baybeasts

When bean and I are confused, worried, planning something new, or just feel like it, we do research.

So when we reached the end of our tether last week, we ordered a whole swag of books from the ABA’s mail order service:

The Fussy Baby Book
The Attachment Parenting Book
The No-Cry Sleep Solution

and an ABA booklet called ‘Understanding Wakeful Babies’.

It was such a relief to have everything we have been doing confirmed, after the patronising and dire warnings in the Baby Whisperer book (I would burn it only it’s not ours), which was all we’d had to go on up to this point. But also somewhat dispiriting because none of our enlightened parenting was making him any easier to settle.

Even so, I completely lost it at about 4am yesterday morning, but our midwife has this uncanny skill of showing up just when we are falling apart (without us contacting her at all - it’s seriously spooky) and dropped in last night and sorted us out, again. She reminded us that he is just a baby, a wakeful, intense, ‘high-need’ baby but ultimately just a baby doing his thing. And we need to chill out and work out how to keep ourselves sane, rather than keeping on thinking that we are doing something wrong or that there is a problem we need to fix.

We had a big breakthrough yesterday too, which is helping me feel more sane - he finally consented to sleep in his bassinet! It was very exciting to be able to put him down (up to now he’s been pretty clear about wanting to be held most of the time, and we’ve been happy to oblige him but it is exhausting, especially overnight). I think we’ll be sleeping in shifts for a while yet though - even in the bassinet he needs resettling every 30-40 minutes and will only sleep for two lots of 30-40 minutes (ie 1-1.5 hrs in total) before he wants to get up again for food and hanging out.

Sadly, I think he is just not that keen on the family bed idea - he doesn’t feed to sleep in the bed (or anywhere) and often wriggles and cries even when he is held in our arms or literally on one of our chests. On the few occasions he does go to sleep in our bed he wakes up at the slightest movement by either of us - the other night bean moved the doona by 2 mm and he lost it. He’s a sensitive little thing…

It’s so ironic that we consciously chose these ‘controversial’ ways of parenting (feeding to sleep, family bed) but he totally has other ideas - it’s a big parenting lesson already, and it’s only been five weeks.

I am learning how to type with him strapped to my chest while I am bouncing on the fit ball. I don’t feel more fit, sadly, but I do have a sore back! S really came to my rescue at 4am this morning. I was on the fold-out bed in the living room and after an hour and a half of being unable to get him to settle for more than a few minutes at a time, I felt pretty awful. I had run out of ideas, and for a few minutes, I just watched him cry. Then I heaved myself up and fed him (again!), at which point S stumbled out of our bedroom. She then settled him for the next 8 hours, only returning him for feeds. She is a seven-months-pregnant-superwoman. I would be non compos mentis without her.

Here is our gorgeous spotty beast this morning, being perfectly one month old.

Tis 4.40am and the little one has just finally fallen asleep after a session of bouncing and singing (PJ Harvey this time). He kept his bean awake from 2.30am. When I came out at 4am after my allotted 4 hrs sleep she was feeding him with a kind of demented look on her face. “I understand why people shake their babies” she said, and as she did, he gave her a smile of the most glorious, contented luminosity that we both immediately understood why we would never actually do it. She then handed him over to me whereupon he immediately started making the cutest faces and smiling wildly for at least 5 minutes, interspersed with tired frowns and grizzles.

I wonder if smiles starting at 4-6 weeks is an adaptive mechanism to counteract the other developmental trend of this period - increased hours of crying and unsettled behaviour…in other words, it’s much harder to send your unsettled baby to the glue factory when he looks into your eyes and smiles as if you are just the nicest thing he’s ever seen.

This is one tired baby. He doesn’t feed to sleep (we feel totally ripped off!), and he doesn’t yet know any other ways to get himself to sleep. So he needs us to actively settle him (involving upright movement) 24 hours a day which is fine in the daytime, but bloody hard at night time when all we want to do is lie down and close our eyes. Which, now that he is finally asleep against my chest, I am going to attempt to do.

As I lay in bed this morning in a stupor, S said sadly - you’ve gone all facebooky, and don’t blog any more… It’s true. It’s so much easier to log on to facebook and check out who has made a new friend, than it is to gather together words with any degree of cohesion after no more than 45 minutes of sleep in a row.

