May's blog

3 months +

May — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 13:33:20 -0700

I keep thinking of great ways to turn a phrase about Mia, and then inevitably being called back to duty and forgetting them before I can blog. Which is no great loss for the Internet, but makes it a bit harder to consistently produce content here. My other excuse is that the majority of my posts are written when Mia is asleep; because the packandplay/crib thing is next to my computer, I wake her up with my 70 words-per-minute clicking (ok, more like 60 now that I've switched to Dvorak). I just typed this paragraph on the iPad, and it was non-literally painful. Though apple's auto-correct isn't bad.

Luckily, Mia also loves playing in her playgym, so now that she's awake I can type this while she entertains herself. I found out that she was ready for one when we had a playdate at a friend's house, and she wouldn't stop playing with this one. I thought it was the cutest thing, but when I mentioned I wanted to get one, another friend ended up loaning us this one (not exactly, it's a few years older). My biggest lesson from baby-raising: beg and borrow, but don't buy everything you think you need. M barely uses the super-expensive swing that we got, but loves hanging out in the changing table. And she's gonna outgrow both in another month or so. You just can't know how they'll use things.

I thank the stars that she's still very independent for a baby - she looks around for us, but she'll hang out by herself for hours, which other moms tell me (with envy) is unusual. I think that's starting to change, however, with her growing awareness and sight. Now she can see me if I'm typing when she's in her crib, and will make cute or demanding noises. Since I'm not sure I'll be getting as many chances to blog, I've set up two Twitter pages: one for me, and one for her. Actually, that makes it sound like there was foresight or wisdom involved in this decision, when actually at 5am this morning my brain decided that people would stop reading my blog unless I posted more, therefore I should post more, but since posting these long, verbose pages takes writing time that is hard to find, I needed to set us up accounts on Twitter. Once I decided to do that, it let me fall asleep. I'm unused to following my brain's middle-of-the-night cravings, but I figured I'd run with it. I probably should have just eaten some leftovers instead.

Thursday's 4am brain-demand was that I wake up and offer to make C a sandwich before he left for work. It's like it decided I needed to punch feminism in the face, or something.

Month 3 has started off much better than 1 or 2. She sleeps from about 7pm to 9am, waking up twice during that and wanting to feed. Once around 2-4am, and once from 5-8am. I usually take the first, and C the second, so not only does everything feel more "fair" than it used to, we're both getting a decent amount of sleep for new parents. Although it takes us both a long time to fall asleep again once we're up - that's the really hard part. I would assume that since I'm spending 12+ hours Trying to Sleep that I'm well-rested, but it really varies day by day. The bad days I'm running on 3 hours of sleep, the good ones usually 7. So I try not to count, for fear I realize how tired I really am. Mia actually slept 9 hours straight the other day, but I couldn't take advantage of it because at 2am I woke up and waited for her to wake up, only to doze off again and wake up a half-hour later. This repeated until 5am, at which point she woke up and was starving, and I was a sleep-zombie the whole next day. It's a weird combo of having a routine and constant change as well...it means every day is different, and also that I have no idea what's coming next.

M's head control has really improved to the point where it only flops around if she's tired, so C has taken to handing her to people willy-nilly in order to make them more comfortable with babies. We both agree that it's unfortunate that in the US, by the time you're having a baby, it's not likely that you've actually had much experience with them, so the learning curve is steep. Ok, she's napping again, I have to take a break...

2 Months (plus one day)

May — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 19:34:40 -0700

Ok, I shouldn't have mentioned the 7 hours thing, because the last three days it's been 6 instead. Which still sounds a bit like parent humblebragging, but man that extra hour would be soooo nice...sigh.

In any case, here is photo evidence of the double chin. If she wasn't mine, I wouldn't post such an ugly photo of her. But I think it's pretty funny. Poor M. When she starts school I'll have to archive my blog somehow and take all these things off the internet. But until then...

A friend sent a link to this article hoping to liberate me from breast-feeding guilt. It certainly worked - I feel much more ok with the idea of giving M formula, even though that is really going against the parenting tide these days. I really like the idea that assuming breastmilk is "free" gives no value to a woman's time.

