Monsters in the Bathroom

For the first three months Sadie was a bubbly, gurgling angel in the mornings and slowly developed into a fussy, angry demon as the day wore on. This is normal for a newborn, apparently, for reasons not fully understood. Whatever the reason, ever since she began approaching the 3 month point that routine has begun to flip (along with sleeping schedules, feeding schedules and every other kind of schedule I've managed to successfully establish, but that's a topic for another post). Last night the kid was Miss Congeniality, and this morning she rapidly devolved into a ball of angry yelly-ness.

When she gets this way she wants to be held and comforted, which is new. Before, it was motion and constant noise that soothed her and it didn't matter too much whether she was being rocked in my arms or in her mechanical swing. Now when she's fussy, putting her down anywhere makes it considerably worse. While I kind of dig knowing that I'm now the source of ultimate comfort for her, it makes doing anything requiring the use of my hands...well...difficult.

Her entirely new perspective on the world has led to other changes I hadn't expected. Typically, for example, I bring her into the bathroom with me while I shower. She plays in her bouncy seat, knocking a little purple hippo back and forth with her fist, and is cool as long as I've got some kind of loud noise going on -- the shower, the hairdryer, whatever. The hairdryer, in fact, as always been a source of comfort for Sadie, putting her into a kind of dream-like trance.

But this morning when I fired it up, she got a look of utter terror on her face and burst into sobs. You'd have thought I'd left her alone on the African savanna in the middle of lion territory, that's how upset she was.

I picked her up and she immediately quieted. I tried turning on the dryer while holding her. No problem. Put her back down in her bouncy seat and turned it on again.

"WAAAAAAAAHHHHHH."

Now, here's the thing. I get to look decent maybe one day out of every month, and this month I would like that day to be Christmas Eve when I get to have dinner with my 80-something grandparents, so DAMN IT I was going to dry my hair and nothing was going to stop me.

So picture this: I wind up drying my hair with Sadie in the Moby wrap curled up against my chest, while trying to hold the hairdryer angled away from her so that I won't fry her head. (This activity is probably not recommended by the APA.) Meanwhile, copious amounts of drool are getting all over both of us because her saliva glands just kicked into overdrive this past week. Also, there are boogers.

But my hair is now shiny and dry, the baby is not screaming, and I can chalk up one more tiny victory in this crazy parenting process.

Right Now I am Bored

And it's for a miraculous reason. The reason is, Sadie has been sleeping for the last three and a half hours.

Before that, she slept for another three hours.

Before that, she slept ten hours straight last night.

She's eaten a total of four times in the last 24 hours. This, from a baby who up until recently used to eat every 2-3 hours with a break in the middle of the night. Four times in 24 hours.

It's so weird, she's growing up.

Tummy Time Woes

Before I had a kid, I'd never heard of "tummy time." But once Sadie was born, all I knew from reading Babycenter was that it was absolutely imperative that Sadie have some, every day.

This is exactly what it sounds like: you plop the kid upside down on a blanket or rug and basically leave them to their own devices to kick, squirm and flail. The idea is that it helps develop their neck and upper body muscles, allowing them to first lift their heads, then raise their shoulders, prop themselves up on their elbows and ultimately roll over and crawl and all those lovely things you need a full range of body coordination to achieve.

By this point, 2 1/2 months, Sadie is supposed to be making strides in this arena. "By now, your baby is lifting her head and upper body to look around!" proclaims Babycenter's weekly updates, thoughtfully sent to my inbox every week so that I can obsess about what my baby can and cannot do versus every other 11 week old baby in the universe.

The problem? Sadie hates tummy time. Like, hates it with a passion and does not want anything to do with it. At first, she was hating it but at least trying to push herself up for a few minutes before giving up and collapsing into angry yelling. Now? She doesn't even bother to try. She's like, "why continue this charade?" Ever since she discovered her fingers, she's decided that rather than attempt to make progress during tummy time, she'd rather take advantage of the fact that her fists are located conveniently right next to her mouth. Why work for a long-term payoff when fist-sucking is so much easier and more satisfying? In this way, she's much like her mother.

