baybeasts

We will write about the labour ordeal at some point. Suffice it to say it was even worse than my labour, with the added complication of a 4 month old in tow. We had two amazing friends working in shifts minding him, and I popped in and out to feed and cuddle him.

Once again, we had no sleep for 48 hours, and were completely delirious for a day, but now that we have had a little sleep we are feeling quite good. The ‘hit over the head with a frypan’ thing that happens to most of us the first time around does not seem to be happening again. thank god.

It is brilliant to have been able to bring them home from hospital so quickly. I felt heartbroken when I had to spend that first night away from them.

My two sons…

We are thrilled to be able to tell you that b2 has a new name… Huey! He was born yesterday by emergency caesarean section - Saturday 10th November at 6.38am after a long and difficult labour . He is a very spunky little blondie! Weight 3485gm (7lb 11oz), which is about the same weight as Loey was at birth.

S and Huey are both well - so well that we are now all home, just over 24 hours later…

Here he is just one hour old!

In hospital

Just home from hospital

So here we are. One day past due day. I took a photo yesterday for posterity:

Surely it must come soon?

It’s been hard to blog lately. All I am doing is whining and waiting.

This blog started as an infertility blog - it was a way for us to feel a bit more connected to the little corner of blogland devoted to infertility that helped us so much through some pretty rough times. So when all I really have to say is one big whinge about the end of pregnancy, I feel like this really isn’t the place to do it.

But now, I guess it has morphed into a lesbian parenting-type blog, or perhaps simply a way to keep friends up to date with our little family’s news. And so I figure it is better to write something than nothing. I also believe, and have for a long time, that life is very complex - it is possible to hold completely contradictory feelings in one’s heart at exactly the same time. That is, I can feel fed up with this pregnancy and weirded out by the uncomfortable squirming in my belly and pissed off with the sore hips and heartburn and pea-sized bladder and sinus headaches and insomnia (see I said I was full of whining), at exactly the same time that I am completely thrilled with this tiny creature inside me that so soon will make our family that little bit less tiny, and so much more full of love.

I know that as this is a first pregnancy I am likely to go into labour past my due date, but I keep hoping that Tootle will want to meet us sooner. It will be a double bonus when he or she is born - finally we’ll see Tootle’s face, and I won’t be pregnant any more. It is also a terrifying prospect - a newborn in the house when Loey still takes up such a lot of our energy and time. I just have to trust that energy and time will stretch, just as I know that love does.

There are a couple of questions that I keep being asked in these last few weeks, so I think I’ll answer them here as well.

1. Are you nervous about the labour?
You know, I am a bit scared, but not that much really. Mostly I feel settled - I feel like I have prepared as well as I possibly can, and that, more importantly, I have an amazing support team around me. I am really committed to giving it a good go at home, but I also have my priorities sorted such that if Tootle or I need the extra help I will feel fine about heading into the hospital. I am actually really looking forward to it because, as I said, it will mean that we finally get to meet Tootle, and that I won’t be pregnant any more. I am also looking forward to the experience itself - it feels like such a unique opportunity to really work hard and achieve something amazing. I hope that no matter how it turns out I will be very proud of myself.

2. Do you know what you are having?
I am always so tempted to answer this question by saying ‘a baby, I hope!’ But mostly I restrain myself because that is just rude. No, we don’t know if Tootle is a boy or a girl. But the pressure for a girl is intense - apparently bean’s grandmother is already knitting a pink jumper, and my cousin says she’ll just re-name Tootle with a girl’s name and treat him as such if he turns out to be a boy! I have always thought that I am having a girl, but that is because the only dream I ever had about this baby was about a girl baby, and because my family life so far has been so girl-centric (eldest daughter of eldest daughter, raised by a single mum, closest extended family all female as well etc) that I find it hard to imagine anything else. So the weight of all this is such that if Tootle is a boy, I think we’ll get a surprise. But honestly, I really don’t care either way. I might have at some point, but I have done a lot of thinking about the boy/girl thing and it ultimately seems like such a small part of who they will be - I care so much more about other things like their health and general personality than I do about their biological sex at birth. The only thing that was holding me back for a while was that bean and I had not been able to agree on a second boy’s name, but a couple of weeks ago we did some hard work and came up with something that we are both happy with, thank goodness.

So, enough of the whining. Now there is just waiting. Not that it is so hard when every day at home with bean and Loey is so precious - but that’s a topic for another blog post.

I didn’t plan to do a 37 week photo post, but this picture is just too cute to let languish in iphoto:

36 weeks today and I am definitely expanding, to the detriment of my lungs, stomach, and bending-over abilities. I am doggedly still putting Loey in the sling every morning for his first daytime nap though:

And leaving him there awake for as long as he will put up with it:

36 weeks is a big day, because from this point on I am clear to stay at home if I go into labour (and all goes well). Today we overhauled the labour box and packed the transfer bag, but I am delaying putting up the birth pool for another week - it just takes up so much room and our house is so small. I am scared of what’s to come, but only to a normal extent I think - it would be crazy not to have some apprehensions about labour! But bean is such a legend - she is doing all the night time care of Loey (I am only comfortable sleeping on the couch), and letting me take it pretty easy during the days too. I will be as rested and prepared as a mother of a 3 month old could hope to be!

Despite our lack of blogging mojo, we are all alive and well, even the chickens who have regularly been laying four eggs a day.

Loey was 2 months old a couple of days ago. We had a little chat about whether we would attempt the beautiful monthly letter that so many other bloggers manage for their children, but of course we will never manage to keep it up and then we will feel guilty and so we agreed to let that idea go.