2 Months (almost)

May — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 16:40:09 -0700

We continue to have an awesome baby. The developmental changes are so welcome but subtle...she holds her head up a little more, she looks at you a little longer, her smile stays longer on her face. I think I heard her laugh the other day. It's just amazing to watch. And she is getting huge - her double chin has connected her chunky cheeks for a while now. Which is actually hard to clean, unfortunately, but I'm lucky to have such a healthy growing baby. One thing you hear a lot of from other moms is "I can't remember when my baby (no matter what their age) was that small!" And now I know why - I saw a friend's baby who is a month younger, and I said the exact same thing to her mom.

Another thing moms will say to each other is "How are you doing?" For people who haven't just had a kid, this phrase usually means you whip out your stock answer of "Great, you?" But for moms, this phrase means "Tell me about your mental state and whether you're feeling post-partum depression, and then lets talk about this in detail." It took me a bit to figure out why I was getting such puzzled looks when I automatically used the stock response.

I got pretty lucky post-partum, I think, as I only broke down crying twice. Both times felt more due to serious-lack-of-sleep/other frustrations than to hormones, but who knows. What people don't tell you about having babies is that the first month to 6-weeks is really, really hard. Fucking Brutal, in my opinion. The reason varies from baby to baby, but there's practically no one out there who has an easy first month. There are some relative differences, i.e. M usually doesn't scream her head off when she's upset, or if she does scream it doesn't last long, but that's no compensation when you are completely incoherent due to interrupted sleep. But then you somehow get over the hump, and things start getting slowly easier. For me the peak was about 3-4 weeks into it, where I felt that if everything continued going the way it was going, I wasn't going to make it. But then she started sleeping a 4-5 hour period during the night. And then she started smiling. And then breastfeeding got easier and C could start giving her a bottle, etc. And now I'm really enjoying my days again and it's such a luxury to be able to bond with my daughter like this.

We took her to Hawaii for a week, which was soooo nice. When I first bought the tickets, I thought "even if I just see the inside of two other apartments for the week, it'll at least be a change." But I got some beach time, some hangout-with-other-moms time, some lay-in-the-sun time, and my parents got more time with M. And flying with her was much easier than expected, although the first night was rough because I'd had so much pre-flight anxiety that I hadn't been able to sleep. And if you can't tell by now, because certainly I don't seem to be changing my behavior to get more of it, when I don't get enough sleep this whole thing breaks down. But other than that, it's been surprisingly easy to continue our lives, even with a new baby in the mix.

Places that I have now breastfed in that surprised me:
Michael Mina (a 1 Michelin starred restaurant)
Airplanes and Airports
The beach
My car's driver seat
Other people's apartments
Chinese restaurants
Cirque du Soleil

Mia slept 7 hours last night. SEVEN. OH MY GOD my life is AWESOME. I'm firmly in the camp of "we do not brag about wonderful things for fear they never happen again", but OMG SEVEN HOURS SLEEP. Superstition would have us repeat what we did Sunday all over again today, but that would involve C making us waffles, lazing around on the couch, C going to work while the baby and I napped, and then Cirque du Soleil. So that would get expensive to do again. Maybe I'll try the napping thing again...

The faces my daughter makes when pooping

May — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 16:09:39 -0700

Alternate titles for this entry:
Reasons she'll blame me for therapy
Might as well put her on the internet first
or
The closest I've come to peeing in my pants this year.

I can't get the animated gif to display well in Firefox, so you can find the whole thing here, or a full color video on GooglePlus.

2 Weeks Old

May — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 13:42:27 -0600

M is spoiling us. She's such a mellow, chill baby that it makes me scared to have a second. There's no way another baby will be this good. Every now and then she'll get super gassy, and that's about the only time we have to listen to unstoppable crying, but even then it's not really all-out-crying, it's more "this is really uncomfortable and I'm going to make sounds and faces to show it." And then when she finally farts/burps/poops we're so relieved because now she'll be able to sleep...having a baby really opens your relationship to bodily functions. We've taken to congratulating each other for them, in order to be consistent for her. Except the stinky ones...those we still try to hide. But for the most part, once you've had a diaper change misfire and start running down your leg (jeans for C, bare leg for me), you really relax about the whole thing and get much less grossed out by it. Last night was a go-thru-two-diapers-and-the-whole-changing-pad type of change, and I just nonchalantly rinsed her off in the kitchen sink before we went back to bed. The most surprising thing to me is how fast this confidence develops - 2 weeks ago I barely knew how to pick up a baby or change a diaper and I was terrified of bathing them. Now I can do 2 out of 3 before she even wakes up completely.