Tummy time

Sadie Hams It Up for the Camera

This isn't the most scintillating footage of Sadie ever taken, but if you feel like staring into the eyes of a cute baby for a few minutes, then it'll be right up your alley.

Yesterday morning, I placed her on the bed and she started a flood of cooing and gurgling, mixed in with delighted smiles. I ran for the iPhone so I could try to get it on video, and naturally as soon as I held it up, she forgot about me entirely and just stared at the camera as though it were something she really, really, really wanted to put in her mouth.

Baby Sadie at 11 Weeks

We Have a Weirdo Baby

First she drove me crazy these past few days by refusing to sleep more than 30 minutes at a stretch. Not counting nighttime, but still. Do you know how hard it is to get ANYTHING done when your 10 week old baby is only sleeping 30 minutes at a time, every 2 or 3 hours? It is really, really hard.

Because you can't just pop them in the swing and walk away, you see. Babies have lightning-quick attention spans. So you must constantly be entertaining them with a rotating succession of positions, toys, movements, etc.

Here, for your entertainment, is a sample of what Sadie's schedule is like over the course of a couple hours when she is feeling particularly sleepless, snacky and cantankerous:

- Feed

- Burp

- Diaper Change

- Smile at silly faces on the changing table

- Change outfits (then cry)

- Get lotion put on dry spots (then cry)

- On boppy pillow on top of the bed, more silly faces

- Stare at rattle being shaken in face, whack with hand

- Cry

- Sit in bouncy seat, stare at purple hippo

- Cry

- Lie face-up on play mat, stare at flashing lights

- Flipped over for tummy time on play mat

- Cry after 2 minutes on tummy

- Feed again

- Burp

- Into swing

- Cry after 10 minutes in swing

- Placed into "Moby wrap" carrier while Mom does chores around the house

- Wriggle and fuss

- Taken out of Moby, wrapped in blanket and bounced in Mom's arms on yoga ball

- After flirting with sleep, decide instead to barf all over self, onesie, and Mom's arm

- Back to the changing table for onesie change, cry because tired

- Wrapped back in blanket and bounced some more

- Drift off to sleep

- Wake up 30 minutes later and DO IT ALL AGAIN

So this has been my last two days. Can you blame a girl for wishing, a few fleeting moments at a time, that she still lived the quiet, productive, childless life? Luckily, Sadie decided to make up for it on Wednesday night by giving me the best gift I could ever have asked for:

She slept for TEN AND A HALF HOURS straight.

Can I just bask in smugness, just for a tiny minute?

Okay, I'm done. No, wait:

OHMYGODOURBABYISAWESOME.

Okay, NOW I'm done.

10 Week (almost) Check-In

Our baby is starting to grow-up.

Occasionally, she will make huge developmental leaps in what seems like a few short hours, as if she's gone to bed with a certain amount of knowledge and then awakened with more. That's what has happened in the past week.

For one thing, I could swear she's been laughing. Or at least, she's beginning to start to learn how to laugh. It's hard to tell the difference between a smile combined with a delighted gurgle and a true laugh, but perhaps it's the beginning stages of laughter. At any rate, it's causing me to do endless variations of funny faces and silly noises in an attempt to get her to replicate the delight and develop her laughing muscles, and at the very least she finds it amusing when I get real close in her face and go, "Blooooop!"

What's more exciting is that rather than simply sitting back and observing the world around her, she's finally starting to develop a desire to touch and feel it. At first, she expressed this desire by tonguing every object that her face happened to come into contact with. The cloth mat she lies on while she does tummy time, her own fist, my shirt, the Moby, all wind up being poked repeatedly by her tongue.

But now, only in the past couple of days, she's turned another corner. Now when she focuses hard on an object, her hands begin to move in that object's direction. It's incredible to watch. This morning, for the first time, I dangled a rattle in front of her and watched as she began to wave her arm toward the rattle and eventually whacked it with her fist, promptly blowing her mind. She even curled a finger around one of the rattle's plastic rings. She doesn't yet understand the mechanics of reaching and then grabbing, but she's making the first steps.

