.  I keep telling myself that.  Some day I’ll be one of those moms who can just discreetly lift her shirt and clip open her nursing bra and slide her child onto her nipple in one swift movement.  No tears, not from mother or from child, and no pain, and no nip slips.  Some day that has to be the way it is, right?  Well right now it is far from that.

Breastfeeding is a production around here.  Thanks to my C section, I generally have to have my son handed to me for feeding, since I can’t bend and twist and maneuver to pick him up and put him on the breast.  I am not confident enough to do it without my Brest Friend pillow, and my child cries hysterically before many feedings, and I often cry a bit too.  He has trouble latching, but we always get it eventually (though it took a week or two to get to that point), and it hurts when he first latches on, and I invariably have to correct his position a little bit.  My breasts are overproducing, so he often gets flooded and chokes and gags on the milk that gushes into his mouth.  As a result he is afraid of the flood and clamps down on my nipples with his gums, which causes an indescribable pain.  I end up sitting with at least one naked boob exposed for a very long time before and after the feeding – before because my husband and I often have to take turns soothing our crying child before he will latch on, and after because my nipples hurt so badly that I need to air them out a bit before I can dress myself again.  Add to all this the fact that our child currently requires a meal every hour or two, and you can imagine that my days are not all that dreamy right now.

Glamorous, no?

Don’t get me wrong, breastfeeding has actually improved greatly from the earliest days, when my nips were scabbed over and constantly in incredible pain because we hadn’t figured the whole latch thing out yet.  My husband tried to convince me to give it up and just pump and give our baby bottles exclusively, but I stuck with it.  We finally introduced bottles of expressed milk this week, and once we got him to actually take the damn thing I foresaw a future with less sore nipples.  Though I still intend to give him the breast at least half the time, and for now we’re only doing one bottle a day.

And no, I don’t want to give it up and go for formula.  I know a lot of moms have and would, and I don’t judge them for it.  But this is something that is really important to me, and unless I end up with (god forbid) some kind of serious infection or a permanent injury that makes breastfeeding impossible, I am going to stick with it.  It has already improved so much, and I know that trend will continue.  It’s just so hard to remember that sometimes, when it feels like we keep taking huge strides forward and then slipping right back to the difficult phase.

So for now I have to breastfeed in privacy, or at least only in front of loved ones who aren’t too uncomfortable around my naked boobs.  One day I’ll be the Discreet Mom who can do this in public.  I can’t wait for that day.

Checking In

It’s March now. Jude is five weeks old. And even though he’s sleeping more than anything for the last couple of days (growth spurt? I dunno) I feel like we’re both sort of waking up.

Slowly, I feel us coming out of the newborn “anything goes/ survival mode” phase of life and segueing into what will eventually become our new normal. We’re getting out more, interacting more, trying to develop a fledgling schedule. Masa is heading back to work on Monday, and I fear that will really be when the real world comes knocking at (down) our door. Our lazy morning routine will morph into hectic chaotic just-get-out-the-door crazy. I have a strong suspicion we’ll be seeing the tantrum side of Gus quite a bit in the coming weeks.,

I thought this second time around would be – while not quite a *breeze* exactly – somewhat easier since I supposedly know the ropes already. Well… there’s some of that, sure, but there’s a lot of “what the hell do we do now!?!?” in there too. Still the second guessing and worrying that we’re doing the wrong thing,  or that we’ll mess him up. Even when I promised myself I’d know, this time, that all phases pass (even the good ones!) and that it goes so quickly, I find myself flirting with the edge of panic wondering if we’ll EVER sleep, go out, feel normal, sleep in the same bed, etc., again. If we’ll ever feel normal again. We’ve seen glimpses from time to time. I know it’s out there, that elusive “normal”.

Learning to integrate our family has been challenging. We expected no less. Gus loves his baby brother, but most of the time he doesn’t really pay him much attention at all. There are a lot of requests along the lines of: “can you just put him down in the bouncy chair and play with me?” It’s difficult to try to find the balance between the one who needs me on so many basic biological levels, and the one who still needs me in such a deep emotional way. My heart hurts with how much I miss my little boy sometimes, even while it sings with how much I adore this new tiny person in my arms.

There is something indescribable about having us all here though. Our little family of four, together; all present and accounted for. When I imagine our family in the years ahead – on camping trips or holidays or just doing homework at the kitchen table, I feel so contented. So settled and happy. Full. And all the sorrow I thought I’d feel at being done with childbearing, with newborns, with that entire part of my life – well it hasn’t materialized yet. I’m thankful for that. It may, someday, but for now I’m mostly just counting my blessings.  They are many.

Jude - One Month Old

My Boys