The first week home for the hospital, we had friends over every night, and they brought take-out. I had no idea how helpful this is, and now I feel bad for not doing it for friends who had babies earlier. We were just getting settled into our new routine, so I could barely think twice about food, and having ready-made plans and food show up was AWESOME. They got to meet the baby, we got adult conversation, and everyone got fed...everyone won. Especially when they brought extra and I could eat it for breakfast and lunch :)

We've been mostly using disposable diapers with occasional naked time on a waterproof pad and the occasional cloth diaper, but I'll probably try to start EC soonish. She's amazingly competent at sensing when a diaper comes off and pooping immediately, which seems like it'll work well for EC, though it makes changing her diaper an anticipatory stand-off. I finally caved and bought a changing table from IKEA, and it does make things easier. We were fine using the dining table, but changing time is now much less fraught with worry if I go wash hands mid-chnge. Besides, C wanted one, and since he's been doing a majority of the changing, he gets what he wants. So on the front of avoiding baby furniture and stuff, my big caves have been a swing (not used much yet, hear it comes in handy soonish...), a pack-and-play (used as a crib), and the changing table (foldable). Not too bad so far. The pack and play is super useful - I'd figured we'd all just co-sleep (baby in our bed), but the first night made it clear that I can't sleep with her that close to me - instead I'll lie awake all night neurotic with "is she still breathing?" worries, which once again everyone always says, and I didn't listen to. In my defense, you can't know how you're going to react to your own baby. We've napped together successfully in bed, but at night I find it much easier with her in the pack and play near our bed.

Everyone asks about the sleep, so here's the low down - as a breastfeeding mom, I get to sleep about every 2-3 hours, as much as I want to as long as it's in intervals, because she eats every 1-4 hours now. So a typical night time is getting ready for bed around 10pm, letting her eat as much as possible, then going to bed while C changes her and swaddles her and puts her in the bassinet/pack-and-play. At first she'd wake up at midnight, 2am, 4am, 6am, 8am, etc. and want to be fed, and feeding would take about 20-30 minutes. After 3 days when my milk came in, I started (unintentionally) waking up when she's stirring, getting her, changing her, feeding her, re-swaddling her and occasionally letting her fall back asleep on my chest before putting her back down and going back to sleep. C is totally willing to do the nighttime changes and burping, and I know some couples do this as a way to keep things "fair", but in my mind it doesn't make a ton of sense since I'm already used to the interrupted sleeping from pregnancy (I was waking up every few hours to pee) and am going to be up anyways. So C mostly handles the day changing and burping instead. In any case, like I mentioned before, the first night home from the hospital with the every-2-hour feedings was really rough, but since then the feedings have spaced out and become almost pleasant. I can't say I love getting up, but I'm happy after that. She rarely cries during the whole thing, and now the timing is more 10pm feeding, 1am, 4am, 7am, with feedings taking 10-20 minutes. Last night was 10pm, 2am, 6am, 9am...which was awesome and I hope keeps up. As long as I remember to get a nap in during the day, I feel pretty rested, but on the days that I forget or have to skip a nap I tend to crash around 8pm.

After a month, the breast-feeding advocates say that you can start using bottles/artificial nipples, but we've been doing so well weight-gain wise we may start earlier so that C can take a feeding or two. It's been going relatively well, in comparison to some horror stories I've heard, though it still hurts a bit when she first latches. However, my breasts have developed a mind of their own. I keep asking C if this is what being a guy is like. When she cries, or it's feeding time, or sometimes for no reason that I can tell, They'll start tingling and leaking breastmilk. It's pretty common, but certainly new to me, and occasionally I'll just stare in bewilderment as I start dripping on the carpet. Sleep-bras are very, very useful. I should have ignored the nursing bras and just bought more sleep bras, which are basically easy-access sports bras. Much more comfy. But the nursing bras are useful for going out in public, so they aren't all bad, and they remind me that I used to care about what I was wearing more than "can I whip my breasts out to feed when I'm wearing this?" Priorities!