The other big event this week was her two-month innoculations. Scott and I were steeling ourselves for days in preparation for this, because we've heard so many horror stories about how pleasant babies turn into angry, upset, pained monsters after they get their shots. And the act itself is traumatic for the parent -- I mean, they make you hold your baby's arms down, for heaven's sake, and they tell you to talk to your baby to "distract her." Do you understand how bad it feels to coo at your baby and get her to give you a trusting smile, knowing that in .02 seconds someone's going to jab a needle into her thigh?

The crying was short-lived, fortunately. By the time the nurse left and I'd bundled Sadie into a blanket, she was done with the tears. She fell asleep in the car on the way home and Scott and I looked at each other and shrugged, all, "Huh. That wasn't too hard."

And then. And then, she woke up.

Oh, lord. The anger.

The fury was epic. She was in pain, and she would try to stop crying, but then it would hurt again and she would burst into a fresh round of sobs. In between, she would look at me with an expression on her face that read, "Mom, why won't you make it STOP?" I wanted to die. Instead, I gave her 0.4 ml of Children's Tylenol, wrapped her in a warm blanket and held her tightly. She eventually went back to sleep and slept most of the afternoon. And when she woke up, she was the happy girl she'd been earlier that morning.

We have a great baby.

Life's a Gas

It's early morning. I change Sadie, powder her butt with cornstarch and wrap her in a nice warm blanket. I carry my sleepy, squinty-eyed child over to the glider for a feeding. The house is quiet and peaceful; the only noises are her tiny sighs. When she finishes, twenty minutes later, she looks up into my eyes and smiles.

Then she unleashes a tremendous fart. It's immediately followed by a wetter, deeper fart, signifying that she has just crapped a giant load in her diaper.

"Good girl!" I say, thrilled, as she beams at me, and I know it's going to be a good day.

Not every day is, though. On other days, Sadie wakes up fussy and gets progressively fussier. When I try to feed her, squirms and squeals with pain. Her face screws up, turns tomato-red and she grunts and cries out and kicks. All I can do is rub her belly and bicycle her legs and wait it out. We tried Mylicon, which is a mild version of adult antacid and is supposed to break up gas bubbles in the intestinal tract. They had no effect that I could see.

We got ourselves into this child-having way with the basic knowledge that babies pass gas, and that for the first few months they often suffer indigestion. So when Sadie started having stomach pains at a few weeks old, I figured it was normal. I tried to combat them by cutting out certain foods -- sushi, chocolate -- if the day after eating them I noticed she was battling indigestion.

But this method seemed imperfect at best. Sometimes I'd eat a giant, spicy meal and the next day she'd be fine. Another day I'd eat nothing but bland food and she'd still be squealing in pain the following morning. One night I ate sushi for dinner but cut out the wasabi; the next morning she was happy as a clam. We decided that it was the wasabi that had been bothering her, but something about that didn't make sense to me. Why would wasabi upset her stomach, but a plate full of five-alarm lamb vindaloo go down just fine? How could it be that a few bites of chocolate could be enough to cause her 24 hours of pain? What was the secret to curing my daughter's discomfort?

The whole time, I was actively and purposefully ignoring one item on the list of problem foods for breastfeeding moms: dairy. There's a good reason for this: I drink a lot of milk. It does a body good, so sue me! It goes into my breakfast cereal every morning, and sometimes I enjoy a nice glass of milk with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and apple slices for lunch, and occasionally it accompanies dessert in the evening. It's a good substitute meal, too, which is what my mom used to tell me when I was snacky as a kid (sorry I didn't believe you then, mom).

The thought of cutting such an essential food item out of my diet completely was repellent enough that I just decided not to even try. Besides, Sadie's drinking milk, so why would putting milk into my body be a bad thing? I researched milk allergies, discovered that they are relatively rare, and made the decision that Sadie probably didn't have one.

But over the last couple of weeks, it became apparent that something would need to change. I could no longer chalk up Sadie's one-day-great-the-next-day-in-terrible-discomfort to everyday indigestion or fussiness. The difference was too obvious: on bad days she was irritable, scowly, prone to crying and unable to nap for very long. On good days she slept like an angel, and was nothing but smiles when awake.

