The Virtual Baby Blog

A Day Off

Today is David's first day back at work. I miss him, and was a little worried about being on my own with the baby all day, but at the same time I was ready for him to go back so we could get into our "real" routine and out of the in-between stage of both of us being home. Eric and I are having a good, mellow day. It's very warm, so Eric is sleeping a lot, and I've just been taking it easy, not doing anything strenuous. I got a bunch of books from the library yesterday and have been browsing in them while Eric sleeps on my chest.

I'm happy to say that my bout of depression was blessedly brief and I have been cheerful and normal (if sometimes tired) since.

I cleaned the kitchen. The need to keep up with Eric's bottles, even after we went out and bought more, has created the anomalous situation for us that sometimes we need to do dishes and there aren't enough dirty to run a load. We've resorted to, for instance, running all the cat food bowls through, and I have also resigned myself to sometimes running a not-quite-full load. Adrianne says she always hand-washed Noah's bottles and he never got gastro-enteritis, but we have a theory that her sink is cleaner than ours, so we hope to keep washing bottles in the dishwasher as long as possible.

Eric is sleeping with us pretty much all the time now at night. Here's an unanswerable argument for sharing the bed with the baby: he sleeps longer when he sleeps with me than when he sleeps alone, so I am up less often and consequently better rested. I think he is actually sleeping longer, but also when we are side-by-side his little half-wakings can be dealt with without either of us coming completely awake. Sleeping with him is also very sweet. Listen to this: if I put him down out of touch of me, he will scoot himself until he is in contact with me and then go to sleep. The first couple of times it happened, I thought it was just coincidence, that he had simply fussed himself randomly into position, but now it is clear that he wants to be cuddled. How much volition or intention he has about it isn't clear; it may just be that he fusses and wiggles until he's happy, and he's happy when he's up against me, but my heart melts. Last night, I put a soundly sleeping baby on his back in the middle of the big open space between me and David in the bed, rolled over, and prepared to go to sleep. Next thing I knew, I had a baby cuddled up to my left shoulder blade. I could feel him breathing and feel his heart beat, so I let him sleep that way until the next feeding.

I am letting Eric sleep between me and David even though all the co-sleeping literature says the safest place for him is between the mother and the edge of the bed. The literature never gives a rationale, though, until yesterday, when I read parts of the book Attachment Parenting, which I got from the library for fun. I thought the rationale was probably something like it being easier for two people to squash a baby than one, but then why did the materials never say "between an adult and the edge of the bed," but always, "between the mother and the edge of the bed"? Turns out it's because "no one has an affinity for the baby like the mother, especially the breastfeeding mother." David said, "So I'm a lout who will carelessly crush my baby." I said, "Apparently."

The attachment parenting book was...interesting. It's one of the many breastfeeding books I've read that make breastfeeding sound idyllic and effortless while suggesting that giving your baby formula is morally equivalent to force-feeding it ground glass and rat droppings. It also shared with many breastfeeding materials a heavy emphasis on why you should follow its plan accompanied by a near-complete lack of concrete information about how to do so. And it had an interesting subtext about motherhood. Besides the stuff about "affinity" for the baby, the book doesn't want fathers to give bottles ever because "nature" designed a single-feeder system; in the short section on attachment-parenting your bottle-fed baby, it said that mothers should give all the bottles, so the baby will have one primary feeder person. I'm not convinced; I think if nature could have figured out a way to make fathers lactate, it would have--what could be better for a baby than knowing it is part of a network of caregivers? Anyway, apparently attachment parenting is really attachment mothering.

If I am to be an attachment parent, despite being unable to breastfeed (though this book pretty much denies that there is any such thing as an inability to breastfeed--women who lose their milk while pumping are mentioned in passing in a section on attachment parenting premature babies, but the strong implication is that they didn't pump enough. I can assure you I pumped plenty), I am supposed to consider breastfeeding with a Supplemental Nutrition System. This is basically the way Eric managed several meals at the breast in our last few days of trying: nursing with the tube also in place so that he gets milk (or, now, formula) while sucking. Frankly, I can't think of anything less appealing, or more calculated to re-open wounds, than pretending to breastfeed my baby.

Eric is eating terrifically well and was up to 7 lbs. 6 oz. on our home scale earlier this week. I continue to feel that ending finger-feeding was a good choice, even though I wish I had been able to continue to give him breastmilk. I am also feeling good about how relatively easy life is now that I'm not pumping and finger-feeding anymore. David and I were doing fine with the routine, and would have kept it up, but now that we're not doing it anymore I see how hard it was, and I wouldn't blame me (much) if I had quit for that reason alone, nor would I blame any woman who simply chose not to do it. There's a lot to be said for me being rested and having the energy to give Eric more time and attention outside feedings.

Eric goes into milk coma at the ends of feedings, as always. The other day he ate a huge meal, and when he was done he let the nipple slip out of his mouth and lay there in my arms. His chubby hands lay slackly on his little buddha belly, and his eyes and mouth were half-open. A film of milk glistened on his lower lip. He looked like nothing so much as a Roman emperor after the debauch; it was almost embarrassing to look at him.

He is growing into his clothes. Last week, his legs still tended to slip out of the legs of his outfits, so that his feet would be all bundled up in the body of the little suit. We joked about what the floppy things at the bottom of the outfits were--perhaps for tying into a decorative bow? But that doesn't happen anymore, and some of his onesies actually fit. He is working on lifting his head more, but he can't keep it up for long. Yesterday he was resting against my shoulder, lifting his head and holding it as long as he could, lifting it again. He was exactly like one of those little bobbing-head dogs you see in the back windows of cars.

Eric is losing his hair. Just the hair on his head, not the furry pelt covering his back and shoulders. It's the Penn legacy: lots of body hair, little head hair. We're thinking of putting a little Rogaine in the formula. Actually, I'm just hoping he loses it all; right now, he has big bald spots and a generally mangy appearance. Hair is good; no hair is fine. The mange is less than ideal. If he loses it all, we can tape little bows to his head like people do for little bald girls. He is also more and more interested in the world all the time; the other night he spent a long, fascinated time in David's arms watching the ceiling fan in the kitchen go around and around and around.

Eric often dreams with his eyes open, especially just as he's falling asleep. He smiles, his little hands and feet twitch, his eyes roll back in his head. It could be quite alarming if one didn't know better.

Time is passing quickly and smoothly for me. I keep losing track of dates. I am learning to get things done in tiny increments--yesterday I paid bills and balanced my checkbook during four or five brief periods over many hours. I'm a little compulsive about finishing things in one sitting, so I am proud of myself for learning to work this new way--and impressed by how much it is possible to accomplish. I cleaned a whole pile of junk out of the dining room by dealing with it one object at a time over a period of four or five days. Four or five days may seem like a long time, but it would have taken a lot longer if I'd waited to have the time and energy to do it all at once.

Even though I accomplish very little of a productive nature in the course of a day, I realized recently that I needed to take a day off, because I was using all of the time I wasn't either sleeping or taking care of Eric on productive things. It finally hit me that a day of lounging would be good, and that is what I have mostly been doing today (beyond the essentials of doing Eric's laundry and washing the dishes). It helps that my to-do list is down to very non-urgent things, like working on my website, and housework, which has a kind of urgency but also has the grace to wait around until you get to it. If you don't do housework one day, it just waits patiently for you.

Posted by Su Penn at June 26, 2003 04:05 PM | TrackBack