I typed most of this while wearing her in a Hotsling, though now our visiting family is over and holding her. Baby-wearing is wonderful - you can do almost every activity you do pre-baby with them next to you, and it keeps them happy and content. We're going out to a fancy family dinner tonight, and probably someone will be holding/wearing her the whole night. So far we've gone out for dinner, dim sum, and lunch each once, and it's gone really smoothly. Best baby I've had so far.

I can has your nose!

Term

May — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 02:14:35 -0600

Baby-g was born Friday the 14th, saving her from ever having to have a Friday the 13th birthday party. 7lbs, 14.5 oz. If you want to hear the labor story, you'll have to ask, because it's the one preggo thing that I am not planning on blogging about. It was possibly the hardest thing I've ever done, and completely worth it. Also, having a doula was definitely the right choice for us.

We've had a rough two nights since we've been home from the hospital, with the intermittent sleeping and tag teaming comforting a crying baby. But today she's sleeping crazy amounts like the first 24hrs of her life, so I had to wake her up to feed just now, because I couldn't sleep. Engorged breasts are ridiculous things. In any case, as I was holding my zonked out daughter and feeding her, I realized that I couldn't have asked for a happier life, even amidst all this sleep deprivation. Having a child is an amazing thing.

39 Weeks, 3 Days

May — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 14:06:15 -0600

I'm not in labor, and there is no external baby yet. ARGH.

Monday started off at 2am with a 8-hour run of 5-20 minute apart contractions. Surprisingly enough, neither of us got much sleep. I was pretty jazzed, actually, hoping for a 10-10-11 birthday, and they weren't that hard to breathe through, so in between me breathing and C using the acupressure points that our doula had shown us, we double-checked that our bags were packed and were ready to call the OB & doula and head to the hospital once they got to the one-minute-contraction-every-5-minutes point. But they never got there. I paced around the apartment, spent a lot of time sitting (i.e. the toilet), took a warm bath, ate a big delicious breakfast of leftover Burmese food, and C checked in code for work. We even played Portal 2 for a bit. And then we went back to bed when it was clear at 10am that I wasn't having any more contractions.

Contractions feel very much like muscle cramps, which makes sense, given that's what they are. You can't really control them, most of the time you feel it coming on, there's no way to predict/control your reaction to the clenching, and when it's over you'll still feel some lingering soreness in your muscle. For me, having C push on the two acupressure points in my lower back decreased the cramp sensation by about 50%. The points are very close to the dimples in your lower back, so I could do it by myself occasionally, or use the two-tennis-balls-in-a-sock trick.

In hindsight, Monday morning was an example of false or pre-labor, but at the time it certainly seemed like it was the real thing. In our case, the two pertinent specifics that we either didn't remember or know are that real labor "progresses" - the contractions get less spaced and increase in length, and that in real labor the pain tends starts higher in the stomach, whereas in false labor the pain tends to be felt in the groin/lower abdomen. C was timing them using an iPhone app, and they seemed pretty consistent, but I guess the lack of progression was what should have tipped us off. There was bloody show, which did make me think it was real, but my water didn't break...basically there are all these things that contribute to labor that happen in no particular order, and there's no way to know for sure besides the non-exact checklist of how many of them have happened. So I totally understand why tons of women end up getting sent home from the hospital because they aren't actually in labor - it's so easy to think it's the real thing! We spent the rest of Monday in a dazed anti-climactic funk - like "What the hell, body, we totally could have been sleeping."