So a week ago, I made a decision: I'd cut milk out of my diet for seven days. That was far long enough to see an effect or lack thereof.

The first day, she was fine.

The second day, fine again.

By the end of the week, there was no doubt about it: a milk-less milk-fed Sadie is a happy Sadie. She's been utterly great all week, with no discomfort when she feeds, no need to endlessly bicycle her legs and massage her belly and run around wringing my hands when she won't stop crying. So there you have it: no more milk, and one content baby. 

Endless Entertainment

Lest people begin to think that I've turned this blog into a place to rant about fleas and lack of sleep, here's some video to entertain you. I sent this to Scott while he was in New York working the New Moon premiere to remind him that he's missing crucial bonding time with our child.

Sadie in the bouncy seat 8 weeks

Baby Days

Sometimes the reality of what it means to have a baby really only sinks in when the typically mundane routines of your former life transform into something completely different.

Take today, for instance. Not much on the agenda. My cleaning lady coming from nine to one, and after that, the freedom to do whatever I liked. The biggest problem, typically, would be keeping the dogs from going crazy when the cleaning lady runs the vacuum outside the bedroom door.

As it happened, life threw a curveball today. You see, Scott's been convinced for the past week that King, our older dog, has fleas. I was convinced he was wrong. I chalked up the constant shaking and itching to the colder, drier weather. I chalked up the mysterious bumps on Scott's toes to mosquito bites. I chalked up the scabby bits on King's coat to a skin rash, and the little black bits of dirt that kept appearing wherever the dogs had last been, to the fact that I haven't bathed them lately.

Today, though, I couldn't deny it any longer. A flea jumped onto my arm and basically announced, "HI! Me and a thousand of my brethren have infested your house!" My husband was right and I was wrong.

So, this necessitated a change to the schedule. Again, were I baby-less, this wouldn't be a problem. Wait until the cleaning lady leaves, go to the pet store, pick up some flea shampoo and upholstery cleaner, throw all the bedding into the wash, and give the place a good vacuum.

But with a baby? It all changes.

Let's start with this morning. With the cleaning lady here, I barricade myself in the nursery with all the baby accouterments I can fit in there -- the yoga ball, the bouncy seat, the giant Fisher Price swing that weighs at least thirty pounds. I bring the dogs, too, because they are terrified of the vacuum cleaner.

The next four hours I alternate between feeding the baby, rocking the baby to sleep, and then soothing the baby BACK to sleep because she's woken up because the dogs have barked at something outside the door. NOTE TO SELF: Dogs + Baby = Chaos. Also, I get really hungry, which happens now because I breastfeed and am outputting a lot of calories so when I need to eat, I need to EAT.

So it's 1pm, I haven't eaten since breakfast (half a Pop-Tart rather than my usual cereal and milk because she's having digestive problems and I think milk might be the culprit so I haven't been eating any dairy for the past three days) and I'm hungry and mad at the dogs and the baby won't stop waking up and fussing. SO. I feed her for the hundredth time, and as I do, I see a flea on my arm right next to the baby's head and I FREAK OUT.

But what can I do? It's not like I can just run to the pet store for flea meds. For one thing, Sadie is now awake, and taking her out necessitates all this prep work, and besides which I have not taken a shower and there is barf on my shirt. Clearly I cannot do all the things that I need to do right now, so which do I forego? The shower? The change of clothes? Lunch? The dogs are going insane because they think I'm about to walk them and Sadie is thinking about whether or not she wants to fuss again and instead, as I'm trying to put on shoes, she barfs AGAIN all over my shirt and like it or not, I have become the Woman Who Goes Out with Barf On Her Shirt and I don't even care.

What could possibly make this afternoon more fun? Well, if you guessed "run into Stephen Toblowsky from the hit show 'Glee' while at the pet store comforting a screaming infant," you're right on the money.  I did. And I told him I really liked "Glee." I also learned today that people do not like you when you're in line behind them holding a screaming baby, but to his credit, Stephen Toblowsky was a perfect gentleman as I was telling him I really like him in the show and simultaneously jiggling Sadie to within an inch of her life.