That said, there are some lovely things about two months. Things seem (touch wood) to be settling down a bit. He has a regular bed time now, and he always sleeps in the same place at night, in the single bed pushed up next to ours (daytime sleeps vary between the bassinet and the sling), and despite some unsettled nights he seems to be sleeping quite well for the first half of the night. The second half is still pretty intense, but it is so lovely to all be sleeping in the same bed and getting a good 5-6 hours broken only by one feed that the rest of the night is manageable.

Typical new parent to put the sleep news first! What is more important and lovely is the way he is slowly coming more and more into the world. He was always a very alert and wakeful baby, but he is beginning to really interact with his world rather than watching it with wide eyes. He loves it when we sing - he smiles and chortles and moves his mouth and tongue as if he is trying to copy us. He often watches our faces intently - when we are speaking, or eating, and his favourite game is the tongue poking game:

He is also beginning to be aware that his hands belong to him - he reaches out to bat at toys, and holds onto toys and waves them about. Sometimes he will simply lie there and watch his hand open and close with a kind of mesmerised expression on his face.

As he gets bigger and more active we are starting to think about a wider range of activities for him than simply lying on the floor with toys - any suggestions are welcome! We’ve started to carry him about awake facing outwards in a sling, so that he can just tag along with whatever we are doing - eating dinner, hanging out the clothes etc. We’d love him to hang out in the bouncinette and watch us while we are doing stuff, but he’s not so keen on that, sadly.

In neck news, we took him to see a paediatrician a week ago (we’ll call him Dr Fantastico). He was the best health professional we have consulted about this yet. We both left his office with huge crushes on him, just because he was so amazing with Loey and lovely with us. An ultrasound has confirmed that the torticollis is definitely muscular only, and the lump is confined within the sterno-mastoid muscle. This is a relief, as torticollis can very rarely be caused by other, more scary things. Dr Fantastico reassured us that it is likely to resolve without active stretching by us, and encouraged us to keep up with the passive approach - encouraging Loey to look in all directions and placing him in lots of different positions throughout the day. He was lukewarm at best about osteopathy, but didn’t think it could hurt, so we are continuing on with that too (because we think it is helping). Best of all, he said ‘I want someone to own this, so I would like to see him again in two months’ - he is the first health professional to have actively taken responsibility for following up and I can’t tell you how grateful we are for that.

In Tootle news, there is very little to report, except that I am expanding rapidly and the due date is zooming down on us (only 5 and half weeks away). Tootle is growing and hiccuping and wriggling and giving me dreadful heartburn. Pregnancy really isn’t my cup of tea! I’ll be glad to have Tootle in the outside world, and as Loey settles a bit we are feeling a tad more optimistic about being able to manage another newborn.

In the midst of all the madness, I still remembered to take my 32 week photo.

It might not be so obvious from this photo, but I have finally, at nearly 7 months pregnant, officially ‘popped’. It’s so strange - because I am very short, with a very short torso (bane of my sartorial life), I was sure that I would stick out from way early on simply from lack of room. But even now that I have popped, I still think strangers would hesitate to ask when I was due, just in case I was merely fat. No neat pretty baby bump for me!

Our midwife (who also doubles as our hero and saviour) keeps asking me how B2 is going, and I keep vaguely replying ‘oh, good, I suppose, wriggles a bit, tummy seems to be sticking out a bit more’. And last time I gave that reply she laughed and told me that I am having the experience of a second-time mum, one who doesn’t have the time or energy to think much about their current pregnancy as they are so caught up in looking after the children they already have.

It’s so true. And it’s kinda cool actually. Physically, I feel the best that I have throughout this whole pregnancy (sleep deprivation and heart-burn aside), and I don’t actually know if that’s because I just feel good, being in the second trimester and all, or if I am just so distracted that I don’t have time to notice all the various annoying things my body might be doing.

Emotionally, I feel more relaxed about B2 than I think I have at any other time. Since our little fellow arrived, I have understood how having a baby makes love multiply, and I am excited about a further expansion to the love in my life. That vague sense of fear about creating a baby with my genes is still there, but muted by the loveliness that is a tiny baby - I know that we will both love B2 with all our hearts, just as we love B1.

Bean is the nick-name coiner in our household - I’ve always been terrible at it. Lately she has taken to calling B2 ‘Tootle’ and it has stuck - it’s so cute! Today I felt Tootle hiccup for the first time, and because we could feel where the hiccups were, we had a rough idea where the heart would be - sure enough, when bean pressed her ear to my tummy she was able to tap out the quick tattoo of Tootle’s heartbeat on my chest, for the first time. It was just so lovely to have a moment of connecting with the little baby inside of me in the midst of our first-child craziness!

Our midwife also says that Tootle will be easier, because we will have a much better idea of what to expect. I hope she is right…my rough calculation is that it won’t be twice as hard to have two, it’ll be more like 1.5 times as hard, because there will be a whole lot of stuff that we’ve already worked out (like how to change a nappy in under 15 minutes, and how to adapt to new kinds of cry without thinking that we’ve broken the baby).

There’s a whole lot of other stuff going on too - bean’s family is visiting, which is overwhelming, and making me have all kinds of protective defensive reactions. I never thought I would identify with the ‘other mummy’ stuff because we would both be bio mummies together, the way we’ve planned it, and once they are both here with sharing breastfeeding and care the biological origin of each child will be less important. But in this small window of time before Tootle, I am feeling the full force of family not really understanding how we are both parents in this together - our little fellow is as much my child as bean’s, but because I didn’t birth him and I am not breastfeeding him I feel have to defend this title of ‘parent’ like a lioness. It makes for not smooth sailing with in-laws, but I expect that is not too unusual! Poor bean though, having to cope with my freak-outs AND her family…

But I should stop with this emo blogging now. I have a sleeping baby on my chest and I should be taking advantage of such a lovely deep sleep to be getting some myself (I am on the graveyard shift, where sleep is precious).