The Virtual Baby Blog

2 Months, 20 Days Old

It's a wonderfully rainy, cool day and I am trying to take it easy after having been too busy for too many days in a row. But I don't quite know what to do with myself. I keep saying, "I'll relax after I get Eric's laundry in the dryer...after I load the dishwasher...after I quickly finish up the pots and pans...."

The rainy weather seems to put Eric to sleep, too, though he spent a chunk of time on the living room floor earlier playing Fist Mouth and practicing for rolling over, which I think is going to happen soon. He has learned to plant his heel and push himself over onto his side, and he does that repeatedly. Yesterday I think he might have gone all the way over once except that his bottom arm was in the way.

I went to bed about 8:40 last night instead of going on our evening walk with David, Scott, and Eric. David says Eric ate about 10 p.m. and then went to sleep. He slept until 7:30 this morning. It's not the first time he's gone that long a stretch, but it's still uncommon--and pleasant--enough to remark on. Despite the good night, I might take a nap after Eric's next feeding, which might be any time from now until 90 minutes from now.

I finally got out the video camera my parents lent us ten weeks ago and started figuring out how to use it. The tape in it begins with 20 seconds of my mom holding newborn Eric, and I almost cried looking at it. A representative sample of the era when Eric consisted of a hat, a face, two tiny fists, and a blanket, and spent all his time sleeping. A very long time ago.

Eric did get a little restless in his sleep at about 4 a.m., his usual eating time. I decided not to leap out of bed and feed him, but to see if he could be re-settled. I gave him his pacifier, and had to replace it several times, but he never woke up all the way and we were both sound asleep again in half an hour or forty-five minutes. I enjoyed being awake with the sleeping baby. He was in the coziest position, on his side with his belly and chest against my breasts, his legs curled along the underside of my breasts and tucked against my belly, his upper arm draped over my breast, and his face in the air pocket between breast and chin. It was like he was the west coast of Africa and I was the east coast of South America, and we'd been re-united as Pangaea.

I admit to liking the physicality of being the mother of an infant. My old cat Susie (this will link up, I promise) used to love to be held as long as you put her over your left shoulder, and over the years I developed a sense of a "Susie socket," a space there that she fit into exactly. When she died, my Susie socket felt very empty for a long time. Even Scott's wonderful cat Harvey, who loves to be held, too, and is perfectly happy to drape himself over my left shoulder, just doesn't fit it quite right. Well, I have some kind of "Eric socket," too, though it's less defined since he wanders all over my abdomen and lap. It's just a sense of familiarity and rightness that develops over time--and for the last eleven and a half weeks, I've had Eric on me for hours every day.

Did I tell you about the most recent unsolicited parenting magazine I received in the mail? It had an article in it by a woman who has eight kids and has been breastfeeding continuously since 1984. That must come close to being some kind of record, though when I mentioned it to my mother, she said, "Hmph. Some people are just stupid." Which makes me want to tell you three things:

1. My mother said that in the most pleasant voice, as if she were saying, "I see the sun has come out at last." It made me laugh because when Adrianne was in Michigan, I was telling her about how, while the freeway through Lansing was closed and all the traffic was diverted onto surface streets, we'd had this huge problem with people not knowing enough not to block an intersection when traffic backed up more than a block, so that people coming the other way couldn't move even if they had a green light. There was an article in the paper, which both introduced mid-Michigan to the phrase "don't block the box," and explained how not to block the box. Adrianne said, "I can believe people hadn't heard the expression, but that people needed to be taught not to block an intersection!" I said, "Well, people are stupid," and Adrianne laughed because, she said, I said it so pleasantly that she thought I was going to say something like, "Well, people need time to adjust to new situations," or something sympathetic like that. When my mom said, "Some people are just stupid" in the nicest tone of voice, I thought, "I am my mother's daughter."
2. It also reminded me of these two festival friends from Ireland. To them, everything was either "lovely" or "crap." "How was lunch?" you'd ask them. "It was crap," they'd say ("crep"). "How is your book?" "It's lovely" ("loovly"). It was so refreshing to me, because American lesbians are so...careful...in what they say, and tend to "own" everything. "How was lunch?" "Well, it wasn't the best lunch I've had here, but garbanzo beans aren't really my thing. I liked the salad." "How's your book?" "I'm enjoying it. You might like it if you like this kind of thing." Just so, about the woman who's been breastfeeding for 17 years, I would say, "It's not a choice I would make, to have 8 children..." But my mother cut right through the crap.
3. The woman with the 8 kids wrote an article about how much she and her husband love babies, which is why they keep having them. She reminded me of a character in the novel The Family Tree by Sherri S. Tepper (a fun read I highly recommend...if you like that kind of thing), Dora's mother, who had all these kids she didn't deal with because she liked being pregnant and she liked babies but really didn't have a clue about handling kids.

Eric and I went to the community college yesterday to fill out a bunch of paperwork at human resources. Human resources for liberal studies, it turns out, is in the only office on campus which is not barrier-free, the second story of an old house. How this affected us: I had to leave the stroller in the downstairs entry and haul Eric up in my arms. Then I sat filling out forms with one hand while he wiggled in the other. Finally, after he had spit up on me, the HR woman said, "Do you mind if I hold him?" and she proceeded to dandle him on her knee, admire his head control, exclaim over what an alert, interested baby he is (if she could see him today, waking from a near-coma only to eat, she'd retract that), and chat about what her own two kids were like as babies. It was so nice to have someone not only be happy to see him, but willing to help me out with him. I hope I am that kind of experienced mom someday, happy to see other people's babies and ready to help out.

The other night, I dreamed that I was listening to a man give a speech when he started having trouble breathing. I was running for oxygen for him when I woke up, and Eric was beside me making these little choke/grunt noises he makes when he starts to drift close to being awake. I had incorporated Pig Baby into my dream.

So everybody makes a big deal about SIDS, right, and I am always coming across scary statements like, "boys between the ages of two and six months are at the greatest risk," but I have not seen statistics about how prevalent it really is. Until day before yesterday, when I came across the numbers on-line: about 2700 babies dies of SIDS every year, which sounds like a lot until you know that nearly 4 million babies are born each year in the US. I admit to being enormously relieved.

Posted by Su Penn at August 16, 2003 08:14 AM | TrackBack