Suffice it to say, today wiped out both of us. Sadie's now concluding what has stretched into a nearly four-hour nap, during which time I locked myself in the bathroom with the dogs and smothered them in flea shampoo. Picture this, if you will. I was wearing a bathing suit, in the shower, with two very wet and very miserable terriers, trying not to vomit everytime I rinsed King down and dead fleas fell off his coat and swirled down the drain. The whole time, I'm listening with half an ear for Sadie's yells, because they could come at any time and GOD FORBID HER MAJESTY NOT HAVE A BOOB WHEN SHE NEEDS ONE.

Life sure isn't boring.

7 Weeks

Sadie is trying to communicate with us as hard as she can. There are certain times of the day, like when I'm changing her or playing with her on the bed with her head supported by a pillow, when we lock eyes and she begins a steady stream of vowel sounds and the occasional consonant. If I talk back to her, she "talks" even more. It's incredible to think that this is the first stage of language development. They say babies study your mouth while you speak, possibly trying to figure out exactly how it all works. Unbelievable to me that she's only been in this world for seven weeks and is already trying to master the art of verbal communication. She's going to be like that baby in the classic clip from "America's Funniest Home Videos" who could name all the presidents so when her dad would point to a picture and ask, "Who's that?" She'd respond, "Eisen-howa."

But until she gets to that point she has other ways of expressing her personality, which is just now beginning to emerge. Everyone who meets her agrees on two things: she's very alert, and she's a mover. Both qualities are aspects I didn't realize were unique to my baby until they were pointed out to me, because, well, I don't hang around babies as a general rule. But apparently there are some babies that tend to just hang out, and Sadie is not like that. She kicks when she's excited and squirms when you hold her and fusses when she's bored. This can get exhausting (you can't imagine how fast I've got to take showers these days, aware that as soon as sitting in her bouncy seat waving her arms and flailing her feet stops being interesting, she's going to let loose with an angry howl), but I don't mind it. While she might be quick to fuss, she's equally as quick to settle down once her attention has been diverted.

And as active as she is when she's awake, it makes the simple art of calming her down that much sweeter. I love bundling her up in a warm blanket, holding her tight, and sitting on the yoga ball, gently bouncing up and down. Her eyes glaze over and she zones out into this alpha state where her body completely relaxes. She begins to stare into middle distance and one arm flops out to the side. Within a few more minutes, her eyes are closed and she's sighing softly in her sleep.

Oh God, I can't help it, I'm in love with my daughter. And, if you don't mind the detour into my own mindset for a few paragraphs, I need to confess that it wasn't an immediate bond.

I wasn't one of those women who gazes upon her newborn child at the instant of delivery and feels an overwhelming love beyond anything she's ever known. And this worried me, a tiny bit. At first, I didn't feel anything other than panic and, later, a niggling doubt that perhaps I had made a huge mistake having a baby because we don't know what the hell we are doing, who allowed us to leave the hospital with this child? And that first month was so terrifying and exhausting, and I didn't know anything, I was just desperate to do right by this thing, this needy thing, all the while studying her face for features that looked like mine or Scott's or my father's and thinking I saw them but also feeling like she was an utter stranger.

The love was something that grew, slowly but surely. It grew as we invested our time and attention and energy into giving Sadie everything she needed and trying new routines and new playthings and new brands and new bits of advice. It grew as that effort began to pay off, little by little. As she began to sleep longer. As it took less and less time to calm her down when she fussed. As I was able, on occasion, to meet her demands without first wondering what in the world it was that she might need.

And it grew as she began to respond to us, too. The smiling helped. The talking helped more. ("I'm in here! There's a person in here," she seems to be saying when she reaches her hand out to me and lets loose with a string of a-a-a-a-a-as.) And best of all was the moment, last night, when Scott was having trouble putting her down to sleep. Every time he tried to lay her in her crib, she'd begin to cry, and soon she was so upset that even picking her up couldn't make her calm down. I came in and picked her up. She settled into my arms, quieted down, and ten seconds later her eyes were shut and she was sleeping peacefully. It was the first time I'd ever truly felt like Mom, that magical creature who makes everything better. 

