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Wow. I can not believe it. My baby girl is already 2 months old! How can it seem like only yesterday and yet I cannot remember my life before her? Time has taken on an entirely new meaning. The days no longer pass without significance. Weeks no longer vanish. There is a new reference point in my life. My daughter. Everything she does is fascinating. Every day brings a momentous occasion, another feat to mark the passing of time. Time is both accelerated and elongated. It’s impossible, but it’s true. I guess time just got more important. I’m paying attention. I don’t want to miss anything.
I shouldn’t have waited so long to start recording my thoughts. I can’t remember it all. Too much has happened in my little universe, not the least of which being that the center of it has changed. The baby rules the school. No doubt. Princess in charge decides everything about my life these days. A helpless baby decides when I get up, when I can sleep, when I can eat and, when I have time to take a shower and when I have rights to my very own body. It’s wonderful to be needed. It’s hard work, but it’s wonderful, fulfilling, exciting, meaningful work.We have a good time together, us girls. The building blocks of how we spend our days stay the same, but the order in which we do them and for how long does not. Adela has not gotten to a place of any sort of consistency when it comes to when and for how long she eats, sleeps or is active. So, I just go with it. But there are certain things I always try to include in her very flexible and sometimes erratic schedule.
A typical day for us these days goes something like this.
Adela almost always wakes up for a 1st feeding at about 6am. She’s still sleeping in our bed, so feeding her consists of rolling over toward her and rolling her over toward me. It’s nice (but we’re going to try and start moving away from co-sleeping, more on tha
t later). Sometimes she’ll go back to sleep after that, sometimes not. If she does, I sneak out of bed and try to take a shower before our day together starts. But that usually doesn’t work. On the lucky days Craig is working from home or doesn’t have to get on the road until a little later, he and baby girl have Daddy-Daughter time after that first feeding. He bundles her up and takes her and the boppy into his office where they spend time together so Momma can take a little early morning nap. That is a real blessing, let me tell you. Craig is a great Daddy.
t later). Sometimes she’ll go back to sleep after that, sometimes not. If she does, I sneak out of bed and try to take a shower before our day together starts. But that usually doesn’t work. On the lucky days Craig is working from home or doesn’t have to get on the road until a little later, he and baby girl have Daddy-Daughter time after that first feeding. He bundles her up and takes her and the boppy into his office where they spend time together so Momma can take a little early morning nap. That is a real blessing, let me tell you. Craig is a great Daddy.
It’s fun to watch him with her as he develops his own parenting style. They ways in which he comforts and entertains her are totally unique to him. He is surprisingly independent when it comes to her. He has his favorite songs and holds that he uses with her and usually they work pretty well. I am learning to not jump in and help (i.e. correct) him when he doesn’t do things the way I would, and take a wait-and-see-if-it-works approach before rushing in to the rescue. His patented “off-roading” hold (that’s what he calls it?) works almost every time.
She gets a bath every other day, a compromise between everything I’ve read saying “don’t overbathe your baby-once a week will do,” and my Mom saying “of course you should bathe her everyday-don’t you feel better when you’re all clean?” So, I error on the side of Mom’s advice.
We listen to music together or, poor girl, she listens to me sing. I cataloged all of the baby/toddler songs/rhymes I know and put them all in one document so that I can easily reference it when I’m having a hard time thinking of something to sing. I got frustrated with knowing literally hundreds of songs and never being able to think of a single one.
I took quite a few workshops on early childhood education courtesy of the county library system over the past couple of years. There is one thing that always gets brought up and that is how vital it is to sing and rhyme with babies. Gone is the school of thought that it doesn’t matter until they grow up a bit. They have shown over and over again that singing and rhyming with babies, not just children, increases their future chances for success in school and makes them in general smarter than kids who are not sung and rhymed with. I remember one massive study they did a few years ago showing that simply the number of words (not even sung or rhymed) babies are exposed to correlates with their future intelligence scores. So I try to talk and sing to her whenever she is awake and alert.
I also sing to her in Spanish. I’m working on learning all the Cuban lullabies/kid songs that were sung to me as a baby. It has also been shown that babies can differentiate between various languages by just a couple months old. That ability to differentiate between phoenitc sounds might translate into an ability to learn other languages with greater ease later on. I am convinced that my Spanish accent is pretty decent because I was talked to in Spanish constantly as a baby and toddler by my Grandma (and Mom too.)
