Feels like I haven't written anything in a long time, though I see it's only been a week, really. Eric and I have been getting out and about more as I get better rested and more skilled at taking him places. I also am finding I enjoy visiting people with him. Going to other people's houses to hang out with him is low-stress as far as caring for him goes and good for me as it gets me out of the house and away from any chores that need doing. I've visited my friend Sarah, my mom and dad, and, last Friday, Julie, and I think I'm going to try to do more of that kind of thing. But doing things cuts into my writing time.
About ten days ago, I thought I detected a slight reddish tinge to Eric's hair, but it's awfully hard to tell when there is so little hair to judge by. But then last Monday when my mother and Nevada were here, my mom said, "I think he's got reddish hair. We have redheads in the family, you know." And yesterday at worship, my friend Kate was holding Eric and Mari Douma looked at him and said, "Su, is his hair red?" Some people don't see it; Kate said she didn't. David doesn't. Certainly Eric doesn't have red red hair; nobody will ever call him Carrot Top on the playground. But he might have reddish-brown hair. We'll see.
Mari also said, "I almost didn't recognize him, he's so big." I said, "Mari, you just saw him Monday!" (she's his pediatrician, remember.). She said, "Yes, I know." Maybe he just looks different with clothes on, but he did gain half a pound this week. He's "supposed" to gain about an ounce a day until he's four months old, so that's about right. He has doubled his birthweight.
I took Eric to worship yesterday because my friend Kate was in town from Columbus and was going to attend and she wanted to meet him. He was sleeping peacefully when we left the house; slept peacefully in the car all the way to the church; slept peacefully in my arms down the hall, up the stairs, and into the worship room...and as soon as my butt hit the chair, he popped awake and started happily playing Fist Mouth, cooing and gurgling and occasionally spiking into the Red Zone. He was pretty quiet but it was distracting me, and I was having to retrieve his pacifier for him and what not. About halfway through worship, my friend Joann came over and asked if I wanted her to take him. I almost said No, but then I said, "Yes," and he played Fist Mouth in her lap and cooed and gurgled at her for the rest of worship--except that when worship ended, I saw he was egg-babied on her shoulder very happily. It was nice for me because I got to worship for awhile. I've been leaving Eric home with David some weeks so that I can worship without distraction--trying to strike the right balance between my need to worship and my need to show off my baby.
"occasionally spiking into the Red Zone": when Eric is playing happily, he gets excited, and every now and then he gets so excited that it overwhelms him and he has to fuss for a minute. We call this "going into the Red Zone," by analogy with, say, the tachometer on your dashboard. Usually a quick trip into the Red Zone just requires a moment with a pacifier to re-establish equilibrium.
Another acquaintance told me after worship that she had just been going to come over and ask if she could hold Eric when Joann snagged him. I am so touched when people are interested in my baby. After worship, so many people (for "people" read "women") wanted to hold him that at one point I actually lost track of where he was.
"Fist Mouth," the game that's sweeping the nation, is exactly what it sounds like: you make your two hands into fists, and then try to stuff them into your mouth. It's a lot more fun if you're 11 weeks old.
One person we chatted with after worship was Esther, who has an adopted five-year-old, Matt. Matt asked her if he was ever as small as Eric, and she said, "I don't know. I didn't meet you until you were much older, eleven months." Matt replied that it would be a long time until Eric was as old as him, and that reminded me of my nephew saying last week at the family reunion, "No wonder he's younger than me; I was born first." A tautology that made me laugh.
Kate and I took her three dogs and Eric for a long walk in the woods after worship and had a nice talk. Eric and the dogs all enjoyed the walk. Eric sat in his stroller and looked around (a jog stroller, with big wheels, would have been good, though: we struggled over some tree roots now and again) and the dogs frolicked. Kate's puppy Maggie had to stay on-lead because she won't come when called, and once we were crossing a bridge over a creek and Maggie ran down the bank and under the bridge. Kate stood at the end of the bridge looking down to where Maggie's lead ran under the bridge, and she was calling, "Maggie, Maggie, come here." I was messing with Eric--fixing his sun hat or something--and when I looked up, I cracked up, because Maggie had gone all the way under the bridge and back up the bank and was standing at the limit of her tether, about two feet behind Kate, looking eagerly at Kate and wagging happily. It was exactly like the scene in "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" in which Max falls behind the sled and when the Grinch looks for him, Max is happily behind him, riding down the mountain.
I think I told you I'm all signed up to teach one section of Argumentative Writing, Mondays and Wednesdays from 8:10 to 10 a.m. To my surprise, I am really looking forward to it, though I hope it isn't too hard on me getting up to an alarm two days a week. I went last week to pick up the syllabus (they use a departmental syllabus at LCC), and it looks pretty manageable. I think I mentioned they are using a portfolio system, which means every student's work is read by two other instructors at the end of the semester (I am guessing that means I have to read two other classes' worth of portfolios). A pain, but you only have to give them a pass/fail, and you don't have to teach the final two weeks of the semester--it's just grading. And the portfolio is just one long and one short paper; they write three short and one long, which I have to respond to but don't have to assign grades to, and then they revise the long one and one short one for the portfolio. It's possible it adds up to less grading than the old system, under which they wrote 6 or 7 papers and revised maybe three of them.
Eric got two walks yesterday, because David and Scott took him out in the evening. He loves walks. He likes to sit up in his stroller and look around. In fact, we've been using the sling less when we go out, he and I, because he finds it too confining and fusses. I think he may start to like it better again when he has enough head control that he can ride in it facing outward, so he can see the world. Soon, I think, he'll be able to do that. In the meantime, we've become stroller people.
Julie asked me Friday whether I had considered re-lactation. She had been prompted to ask by a friend who is doing EBF with her daughter (EBF: extended breastfeeding, which means into the second and third year--and for some folks, even beyond that) and is very involved with La Leche. Here is what The Nursing Mother's Companion by Kathleen Huggins, the best book on breastfeeding I know of, says about relactation:
For various reasons, a mother may want to begin nursing after initially starting her baby on the bottle, or to resume nursing after weaning her baby. In general, the less time that has elapsed since weaning, the more likely bringing back a full milk supply will be.... Always critical to milk production is frequent and regular stimulation and emptying of the breast. This means that either a vigorous nursing infant or a fully automatic electric breast pump should be draining each breast at least every two and a half hours... A medication that has been used to stimulate milk production is Reglan....
I have, indeed, thought about trying re-lactation now that Eric is bigger and stronger. But relactation rarely results in a full milk supply for any woman, and there has been no miracle here in the last eight weeks: my nipples are still inverted, my breasts are still enormous, I still can't take Reglan, and I figure, if I couldn't sustain an existing milk supply pumping, I'm not likely to be able to create one. And I don't have a "vigorous nursing infant"; I have Eric. I figure the attempt to re-lactate would involve feeding Eric at the breast with a nursing supplementer (the little tube at the boob) to try to get him to figure out how to nurse, then pumping every couple of hours as well. My judgment is that to make the attempt would be to re-introduce a source of stress into my and Eric's life with very little chance of any reward for our efforts, culminating in a replay of our final four or five days of pumping and fingerfeeding, still the most hellish and painful days of my life. No thank you. Eric is thriving, I'm thriving, and we are basking in the pleasure of a string of happy days. Gee, I think I'll re-introduce massive sleep deprivation; frustrating, cumbersome, slow, and messy feedings; and weeping. Just what our daily routine needs.
Posted by Su Penn at August 13, 2003 08:49 AM | TrackBack