six cats in the yard

I think the snow started falling *last* Sunday. Leigh worked from home on Monday and Tuesday, luckily so did everyone else in his office. But Thursday he had a meeting and so Wednesday he went in to prepare, knowing that he would be camping out on someone’s couch. I steeled myself for him to be gone until Saturday since the reports were talking about snow storms everyday for the next week!

It was nice to have the entire bed to myself (and Maddie) and to be able to put her to sleep at 6:30 instead of 7:30. She still didn’t sleep through the night, but I had enough time to start reading the Super Baby Food book that my friend Sarah gave me. And I hatched a plan to add another solid to her diet and get into more of a routine with the solids. I guess one of the reasons babies at her age will stop sleeping through the night is that they are still hungry and can’t get filled up enough from the breast milk, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

And after Leigh returned Friday night, the snow has continued to fall. But this year it is welcome, more peaceful and more of a blizzard! I remember being constantly cold and feeling off all winter last year. I didn’t know if it was from a dissatisfaction with work or my life in general, or it if was hormones from the pregnancy. This year, while I’m still working, my work hours are *much* reduced with no emergencies! And I’m happy to say that while we do struggle with my lack of steady income and an intermittent lack of sleep, I’m having a beautiful, fun, joyful time being a mom and perhaps that feeling of peace with the world is helping me to return to my pre-vet school feelings of calm, love, tolerance and openness that has really escaped me for a long time. The snow storm gives me a good excuse to snuggle up on the couch or get out an walk to appointments rather than drive and I get to see the world in slow motion.

Every now and then we look out the window and watch the snowmobilers tearing off down the street or watch the snowplows clink by or even see people swish-swish by on cross country skis. 

Today I appreciate my life.

Both of us want to give Madeleine the best start possible, so we were advised by Leigh’s stepmother, Martha, that we need to make sure we get her (and read her) many books. We also shouldn’t talk baby talk (which is a little hard not to do sometimes). So we immediately bought her a number of board books!

Now, of course, she’s old enough to reach for and put the death grip on many, many things, including the book you are reading to her at the time. Reading doesn’t seem to be her first priority, however. She seems more interested in seeing how the pages taste.

We looked forward to our visit to SF for Quinton & Alex for months, and having had a trip to Tennessee for Leigh’s dad’s funeral the month before, we knew that Maddie would weather the trip well…except for the fact that we got in to Oakland after 11pm and didn’t get to the hotel until after midnight. Totally screwed up her sleep so that was a hard lesson learned.

All in all, however, it was a terrific trip with too few pictures and too little time spent with many of Leigh’s and my good friends. It was wonderful to show off little Maddie, and just as wonderful to leave her with a terrific nanny for a few hours of downtime, especially after two days of very fussy baby not so down with napping all of a sudden. 

We took a trip to Japantown for some culture, Korean food and Q&A’s wedding gift. 

 We ate breakfast at what apparently is an SF institution, Mel’s Diner. And managed to have some breakfast before she broke down the first day, and while she was sleeping the third day.

We were able to meet up with Leigh’s good friend Jeff and his wife and kids at the Exploratorium. Though she’ll likely have no memory of her time there, Maddie will be able to see herself in some good pics. I can see how parents would want season passes to this place. You can’t possibly take it all in over the course of a single visit and there’s no way to stay longer than a couple of hours before you go through system overload.

Neither of us really wanted to leave when it was time, especially because it meant that I had to start working and Leigh had to go back to work. Ah well. 

When we were in Tennessee after Leigh’s father passed away, we decided to find a bunny costume for Maddie for Halloween. We are always calling her bunny and thought that would be a cute idea. Needless to say, I looked online and found something acceptable that would require a little adjustment (addition of pink to the ears) and then just never got around to it. All of sudden it was Halloween and I told myself that we didn’t need a costume for a 3-month-old baby who wasn’t even going to know that day was any different from any other day.

Then I got an innocent email from our friend Tricia asking what Maddie was going to be for Halloween. She has a daughter just 3 weeks younger than Maddie and they were going to dress her up like a hot pepper. Nothing in that email was meant to make me feel bad, but all of a sudden I remembered some of my childhood when my mother forgot to sign me up for softball my 6th grade year and I was devastated. I never played softball again and it was something I was good at. I just remember how I felt, like I wasn’t important enough for my mother to remember something that was hugely important to me.

I pictured Maddie, years from now, in therapy because her mother couldn’t make the time to get her a costume for her very first Halloween. After all, she would at least have pictures of it, even if she didn’t remember it.

I know that having a child really does make you relive and work through your own issues and, while my mother did a lot for me and sacrificed a lot for me in her own way, she wasn’t always able to give me what I needed. I don’t want to make that mistake with Madeleine. I know that I will make my own mistakes, maybe in the name of making up for what I lacked when I was growing up, but hopefully I can give her all of the opportunities that I never had and give her the love and support that I sometimes feel I lacked. I know that she will have regrets in life, but I hope that  she will always make the most of her time here on earth for travel and education and sports and music and drama or science or whatever piques her interest.

So I went right down to our local Wal-Mart intent on finding a kick-ass costume that I could be proud of…well, I went to the evil WM after trying our local used baby clothes store where I couldn’t find anything her size. I was actually excited about the costume I found.

This was just how much she naps according to schedule!   