We have Moby time. I try to put her in the wrap at least once a day. She loves it for one thing. There has literally Never been a time when putting her in the wrap has not calmed her down, even when nothing else (including nursing) did. This invention is magical. Plus I can get dinner ready, vaccum, exercise (walk around the neighborhood), even Blog (yep that’s right, she’s in it right now). It takes some practice and of course everything takes longer to do than if she wasn’t in it, but it’s so worth it. And for the record, there are also multiple studies that have shown that babies who are carried (carried in whatever fashion-wraps are just nice because they leave your hands free) are better adjusted emotionally, cry less, talk earlier, grow faster and sleep better than babies who are not. So I figure I can’t lose. I enjoy it. She enjoys it. And all signs point to it being really great for her.
We try to nap. Well, I try to get her to nap mostly. I cannot seem to fall asleep, even when she does decide to nap because I’m so worried about whether or not she’s actually going to stay asleep that I can’t drift off. She doesn’t love napping. But I have figured a couple things out this week. One, she loves her swing.
I have been really reluctant to put her in it because I feel guilty doing it-I guess it just seems like having a robot babysit my child-but I’m getting over it. It puts her to sleep when she would otherwise be up, tired and cranky. So I am buying stock in D batteries. Two, she loves to be in the car. No surprise there. Most babies do I guess. I’ve started going for little drives when she doesn’t feel like sleeping (and I don’t feel like Mobying, because that will always eventually put her to sleep also). The only drawback to this method of sleep induction is that when I’m by myself, I have to keep pulling over to put the binky back in her mouth until she finally succumbs and drifts off.
We eat. I eat mostly cold food. She has extra-sensory perception when it comes to hot food being on the table. I rarely eat at the same time as Craig anymore, but it’s okay. Baby first. And boy oh boy, she eats ALL the time. I am started to try and stretch out feedings a little because I noticed it is getting to the point where she is crying for food at less than 2 hour intervals…and that is carrying over into nighttime which is really not fun. So, we are working on that. I’m trying to keep her entertained other ways for as long as possible when she starts showing signs of wanting the num–nums. I pretty much feel like I’m half-undressed half the day. Even so, we both love nursing and I have no intention making a swap to the bottle.
We play. She has one of those baby floor gyms and she loves it. It sports little jungle animals, crinkly leaves, music and lights. She has staring contests with the monkey. She spends time on her back looking at the lights, and time on her tummy exercising her neck. She won’t stay on her tummy though. She usually rolls right back over onto her back unless she’s really sleepy. She rolled over for the first time in this gym when she was exactly 4 weeks old. She smiled at me for the first time at just over 6 weeks old.
We go for outings at least a couple times per week. I get stir crazy and I think she does too, so we go to Walmart or the grocery store or Costco or the mall. I usually keep her in the wrap facing out (now that she is strong enough to hold her head up pretty much indefinitely-well, until she falls asleep) so that she can look around. Her eyes get so big. She hardly blinks. She seems to find it all very fascinating. If she’s in a sleepier mood I keep her facing me in the Teddy Bear hold and she curls up and she naps. Sometimes, if I’m feeling lazy and she’s alseep, I keep her in the carrier, not because I don’t to put her in the wrap, but because I don’t want to take her in and out of the stupid carrier. She tends to get upset when she gets moved in and out of the car seat for some reason.
Of course, errands take way longer with baby in tow, and we have had our share of mishaps (explosive diapers and crying fits in the car on the way home nostly), but like I was telling a good friend the other day, all the worst case scenarios tend to not be as awful as I’d imagined. I am getting braver and braver when it comes to breast-feeding in public too. I still won’t do it at Starbucks or restaurants, but I feed her in the car quite frequently and even nursed her at the beach last week on a little concrete bench. I have one of those Hooter-Hiders so it makes it easier to be discrete.
Bedtime is usually between 8pm and 9m these days. Never thought I’d see the day. But actually we don’t go to sleep that early. We get in bed and cuddle us as a family, watch TV on the laptop, nurse and read. It’s everyone’s favorite time of the day. Lights are usually out between 10pm and 11pm.
Well, that’s a good start on the things I want to remember about our lives right now…
Amanda - Awww, I love it 🙂 I can relate to SO much of this, how fun! I've been loving the Moby wrap, too. It took some practice getting him in there, but without fail if he is ready to sleep, he does. Great idea about cataloging the nursery rhymes, I'll have to try that. I am terrible about remembering them too.