Hunting Babies

IMG_3304



Originally uploaded by AstroCry

I just configured Flickr so that I can post photos directly from there to the blog. That's going to save me a lot of time. Let's see how it works...

Looking Back

Smiling happy Sadie

Sadie's now comfortably into her second month of life, and she has become a completely different baby. It's mind-blowing to watch her grow and change every day.

She coos and gurgles, reaches out for our faces with her hands and kicks out her legs when she's excited. She's developing new ways of communicating other than crying -- a well-timed yell lets us know that she's cranky, and if she needs something, she'll test the waters with a little fussing and then pause briefly to see if we come running before breaking out in her usual pained howls. Occasionally she'll begin to cry, then seemingly decide it's not worth the effort and calm herself down without our help.

It all adds up to a baby who, for the first time, is becoming easier to read and understand. We still feel as if she speaks a different language, but we're beginning to decipher that language bit by bit, and she's starting to decipher ours. Now when she cries, I understand the difference between "I'm hungry, feed me!" and "I'm tired but I don't know how to get to sleep." Cries from gas pain are different from cries indicating she's lonely and just wants to be held. I can't tell you what a relief it is to hear her cry and think to myself, "I know what she's crying about. I know how to fix this."

I think that if there were any advice I would give to parents with a brand-new baby, it would be to warn them that the first month is really, incredibly hard -- harder than anyone warns you it will be. Those first thirty days were a complete blur; I barely remember them. Day and night blended together into one long, never-ending quest to figure out what Sadie needed at any given time and to give it to her. Sleep was fleeting. I cleaned obsessively because it was the only part of my life that had any semblance of normalcy.

In comparison, the second month has been a cakewalk -- not because she doesn't still cry and need things and deprive us of sleep, but because it all seems a little less scary and unfamiliar now. She occasionally suffers from gas pains, and those are awful. She screws up her face and turns red and kicks her legs and screams, and there's very little we can do, but it helps to know that they are temporary and the next day she will feel better.

She has been sleeping consistently for longer and longer stretches -- six hours, then seven hours, then six again. She recently discovered that, rather than hating the bath, she actually likes it, turning bathtime into a nightly routine for Sadie and me that we both enjoy. We've learned that she loves being placed on her back on the bed and having us lean over her and make silly faces: she talks back to us, making little noises and blowing raspberries and beaming that big toothless smile.

I feel like we are heading into a new kind of normalcy. While the life we used to have may be long gone, the life we're beginning will have its own routines and rhythms. Soon it will feel as if it's always been that way.

Local Infant Breaks Own Sleep Record

Valley Village, California -- Six week old Sadie M. shattered her own previously held record of five and a half hours of straight sleep last night at her home in Valley Village.

Sadie stunned onlookers when she fell asleep after a feeding at 9:45pm on Monday, November 2nd, and did not awake again until 4:15am on November 3rd. While the baby has been gradually increasing her sleep time over the past few weeks, the six and one half hour stretch of uninterrupted sleep went above and beyond all predictions.

When asked about her achievement, the brown haired, blue-eyed infant credited a grueling pre-bedtime regimen of physical activity, refusal to nap, and ear-splitting screaming.

"The trick is to allow Mom to rock you right to the brink of sleep, then whack yourself in the face with your fist to wake yourself back up," said Sadie. She then punctuated her sentence by ripping a long fart and blowing several raspberries.

Proud parents Scott and Amanda M. were not available for comment, having snuck away for a nap while their daughter was being interviewed, leaving reporters a bottle of expressed breast milk and a burp cloth. (AP)

Sleeping Like a Baby

Scott and Sadie sleep

If there were one word to define how we're all feeling these days, it would be "tired."

Also, whoever came up with the phrase "sleeping like a baby" was smoking crack. Babies do not sleep. They nap, sort of. But Sadie's days of passed-out, comatose sleep are already behind her. The kinds of things she used to sleep through, like dog barks and people banging into things and the ringing phone, are now likely to wake her up.

