home alone, two

pete went back to work yesterday. it's a little depressing, and it means that i have no time for anything but baby. i am typing with one hand while swaddlebum sleeps on my chest, held by my left arm, and the main menu for "some like it hot" cycles over and over again in the dvd player. he only wants to be held, and i can't blame him. he missed out on a full third trimester of being held and not having to do any work. a lot has been expected of him.

hang on. this music is going to make me nuts...

anyway, a lot has been expected of him, and he's only been home for two weeks. still, it's very frustrating that i am only going to be sleeping in dribs and drabs. it's very frustrating that the majority of the mothering falls on me because i am the mother, and i have the rack. it's very frustrating that he does not want to sleep in either of his beds.

but he did not ask for any of this; we did, and he's a lovely baby. this is just a drop in the bucket of what we asked for. he will only be this size for a short amount of time. before we know it, he will be an infant, and then a toddler, and we will have to look at pictures to remember these first weeks at home. we need to lap up every moment, even the ones filled with the red screams, because we're lucky to be here. three months ago, on the way to the hospital, i never would have dreamed we could be here.

there's my moment of zen. the one i will have to draw upon when he is wailing or when i just want to eat my sandwich all at one time.

and to think. i never even wanted a dog because i thought they were too needy.

Fussy McGurglebarf

Imagine eating pizza until you threw up, and then eating pizza until you threw up, and then eating pizza... until you threw up. You would either be a freshman girl during pledge week or a newborn.

Finn has entered into the milky realm of regular spit ups. My baby smells like cheese.

We now have four beings in the house who barf on a regular basis. Three of them are cats: one with hairballs, one with an eating disorder, and one who pukes greenery. Finn has them beat in frequency. The video was just a prelude. We are true parents now: we don't groom, sleep, or leave the house. Pete has been walking around in a spit up stained Celtics tee shirt for two days, and I change clothes on a regular basis, like after he barfs down my arm, all down his front, as I sit on the couch, holding gurgly baby while cheesy fluid pools in my waistband. Today he exploded in a world of hurl, in the middle of a meal. No warning, no fanfare, no pauses, just Splash! and all the work of the previous ten minutes was soaking into the pillow and running down his face and chest. I startled, and Pete took him to shush him and tell him it was all OK. To be fair, he seemed fine and was back on the boob horse minutes later.

He also explodes into screams frequently, and they are loud and make me crazy. Pete bears it in stride, taking his sweet time changing the diaper or rinsing the soapy bum while Finn turns red and is screaming so loudly he barely makes sound. I am crawling out of my skin. I just want to help him--make it better. Fix it. "Babies cry," says Pete sagely.

Duh.

But this isn't "babies," this is my baby, and he spent his first two months on this earth in the hospital. It's hard for me to say "babies cry," and calmly deal with the frothing mess. I have to, of course, so I do, but I have been known to snatch him from the changing pad before he gets a diaper cover and whoosh him onto the boob because Pete is taking too long, and I can't stand it, pee be damned.

38-12

Finn is three months old and two weeks away from being born. He's an interesting hybrid of a newborn and an infant. I often forget that he's a preemie because we just brought him home from the hospital, just like a normal couple would. After two and a half months.

Today, we had our follow-up appointment with Mary Jane, the lactation consultant. I was convinced that he would not have gained enough weight, and we would have to supplement him with yucky formula; I was resigned to it. I felt like he had been sleeping a lot and not eating enough.

Imagine my surprise when we discovered that he had gained 2.7 ounces in 2.25 days. As they are looking for an ounce a day, we are out of the green poopy woods, at least for awhile.

At 38 weeks, if he were inside, he would weigh about 6 pounds, 13 ounces, so at 6 pounds, 2.7 ounces, I am pretty pleased with his progress. He would also be 14 inches long. At 18.5 inches (possibly more), I guess he's a long baby. He was 14 inches at birth, four pounds ago.

I should probably skip ahead to the "newborn" section of The Book; I just noticed that they also have a premature baby section. I wonder what it can teach me...

poly-vomit-sol

Who knows what's normal? I know I don't, even when it comes to regular life. Throw a baby into the mix, and you got me. I am probably like every other new parent: obsessing over every little thing. For instance, he seems to be sleeping a lot and not eating so much the last few days. If he were a grown up, I would think that he was recovering from a stressful experience and that he is now finally able to relax. I guess you could assign the same characteristics to a wee babe, but I don't know. They say he's supposed to eat, eat, eat/gain, gain gain--about an ounce a day, and he fed like a pro for the lactation consultant, but since then, he's been very fussy at the boob. He'll take a bottle, but he just does not seem to be very hungry.

This morning, he latched on and ate nicely with no fussing and no arching. Then we gave him his Poly-vi-sol. And he puked. And puked. And puked. How am I supposed to pack the ounces on this baby when the supplement they want me to give him completely undermines the work of the previous hour? I understand that he needs iron for brain development, and I don't want to short change him, but it's a balancing act between caloric intake and supplement.

It's one of those times that I find it helpful to fall back on a cliche and say "They can put a man on the moon, but they can't make a more palatable and digestible iron supplement for children?!" I don't get it. I mean, it's not that I don't enjoy my baby smelling like a rusty bucket and watching him retch and gag and then puke up something that puts me in mind of bubotuber pus, but I did rather prefer it when he smelled pleasantly of pumpkins and was dealing with his normal amount of uncomfortable reflux.

in action

There's a little surprise at the end.

