baybeasts

We have started giving Loey some food even though he is only 5 months old. We are trying to do a bit of the ‘baby led weaning’ method and he LOVES it. He knows if he is being duped by being given a non-food item to chew, so we are letting him loose on veges, fruit and squished up rice and oats. Er… with the odd chop bone thrown in. Today it is 42 deg C (107.6 F) in Melbourne - thus the photo below of Loey on the cool floorboards with a wet washer on his head!

Recent Loey developments include a fascination with all manner of tags. He’ll be mad keen to grab a doll… just to play with the tag for ten minutes. He is also delighting us with his enormous gutteral grunting, blowing of raspberries on everything - including the nipple, and he has started holding out his arms for us. It’s almost painfully sweet.

Our first family Christmas! It was so very far removed from xmas two years ago when trying to get pregnant with semen and syringe had failed and we were heading into IVF. My thoughts are with those who are still on the hard road. We are so lucky it eventually worked.

the bay tree

Before we were even pregnant, we decided that we would honour our baybeasts by planting their placentas in a big pot along with a bay tree. This week we finally took the placentas out of the deep freeze where they have been languishing since the births. We inspected them closely before burying them in a big terracotta pot that my friend A gave to me many years ago, and planted a bay tree bought from Ceres on top.

Loey’s placenta was dark and twisty. The cord was full of strange twists and lumps, and its insertion was velamentous, which means that the blood vessels were all caught up in the membranes rather than coming directly out of the placenta. This is a very rare thing and a bit scary, because when the waters break a vessel can rupture which would be likely fatal for the baby.

Huey’s placenta was small and neat. So much for the whopping great placenta that supposedly blocked him from getting into a good position in utero! There wasn’t much cord, but we don’t know if that was because it was actually very short or if it’s because it was chopped in the caesar and they didn’t give us the whole thing. I like to think that his cord was a bit short, plus round his neck (maybe even twice, I think I heard the doctor say), because then I can understand why he wouldn’t put his head down and the hideous labour and emergency caesar make sense.

It felt good to finally do something meaningful with the placentas - they were so precious, keeping our babies alive and well inside us all those months. And I think the bay tree, which was looking a bit wan and cramped in its nursery black plastic pot, is already looking greener and happier.

the christmas tree

This is our fifth christmas together. Of the four christmases so far, we’ve had one very sad one when we lived in Footscray where we didn’t do anything and felt rather miserable, one on the south coast of New South Wales with my family, another fairly sad one here in Preston, and one in Brisbane with bean’s family. We’ve never had a proper christmas tree, and rarely bought each other secret presents - we’ve always just bought something big we both wanted (like a camera) and called it our present.

This year, with two small babies, we couldn’t spend christmas with either of our extended families, so we decided to really do it properly at home, in celebration of our own little family. The two things that make christmas for me are having a real live christmas tree, and a big pile of exciting presents underneath it. So we allocated a budget for christmas shopping (that we both broke!) and made time to go out alone and buy presents for each other and for the boys (because they are too small to appreciate the surprise, we have made surprises for ourselves by each individually buying presents for each of them). And last week, I ventured out in the car to find a christmas tree. I had just been to three separate christmas tree vendors, and decided on a beautiful little spruce in a pot, when an idiot in a shiny Honda ran into the rear of our car. It was very scary - I was turning right, and waiting for a bus to go past when it happened. I am so lucky that the bus didn’t hit me, and so glad that I was alone in the car. I wasn’t hurt at all, but the car, sadly, was so badly damaged that the insurance company has written it off. This means that we have to somehow find a new one. We loved our car, but they are not terribly common because they don’t make them anymore and they are in demand, so we are feeling a bit miserable about our chances. We also feel miserable about the loss of the car itself - the car we bought so that our little family would be safe on the road; the car that carried our brand new babies home from the hospital.

Luckily, our brilliant friends S and K lent us their second car. The very next day I went out and bought that little spruce in a pot, and it has made everything seem better somehow to have it glowing with fairylights in the corner of our loungeroom, with a big pile of presents underneath.

At five months, Loey:

- smiles a lot, laughs more rarely (we think he has a special smile for us - with squinty eyes and a wiggly tongue)
- has learnt to roll from front to back and back to front without the brace on, and from front to back with the brace on
- can stick his bum up in the air (very cute when naked)
- is now working on crawling, both in and out of the brace
- is still waking up every hour or so overnight, but usually goes back to sleep pretty quickly
- still breaks all the rules
- is on the 90th percentile for weight and the 80th for height, and consequently looks much older than he is
- is mad keen for food (so far has sampled orange, pumpkin, sweet potato, banana, avocado, yoghurt, a lamb chop bone, and rockmelon - all have been enthusiastically, if messily, appreciated)
- breastfeeds fast and furiously (and just as happily from either of us)
- loves to drink water out of a glass (with one of us managing the glass)
- is working on his pincer grip
- loves to be outside
- loves new people and new experiences
- is getting snugglier (we love this so much! every time he puts his head on one of our shoulders it is like we won the lotto)
- is fascinated by chickens, the cat, and Huey

