Yesterday Eric and I picked David up from work to have lunch, and then after lunch ran some errands. I had not previously tried to do several quick errands with Eric and wasn't sure how it would go with all that getting in and out of the car, but it went well. We continue to like our sling very much; it's much nicer than trying to use the car seat, which is heavy and awkward, and quicker to get in and out than the stroller, too. We managed all our errands with only one quick break to park in a shady spot and have a nice bottle in the back seat. Today, though, we are planning a quiet day at home. I find that two out-of-the-house days in a row requires too much recovery time to be worthwhile.
The sling, despite being the trendy parenting accessory of the new millennium, is apparently still a rare enough thing that I get stared at a lot wearing it in public. People will study me intently for a minute and then suddenly burst out, "Oh! You have a baby in there!" Or, as in line at the post office yesterday, they will figure it out when Eric starts making noise. People aren't even subtle, sometimes. Yesterday at Target one woman watched me approach her, and, without trying to hide it, kept her eyes on me as I passed and turned to keep watching me after I had gone by. I find myself checking: skirt tucked into underwear? Shirt riding up? Spinach in teeth? But it seems to be the sling that intrigues them.
Carrie came over and hung out with Eric on the deck while we washed the dogs. Eric loved it. He was interested in everything, especially Carrie's face and the phone lines that run over the deck to the house. He stayed awake for nearly three hours straight, the longest continuous waking period in his life. He's awake now, sitting in his bouncy seat and happily looking around. I think he's beginning to get tired, though, because the arm-and-leg waving has slowed way down in the last few minutes.
I feel guilty when I take advantage of his happy awake times to do other things. I find myself thinking I should be interacting with him and stimulating him. Shouldn't I be showing him pictures? Playing Mozart for him? Beginning to teach him his ABCs? But common sense tells me, if he's happy, he's happy. And he gets plenty of attention, believe you me.
When I woke up this morning he was lying beside me in the bed staring at me. It was a bit disconcerting. I guess he was learning all about snoring and drooling.
I was just interrupted by the painter knocking at the door with a question ("Do you want the gutters painted?"). What do they do on houses where everyone works during the day? Some days it seems like they can't work for an hour without needing my input about something.
Eric has put himself to sleep.
Some days I am in the Mothering Zone and do everything right. I know what he needs almost before he does, every bottle I make is exactly the right size, if he fusses the first thing I try fixes it. It's like we're dancing the Mother-Baby Minuet. Other days...I give him a bottle when what he wants is to be cuddled to sleep, then an hour later I let him work himself into a howling frenzy because it doesn't occur to me he might be hungry. ("Howling frenzy" is probably a bit of an exaggeration. OK, it's a big exaggeration. But he does cry pretty loud sometimes, until you cork him with the bottle. We say, "Hark! It's the lusty cry of the healthy newborn!" Though he's not really a newborn anymore.)
Yesterday one of our usual painters was sick, and was replaced by a young man who looked, to me, just like Emilio Estevez circa Repo Man, right down to the form-fitting t-shirt and tacky gold crucifix. In the course of the morning, I was in the upstairs bathroom brushing my teeth and Emilio spoke to me through the open window. "Excuse me, Mrs. Ken?" As I told David later, apparently Emilio has never been to festival, and has not learned to observe the polite fiction that a layer of cloth, in this case our white bathroom curtains, is an impenetrable barrier. He clearly didn't know that I was supposed to be able to go about my bathroom business while pretending I didn't know he was working three feet away, and he was supposed to do his work while pretending he couldn't hear me going about my bathroom business.
It's bad enough that I always end up dealing with the paint crew first thing in the morning, unshowered, wearing dirty shorts, no bra, and a baggy t-shirt with spit-up formula on the left shoulder. Yesterday when I actually bathed, dressed, and left the house, I made sure they all saw me clean as I was on my way to the car. Of course, Emilio knows I take showers because he was there.
All my t-shirts are baggy, because I am still wearing the great big ones from my pregnancy. Although I weigh about the same as I did before I got pregnant (plus 3 pounds, according to the scale at the doctor's office), my breasts are still bigger, and abdominally, everything is squishier and two inches lower. Most of my pre-pregnancy clothes fit, but not regular t-shirts, which are too tight, and some pants don't work anymore. And, alas, as I discovered when we washed dogs, my fabulous two-piece swim suit doesn't fit anymore either. It was quite the project stuffing myself into the top half of it on Monday night. At one point I thought I had succeeded, only to catch sight of myself in the mirror, thank goodness, because half my right breast was hanging out underneath.
My major lingering post-partum discomfort is that I have a zone of tenderness around my belly button. This would be fine except that Eric likes to kick me right there in the middle of the night. And there's Added Bonus Pain if his toenails need trimming. One of these nights I'm going to wake up without an appendix.
As well as not always being perfectly in the parenting groove, I am guilty of sometimes letting my baby cry while I, for instance, finish towelling off and get dressed, or eat the last two bites of my toast. We have a saying at our house: Secure Your Own Mask Before Assisting Others. You might evoke this principal, for instance, when someone asks you to fix them a sandwich just as you are about to expire from hunger yourself. In Eric's case, I know that if I pick him up it may be half an hour or forty-five minutes before I can do anything else again. I think I can take better care of him him if I have some food in my stomach, or if I'm dry and dressed rather than wet and naked. I'm not talking about fifteen minutes; just a minute or two. But the Attachment Parents, all of whom are sitting around wet, naked, and hungry with crying babies in their arms, would disapprove.
Oh, they'd disapprove of my feeding methods, too. Remember that I am supposed to be replicating breastfeeding as closely as possible while bottle-feeding Eric? All the breastfeeding positions have names: the Cuddle Hold, the Cross-Cuddle Hold, the Football Hold. I often feed Eric his bottle using the Barcalounger Hold, in which he rests his hiney on my lap and reclines along my abdomen facing roughly Northeast if I am facing North. I support him lightly with my left arm and give him the bottle with my right. It's a great position if we're in a chair that doesn't offer good arm support, because my torso supports his weight while my arm just helps him stay in place. It also keeps him propped upright, which is supposed to be good. But I'd like to see the woman who could breastfeed a baby sitting like that.
I've been at this an hour and should at least look at my to-do list for the day. I'm a little tired because Eric was up a lot during the night, eating like a hog. He ate at 11, 2:40, 5:30, and 8 a.m. it's my less-preferred schedule; I like 10 p.m., 3, 6, 9. But he never asks me.
I like to talk psycho-babble to him. He'll be crying, and I'll say, "I hear you saying you'd like me to give you a bottle," or "I hear you saying you'd enjoy being picked up now." I'm sure he's thinking, "Just shut up and feed me."
Posted by Su Penn at July 11, 2003 07:23 AM | TrackBack