Before Monday, I'd been pretty content to let the pregnancy ride go as long as necessary before it happened naturally. But now I'm getting kind of antsy thinking "when is it going to happen???" The contractions I've had since then have been a bit more intense, but much less predictable when they happen, and I'm not very patient with waiting. Knowing that it could happen any time makes me hesitant to do anything...which is a waste of time. So I've been making myself do things to try and fight that. C's mom came over yesterday and we walked to lunch and a bakery, and then I finished another novel and got some real sleep last night, so I think I'm recovered from the Monday all-nighter and less anxious about having it HAPPEN ALL READY. Maybe :)

38 Weeks, 6 Days

May — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 18:31:07 -0600

I'm not in labor, and haven't had the baby yet. I basically start off every conversation with that statement these days. Especially phone ones with my family.

...

Things people have said to me that I should get an award for not punching them afterwards:
1. Excuse me, your water just broke.
2. Oh my god, you're Huge!
3. You're gonna pop any day now. (2 months to go at that point)
4. Wow, you're really waddling. (From an engineer, almost excusable)

At least I've been spared the comments about how-there-must-be-two-babies in there, or questions about how much weight I've gained, or other mom-to-be pet peeves. Turns out, you should be very careful talking to pregnant women. Some of the best conversation starters that people have used are open-ended questions: how are you doing/feeling/etc. This lets me either talk about being pregnant or not, because sometimes I get sick of talking about it all the time.

Our doula is semi-new to the doula-ing, but she's also a current yoga teacher, so the two prenatal visits I had with her were combination visits/private yoga instruction. It didn't help my pelvic pain like I was hoping it might, but I did realize that yoga and birth are very similar. (I'm biased because I'm actually don't like practicing yoga, though I do like the results: increased strength/flexibility/balance/etc) In my mind, they both involve holding uncomfortable positions and breathing through the muscle burning and thoughts of "I want to stop doing this now". So, good practice for birth.

Last night was a bit exciting - I had a decent run of contractions pretty close together around 6am. But then I got up and ate a NY bagel with an indecent amount of cream cheese on it, read the internet for a while, and went back to bed. I will forever be grateful to AK for making me realize that I don't have to continue using a middle-school-girl amount of cream cheese on my bagels, because 1) it makes no damn difference to my weight and 2) it makes an amazing amount of difference to my happiness.

Being on pregnancy leave has been awesome so far - I've made it through a bunch of books, played too many games on the iPad, read a lot of the internet, had fun lunch dates with friends, and haven't even started Portal 2 yet. I haven't driven myself crazy with boredom yet, nor nested myself into exhaustion, so it's been better that I thought it would be. Turns out that I can still find things to procrastinate besides work, which makes everything else more fun. Though my houseplants are possibly suffering, because now I procrastinate paying bills and watering my plants. Hopefully it's making them stronger instead.

My nesting keeps taking on weird forms - it's way more theoretical than actual. I'll think about something a lot, then eventually do it and forget about it. I've already made quite a few Goodwill runs, but today we pulled out everything in the guest bedroom closet and re-ordered it, found more things to donate, shoved our dusty hiking/camping/climbing gear in less valuable closet real estate, and now I'm going through the piles of clothing trying to marshal them into some semblance of order. I've been thinking about doing this for 3 weeks at least, planning out where things should go, and trying to figure out what the daily routine will need.

At first I was convinced that we didn't have enough clothes for Baby-G and needed to buy some, but it turns out that people totally give you stuff, both new and used, so she has way more awesome/cute clothes than I do now. (Thanks awesome people!) And people with kids somehow find you in order to clean out their closets, so if you're not too gendered with your clothing options, you can easily find yourself overloaded with kid stuff. Our friends adopted a kid 4 months ago, and he's outgrowing his clothes at a ridiculous rate, so we practically have a steady stream of clothing coming our way every few months. My major dilemma with the clothing is how to sort it: size, function(pj or going-out wear), or preference(soft/fuzzy/adorable). Such a quandary!

Squeamish alert - more fluid talk starting. One of the moms in my group that has already given birth was telling me that when she was giving birth she had to pee so bad but couldn't, so the nurses catheterized her twice, and she was so grateful both times. At first I felt horrified sympathy, but now I totally understand why she was grateful. The more Baby-G drops, the harder it is to use the bathroom - think old man with prostate issues, and that's my at-least-5-times-a-night routine. I have much more sympathy for men with prostate issues now.