At five weeks, Huey:
- is smiling frequently and adorably (there is a particular cheeky grin that just melts our hearts)
- is becoming more and more wakeful during the day
- still sleeps a good 4-6 hour stretch overnight (bless him)
- is capable of putting himself to sleep (bless him!)
- stares very intently at whatever comes within reach (our faces, c. scott the cow, patterns of light and shade)
- has angelic blonde hair that even seems to be slightly curly and deep blue eyes
- is finally losing his newborn spots
- hardly ever cries, even though he is in the 4-6 week period of peak fussiness according to all the books
- breastfeeds with an attitude of total relaxation, with hands akimbo and eyes either focused intently on our faces or blissfully half-closed (and equally happily from either of us too)
- has super upper body strength, a long long neck, and will hold himself upright when we hold him over our shoulder (no head resting or relaxing in)
- has started talking to us with cute little squawks and a very animated face
- reaches out and swipes at things that interest him
- seems to move himself around on his back on the floor somehow
- makes crawling movements (and a lot of grunts and other noises indicating effort) if we put him down on his tummy
- stares at Loey and has even smiled at him once or twice
- has uneven creases on his legs (like Loey), so we are nervous about his hip ultrasound next week

Loey has stubbornly refused to use a dummy to settle, but is now finding it quite entertaining as a toy…

Huey has mastered the look of suspicion but it seems we are not too dodgy as he is still throwing us some gorgeous smiles!

blame the drought, not our chronic lack of gardening time…

(mind you, we did grow the apricots too, and they were pretty ace, even if there were only 4 of them)

Huey has been in our lives for four weeks today. It already feels like he was just always around. Even though we were both convinced that we were having a girl, there is very little grief for that lost imaginary baby. Huey is just our baby, an integral part of our little family.

I really wanted to write a proper post about Huey - the little things we have noticed about him, the way he has slotted into our day to day life. But the reality is that I barely get any time in front of the computer, and when I do, it is usually one handed because the other hand is busy helping Huey breastfeed! I hope that I get a chance to write something soon, before these precious newborn days disappear into a mist of tiredness and busy-ness.

Just one thing though - today, at 4 weeks exactly, Huey gave me his first genuine, awake smile. I melted. bean has been telling me he has been giving her little secret smiles for weeks, but I didn’t really believe her until today. Our Huey, the early smiler! Our babies are just so advanced, of course. Sadly we didn’t catch the moment on camera, so I’ll leave you with yet another photo of him doing that thing he does so well - sleeping.

So far, he’s been a champion sleeper (we know this probably won’t last but we are terribly grateful to him for easing us into it). He has slept peacefully and easily on every couch in the house, as well as in a baby hammock, in a bouncinette, in the sling (two kinds), on our chests, and in two different beds. He’s a snuggler - when we co-sleep he wriggles in until he is cosied up against our chests. But he seems to be just as happy to sleep on his own. All this both mystifies and delights us.

Meanwhile, Loey is getting on with the business of being four months old…

It’s been a funny old year. It’s the year in which we got our dream - our family, our two boys. And we couldn’t love them more. But it has been such a humbling year too. We didn’t have the births we hoped for, and we are not the parents we thought we would be. We were never going to wrap (we did), give a dummy (we’ve tried but Loey refuses it), use disposables (Huey needs them for his nappy rash), give drugs (we’re giving panadol to Loey to get a few precious hours sleep, and oral antibiotics to poor three week old Huey for the hideous nappy rash). We knew this year would be hard, but failed to realise just how hard that would feel.

The latest disappointment is the loss of the chickens. It was such a great idea - we were going to pre-load the cost of eggs by buying the coop and the chooks, and save ourselves heaps of money. What we didn’t expect was to fall in love with them so deeply - fussing around in their glossy black dresses, they bring our backyard to life. And Loey loves them - he will sit quietly for ten to fifteen minutes just watching them.

But a friendly neighbour yesterday told us that some not-so friendly neighbours are planning on complaining to the council about our chickens. It is true, they do greet the dawn in a very enthusiastic manner. And they do attract rats (though we were going to deal with that). And we aren’t strictly following the by-laws - they are a bit close to other people’s houses. So we think that the only thing to do is to wave goodbye - we do not have the energy to have a showdown with the neighbours. Luckily, very good friends of ours who live nearby have chickens already and can also accommodate ours - we will have visiting rights and the occasional batch of eggs. But we are devastated nonetheless.

We just have to hang onto the knowledge that we won’t be here forever - there will be other chickens, in other houses. And in the meantime I think I want to get a couple of rabbits or guineapigs for Loey to watch…

(Huey post in draft, coming soon)