When I took Madeleine in for her 2-month checkup, I also asked the doctor about her naps. We hadn’t really, at that point, thought too long or too hard about exactly how long or when she should be sleeping. I had just let her sleep when she fell asleep or when she seemed cranky. I didn’t really know about the “science of sleep” for babies.

I wasn’t really prepared for her response, because it made me feel like a neglectful parent for one thing, and her advice was contrary to the way I had decided to parent Maddie. She said that Maddie had to have two 3-hour naps each day, one in the morning and one in the evening and that if she wouldn’t go to sleep on her own in the crib, that I should let her cry herself to sleep.

I know that’s the advice a lot of people give, but it just wasn’t going to work for me. It broke my heart to hear her cry and there was no way I could do that, especially because the first time I tried it (and yes, the dr. made me feel bad enough with her speech that I had to try it to see if it really worked as simply as she said it would), she cried so hard that she lost her breath and I felt like a complete schmuck.

So, the bottom line, the discussion at the doctor’s office got me thinking, reading and talking to others about what I really should be doing about her daily nap schedule. And I realized that I had to start a routine for bedtimes.

Since we also didn’t really have a bath routine down, we decided to go with Emily’s and the No Sleep Solution recommendation and add bath time to the nightly bedtime routine. Luckily she loves her bathtime.

We are starting to get back into a routine that we hope will be interrupted by a move to portland. My perfect day would include an early-morning walk, followed by breakfast. Short nap for Maddie, then some play/bonding time. Next would be a 3-hour nap for Madeleine and yoga, meditation, and possibly time to take care of dinner prep for me, then more bonding time. Short late afternoon nap. More bonding time. The rest of it can be up in the air.

Wednesday we had a mostly good day. Walk on a beautiful, sunny fall day with a happy baby.

The summer flowers were still hanging on in most of the neighborhood.

Madeleine’s nap lasted 1.5 hours which gave me enough time  for a nice yoga session and she was happy and googly most of the day. The next day, of course, was a full-blown scream fest in the afternoon when I tried to get the sleepy beepy to nap and then again that night when we tried to put her down …. Ah well. You can’t win every day.

After spending two weeks in Eugene doing my best to help out with my mom, we  discovered the usefulness in the vibrating chair (for the baby) and the baby swing, so we ordered them both immediately upon arriving home. And I mean immediately, in that we hadn’t been home for more than an hour when they were on their way. They don’t always work, but often they can give me enough time to shower or to make dinner (as long as none of that takes more than 5 minutes).

But sometimes they don’t work so well and we are again reminded that Madeleine is one very opinionated infant and has been since birth. We have a healthy fear of her toddler years. And we think it will start early. 

In order to give myself a break and make it easier to update from here, I thought I would just give the highlights of what I remember from the first two months:

The first couple of days were spent in the hospital. I tried to get them to send me home a day early but they were having none of it. It was nice to be able to, albeit with a guilty mind, turn Madeleine over to the nurses at midnight the 2nd & 3rd nights in order to get some sleep for an unbroken 3 hours, but it was nicer to go home. They discovered that she was a “tummy sleeper”, which apparently, most babies are. She still sleeps on her stomach and it means that I will probably wait as long as possible to transition her from co-sleeping to sleeping full nights in her own crib. 

The first week home it was nice to have my stepmother, Christina, here to help out with taking her during the day to give me some nap time, though I hesitated so much to part with her. Even now, I think I should give her more daddy time but it is difficult to let her go. I understand now what empty nesters must go through.

Unfortunately, Leigh had to go back to work the week after she was born.

She was holding her head up from birth, but still needed support often and she was scooting and grunting shortly after birth, so we’re afraid she may be walking early. We also discovered that she doesn’t like hats and doesn’t like to be swaddled. In addition, her favorite settling position is being held on her stomach with a thumb in her mouth (we had taken her pacifier away, only to give it back at 6 weeks of age). 

I had a few visitors during the first week home, namely my cousin Kailee and her son Caden, along with my Aunt Sherri and Uncle Scott. I also had a visit from my mother, which I will leave, perhaps, for another post.

Her first 6 weeks are a blur, mostly sleeping, feeding and diaper changing with a few of my own breakdowns and cry fests from lack of sleep or from grief (see post about my mother). I think most days I never changed out of my pajamas and many days I spent in front of the the television, catching up on old CSIs and getting into new shows like Eureka and Burn Notice (because when you’ve seen every MASH or Star Trek episode a million times, and you’ve watched about as much home improvement shows as you can handle unless your name is Leigh, trying new shows just makes sense).

Our first venture forth into the real world was at 2 weeks old in order to print photos for my mother. It ended in her screaming through the checkout process. I calmed her down enough to set her back in her carrier, where she almost promptly fell asleep, giving me an opportunity to go grocery shopping with no screaming whatsoever. I think at that point, I was still very afraid of her crying in a public place. I was still unsure of my own ability to read her signs and know what she needed. 

My good friend Emily and her son & husband moved back to the states when Mad was about 3 weeks old and we’ve been able to spend some good, quality time together.

Stephanie came to visit for a few days and we went out to our first dining experience as well as our first coffeehouse adventure.

Right about that time, she started smiling and cooing (was it Stephanie’s presence? We’ll never know). We also, at four weeks, gave her her 1st bath and she seemed to like it.

About 6 weeks of age, she started drooling, so we wonder if she’ll get a tooth early.

Then when Madeleine was 6 weeks old, our routine was completely disrupted.