Not today, I'm booked solid.

Today was a busy day for the Little Man. His schedule was something like this:

24:30 bottle from Pete. (I went to bed at around 1:00. I sleep in the bedroom for a few hours, and then we bring Finn in, and Pete sleeps in the guestroom for a few hours.)

2:40 have wet diaper changed
2:45 drink a bottle as reward for humiliating bum exposure

sleep.

At some point, have another bottle and another wet diaper. (Pete did not write these down, but we deduced from the facts available to us that they did indeed occur)

At around 4:30, I got up, just as Pete was finishing a diaper change and getting ready to bring the boy in. We tried nursing, but he just wanted to sleep. I was concerned because I was under the impression that he had not eaten since 2:45. We figured out later that there was an undocumented bottle involved in the early morning's activities. Finn and I slept for a little while after the unsuccessful boobular attempts.

7:00 31 minutes on the right breast
9:30 wet diaper
11:00 wet and poopy diaper
11:03 30 minutes on the left breast

11:30 get caffeine citrate dose from tiny syringe, spend some time looking at Snoopys on Moses basket liner, have some lap time with Dad.

12:15 have eyedrops administered, one drop in each eye (This was not even close to the misery of pilling a cat. In fact, it was quite simple. It made us feel worse than it did him. He experienced some mild irritation that he got over very quickly)

12:20 wet diaper
12:25 second round of eye drops

12:30 have 30 ml bottle (The note on the eyedrops said that we were not to feed infants for four hours after their appointments. In ALL CAPS. Of course, we did not see this until it was too late to feed him. We decided to ask the doctor about it.)

13:00 eye doctor appointment. (His right eye is totally mature, and his left is just a little bit behind. He'll be back in 5 weeks for a recheck. We were present for this exam; we had not been before, while he was at the hospital. They hold his eye wide open with a little tool, and I could not really watch. Pete did. Maybe he can tell you about it. The doctor told us to wait two hours to feed him, which would work out well with the lactation appointment.)

15:00 wet diaper

15:20 appointment with lactation consultant. (I wanted to ask about the nipple shield. Plus, we got him weighed. He's 6 pounds even, but he's not gaining as fast as the lactation consultant would like. She wants me to switch him over to the second boob when he starts to wane on the first, and see if that helps. Of course, when she was watching, he performed like a total champ. No shield, no kitten rooting--this is when he shakes his head back and forth really really fast in what seems like frustration, and usually winds up with nothing in his mouth. He latched on to The Boob--the right one is The Boob; it outperforms Lefty every time. It would be a good TV show: Lefty and The Boob. A crack crime fighting team consisting of the productive and quick Boob and his slightly slower but doggedly determined sidekick, Lefty--and then he latched on to Lefty. The Lactation Lady said that we are doing a very good job, and she was impressed with his eating. He took 1o2 ml in a little over half an hour, which was very helpful to know, as until today, no one had ever weighed him before a feeding and after, to see how much he was eating. All in all, a good appointment. I'll try double boobing, and try to keep the shield at bay. We'll go back Friday for a weight re-check and see how he's doing. It's sort of like cramming for a test or flossing the week before a dentist appointment. We really have to be on our best behavior these next few days.)

16:00 35 minutes split between Lefty and The Boob, but mainly on Lefty (good job, Lefty!)
17:00 wet diaper
17:30 adults get ice cream, baby sleeps.

home. sleep.

It's 19:07 now. Pete's sleeping, so's Finn, though the boy is stirring a bit as I type. If the past week is any indication, the rest of the day will involve eating, peeing, and sleeping. Hopefully, it will not involve inconsolable crying. I'll go to bed at around midnight or so, Pete will stay up with the boy until around 5:00, at which point, I will take over. It's what's working now, and it seems to be what he needs. If I get at least 5 hours of sleep, I find I do pretty well. I have diaper washing to finish and maybe some food to cook. I think Pete wants to vaccuum. We'll see. Tomorrow, we have no appointments, though Pete has a gig in the evening. I have some work I would like to do, and there are always plenty of little tasks that can fit into the nooks and crannies that we find hidden throughout the day.

I slept very well from 1:00 a.m. until 5:00 a.m. when I woke up to take over for Pete. This is the way of things: we don't sleep for long, and we don't sleep together, but when we do sleep, it's for real. I am not terribly good at sleeping, and I generally don't seem to need the full eight hours, so this has not been overly painful for me. Pete's hanging in there, but he needs more sleep than I do, so I try to make sure that he gets it. He's sleeping now; both my boys are. Finn has been sleeping since he finished eating at 7:30, for the most part, aside from a quick diaper change and my assumption that he would then be hungry. He wasn't. So, of course, I am obsessing that he is not eating enough. If he's sleeping, he must be tired, and I can't really force him to eat, but the hospital pounded the every three hours thing into my head, and I can't get over it.

He has an eye doctor appointment today, and we have to put his eye drops in before hand. I am not certain how you get eye drops into a baby's eyes, but in my head, it bears a resemblance to pilling a cat.