Ok, back to sorting.

37 Weeks, 2 Days

May — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 18:40:23 -0600

Saw the OB today - now that I'm past week 36 I have weekly appointments with her until I give birth. The general schedule is: first 2 trimesters = once a month appointments, starting Week 30 they become twice a month, and Week 36 they are once a week. Usually the appointments involve peeing in a cup to test protein(pre-eclampsia) and sugar(gestational diabetes) in the urine, testing blood pressure and weight, listening to the heartbeat with a Doppler, then 5-10 minutes of talking to the doctor about any questions. Now that I've hit the weekly appointments they're now also checking fundal height(belly circumference), placement (engaged or not), and the fun one: dilation and effacement. Basically, the doctor feels up your cervix. C has been pretty game about coming with me to almost all of my appointments, which seems really rare - most of the other women in the waiting room are there alone, so I get to feel pretty special.

I'm also 2 cm dilated, which first doesn't mean anything and yet is 1/5th of the way there - at 10cm you're ready to push the baby out, and most of the hard work is getting from 5cm to 10cm. I don't know what I should visualize - some books say to think about your cervix as a flower opening in order to start labor. Since I've got two more weeks until 39, should I think about a flower in stasis? The existential questions are the hardest ones :) The real reason it doesn't mean anything, though, is that the average baby is born late. How is that possible? Statistics! Don't forget, average can imply the median, the mode, or the mean. In this case, the mode is a few days late, and the numbers are also wonky because more than 2 weeks late usually gets induced. However, this means I'm going to start keeping a towel in the car, because it really could be any time now. Scary and exciting and nervous all at the same time!

37 Weeks

May — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 18:53:13 -0600

Baby-G is now officially considered term, which doesn't actually mean anything. I think there's a decreased chance of her needing the NICU if born now, Alphamom says we're full term starting Week 38, but Wikipedia says that there's still risk of underdeveloped lungs/immune system/brain until Week 39, so I guess we're not fully out of the woods yet. Which is ok - she hasn't dropped/lightened(hah, what a term) yet, so I don't feel like birth is imminent, even though I'd like it to be. Lightening, when the baby descends into the pelvic cavity, is also called baby drop or head engagement, which is funny to read about because the phrase "torpedoes engaged!" comes to mind. Supposedly after lightening you can breath easier and eat more, but it's harder to pee and poo. This doesn't seem like a good trade-off to me right now, but it is a necessary one to get to the birth, so all I can do is wait for it and hope the phase doesn't last long.

It's been too hot (high-70s outside, so high-80s inside our place at 4pm) and I've been snappish for the last week. Luckily it has cooled down for the weekend, but temperatures are predicted to go back up for next week, and I'm hoping they don't. I've really appreciated having a gloriously cool summer, though SF tends to stay pretty stable temperature wise regardless of season, but hot days are very linked to grumpitude. I'm just thankful that our place has much more insulation than my old place - since old buildings in SF tend to have single pane windows, no insulation, and no A/C, my old top floor apartment had 20 degree differentials between outside and in, and I'd spend hot days lying on the kitchen tile trying to cool down. I've only had to do that once at our new place, and it's much more comfortable when you're not pregnant.

I finished up my last project at work, so I have a week to wrap up my year-review and organize/archive my files so that my team can access them, and then I start pregnancy leave next Friday. I'm already feeling bored. While I first thought "Sweet! Two weeks of vacation before the baby comes!" I imagined walking daily to the crazy-popular bakery a mile away and eating and reading, but now that I can't walk that far, my imagination is failing me on how I'm going to pass the time. I've definitely got tons of books to read, and Portal 2 (I saved it for this), and the ever-present internet, but I think a lot my minor activities are enjoyable simply because they're procrastination of work, and since I can't go play soccer or climb, I don't know what I'm going to do with my time. It kind of reminds me of being a kid and looking forward to summer vacation, and then realizing after a few days that you're bored and don't know what to do with yourself. The whole not-being-very-mobile or able to stand for very long makes much more of an impact on daily life than I've ever given it credit for. Just like everything - you only stop taking it for granted when it's taken away from you.