Our little hairy beast has been decidedly grumpy for the last few days, and it is very wearing. We think it is because he is working on the smile. There have been a couple of sneak previews of the real deal, and it is entirely heart melty. He has started to process more about his surroundings. Instead of bawling until the boob is in his mouth and milk is flowing, he is actually starting to settle when I talk to him and reach for the bra strap. It has also been a spotty week for our son. I’m hoping it is just the run of hormonal pimples from 3-6 weeks, but some patches look pretty angry. We don’t want him to feel self conscious, so we try not to make too many comments about it.

Here he is this morning, having a lovely chat with S who crocheted this christening gown.

I just realised that it’s Saturday night.

I am bouncing on a fit ball in front of the computer with a sleeping baby strapped to my chest, and another in my tummy, listening to Gold 104 (which just happens to playing the song that I did my one and only drag performance at drag kings to many years ago now). I just finished making some home-made nappy wipes, and when I finish this blog post I will fold the washing.

And I couldn’t be happier.

How my life has changed.

Our little fellow is definitely a vampire. The proof:

- he prefers to sleep upright in confined spaces (rather like a coffin)
- he prefers to be awake at night
- he doesn’t love the sun
- his favourite spot for nuzzling is into the neck of the person holding him
- if he is hungry, these nuzzles turn into full blown neck sucking

See? Incontrovertible.

Mind you, it could just be the sleep deprivation making us hallucinate (too much buffy in our free and feckless days)…

I can’t believe how hard it is to do things that require thought. I had planned to journal and blog everything about these early days and weeks, but the best I can do is take photos and try to stay afloat. I have been sadly surprised that being a midwife has not made this job any easier. My midwife brain flew out the window not long after his birth, and was replaced by a teary, tired, and shocked new mother. It’s the most difficult thing we’ve ever done - compounded by the three sleepless nights we had before he was born. This experience has forever changed the way I will look at postnatal women and their families, and I’m certain that the way I work with women will be so much improved.

On a more positive note - we got a three hour stretch of sleep last night for the first time, and that felt wonderful! He is feeding well and gaining weight and generally being a pretty easy baby to look after. I felt a little bit sad when his cord stump fell off at 4 days - quite early it seemed. He changes so quickly, and the days pass by in such a fast blur of getting nothing done, that I’m worried I will blink and miss everything. (Luckily, I have the very slow-moving nights to keep everything balanced).
It has been really lovely to see him in the clothes that S lovingly made for him over the years we were trying to get pregnant…

knitted red hat…

bum jumper…

pre-smile!

we are hoping he will love reading as much as we do…

It’s been two and a half days almost exactly since our little fellow was born. And I don’t know if it’s me, or if the world has changed, but this morning I went outside to let out the chooks and everything was rimed with white, the first real frost of the year; the morning was outlined clear and intense and I felt overwhelmed by the beauty of it all. I have felt exhilaration before, but never quite like this. When I came back in I held him for a minute, and he looked into my eyes with his wide dark unfocused gaze and then I looked at bean and my heart is still quivering with the love that flowed between the three of us.

My two favourite people are now sleeping in the lounge - one on the couch (quietly), one on the floor (noisy with grunts and squeals) in a bassinet. We are all so tired - this parenting thing is such a steep learning curve, on so little sleep. Everything feels surreal. Things I have learnt in the last few days include:

- how to change a cloth nappy in under 15 minutes
- that commercial baby clothes don’t fit over cloth nappies
- that high pitched squealing exactly like a guinea pig is just our little fellow’s way of talking to us, not a sign that he is in desperate pain
- that babies can create a dutch oven in the bed to rival any adult
- how to not be in the same room as him, even though it feels like being separated from my daemon
- how even more magnificent and beautiful bean is than I already thought
- that even when you think you have prepared as much as possible, there are some things that cannot be prepared for
- that I have more to learn and be humbled by than I ever imagined

I have also discovered that our little fellow loves to be read and sung to. This morning I sang him fragments of Beatle’s songs, and then I recited my favourite poem, by Yeats.

He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread upon my dreams.