And we cannot have that. We must keep the baby sleeping. Because when the baby sleeps, we...well, we don't sleep. But we at least are able to do things like eat lunch and clean up messes and fold laundry.

Seriously, I am so, so tired. I'm not throwing this out there because I think it's a particularly unique complaint -- but I'd like to record for posterity how tired I am right now so that if we decide to have another child, I can go back through these entries and remind Scott of how tired we once were.

The nature of this weariness is nothing I've ever experienced before. It's not that we get no sleep, ever. I hear horror stories of mothers whose babies wake up every hour or two throughout the night, or who scream until 2am. We're not those people -- in fact, Sadie's pretty easygoing as far as five-weekers go, and if this is the worst it's going to get then we really did get off easy.

So I'd say we both probably get between 5 and 7 hours of sleep every night. But it isn't quality sleep, and it isn't consistent sleep. And somehow, 7 hours spread out between two three-hour stretches over the course of the night and an hour nap in the afternoon leaves me as bleary-eyed and exhausted as if I hadn't slept at all.

Here's our current routine:

One of us takes Sadie into the bedroom around 10pm and gets her to sleep in her crib by 11. (There's no way to get her to sleep earlier than this -- she's developed the power to stay wide-eyed from 7pm right through the end of the 10 o'clock news. Any attempts to put her in her crib are met with EXTREME pissiness.)

We then join the other one in the bedroom, where it turns into a quest to fall asleep quickly so as to utilize sleep time as efficiently as possible. That, of course, inevitably results in not being able to fall asleep quickly.

On a good night, she'll go until 3am. Last night she went until 4am -- a marathon five-hour sleeping stretch that would normally have been cause for celebration...only, I'd woken up at 2:45am, and stayed awake for an hour expecting her to start fussing at any moment.

From 3-4 ish, she gets fed, burped, changed and bounced on the yoga ball to an endless succession of lullabies. This can take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour -- or longer, if she happens to nurse than then, ten minutes later, VOMIT ALL OVER HER NICE CLEAN CLOTHES right after I've changed her, necessitating a second changing and also a change of clothes and ROYALLY PISSING HER OFF in the process because it's been cold here recently and the front bedroom is like fifty degrees at night and being naked on a changing table in a freezing cold room is not where a baby wants to be.

NOT THAT THAT HAPPENED LAST NIGHT OR ANYTHING.

So after this, there's perhaps time for one last stretch of sleep until daylight, which is when Scott gets up and heats up a bottle and Sadie screams the entire time, which echoes through the baby monitor that rests on the nightstand exactly six inches from my ear, and insures that all three of us are now entirely awake.

Oh, and? It bears mentioning that one Sadie's had her morning meal and we're both good and awake, she smiles at us, drifts right back off into dreamland and proceeds to nap for the rest of the morning.

It's a good thing she's so damn cute.

Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My

Is there anything cuter in this world than a five week old baby in a pair of footie pajamas with little jungle animals printed on them? I challenge anyone to produce something more capable of inducing a universal round of "awwww."

Baby clothes are my topic for the rant of the week, for several reasons. We've reached a new and unexpected milestone within the last few days: Sadie, who has been putting on the pounds at a rate faster than her mother locked overnight in a Krispy Kreme store, has already grown too big for many of her newborn clothes. A few days ago, I attempted to snap a onesie over her diaper, and you could see the material strain at both ends.

This means it's time to graduate to the 3 month onesies, and this presents a problem: while Sadie owns a number of very cute little summery shirts and pants in the 3-month size, she has virtually no onesies, and this baby LIVES in onesies. They are the ultimate in lazy dresswear.

So I ventured out to the mall yesterday to buy her some onesies in her new-and-improved Big Girl size. Walking into Gymboree, you can tell immediately which is the boy's side and which is the girl's. One guess as to which side was overwhelmingly pink. No shocker there, right? But as I shopped, my disgust grew.

Everyone always says it's easier and more fun to shop for girls than for boys. Yet as I rifled through endless stacks of pink sweaters and pink-and-white striped socks and pink hats with bunny ears on them, I couldn't help but note that the boys' clothing was decorated in shades of blue, brown, green, yellow, red. They had pictures of puppies and bears, printed on bright patterns.

