2 Months (almost)
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...