The only package of onesies I could find in Sadie's size had a fairy-tale princess theme. Each onesie had a different image evoking (or intended to evoke) a pretty, pretty princess. One had a crown. Another, a scepter. A third, a high-heeled shoe.

Yes, that's right. The boy onesies had pictures of puppies of them. The girl onesies have pictures of sparkly pumps.

By the time I got to my second stop, the department store, I didn't waste too much time in the girls' section. I was looking for some clothes for an upcoming winter trip to the Pacific Northwest, and I knew what I wanted: some absurdly cute, fleecy clothes to keep her warm.

As I'm wandering around the boys' section, I stumble upon the cutest freaking outfit ever: a fleecy pair of powder-blue pajamas with bear's ears on the hood. Apparently in the world of children's wear, this is called a pram. I guess I've been reading too much Dickens, because I thought "pram" was Brit-speak for "stroller," but here it means "item of puffy clothing designed to elicit shrieks of joy from grandmothers all over the world."

The minute I pick it up, I'm accosted by a woman who is the type of woman you can find at every department store in the world. If you've ever bought a bra at Macy's, you know exactly who I'm talking about: she's older, she has a strong Eastern European accent, and she would like to inform you exactly what you need to buy, so you can save yourself the trouble of coming up with an opinion of your own.

When I told the woman what I was looking for, she asked me if the clothes were for a boy or a girl. Girl, I answered.

"This is the boy's section," she informed me. I replied that yes, I knew it was, but it didn't really matter to me -- I was just looking for winter baby clothes. You wouldn't believe the look she gave me in response, but the intention of it was clear: yes, it DID matter. It mattered a great deal.

She eyed the blue pram I was holding. "We have that for girls. The girls clothes are over here," she said, marching over to the other side of the store. And hey, guess what? Everything was pink, pink, pink. Pink sweaters with red and pink matching pants, pink velour tracksuits, pink puffy coats and pink fleecy vests.

"This is good for winter!" the woman said enthusiastically, plucking a tiny white woolen sweater off the rack and placing it into my arms. The price on the tag was $44.99. She led me to the cash register, where I gave her the blue outfit and told her the white sweater was too expensive and I didn't need it.

"It's on sale. Only $29.99," she told me, and proceeded to ring up the sweater. "I don't need it," I repeated, and physically removed the sweater from the pile. She kind of shrugged her shoulders like, Okay, apparently it's not enough that your imposing your gender confusion upon your daughter -- you want her to freeze, too.

Do we dress our girls in pink because pink is what they like? Or do our girls like pink because, from the youngest possible age, we've swaddled them in nothing else? Why are mothers taught to believe that it matters whether we dress our month-old child in blue, pink, yellow or black? Why the disapproval if I want to put her in clothes with lions on them, or baseballs, or a rocket ship? Would it be more appropriate if that rocket ship was pink?

Learning the Rules

Big Smile

I've been meaning to post a more detailed update for the last week, and every time it seems like I'm thwarted by our temperamental little girl, who has mastered the ability to stay awake for up to five hours at a time. I think I've found a brilliant way to deal with this problem, but more on that in a second. Right now, Sadie is chilling in the swing and I am going to relish these few moments of freedom. Ahhhhh. That's good.

What amazes me the most about these past couple of days is what huge leaps and bounds Sadie seems to have made, and how different these leaps and bounds are from the ones she made the week before. Week three was a growth spurt -- an exhausting one for both of us. She wanted to eat ALL. THE. TIME. By the end of the week, she'd hit the ten-pound mark. Yes, that's nearly three full pounds in three weeks. Pretty amazing when you consider that babies gain, on average, an ounce a day.

So there was this growth spurt. And by the end of it, suddenly Sadie no longer fit into her newborn diapers, and all of her onesies were suspiciously tight. That was Sadie the body. But if you'd asked me what was different about Sadie the person, I wouldn't have much to tell you. She was still doing her daily cycle of feeding, crapping, crying and sleeping. Not much variety there. In the last week, though? I began to see some real changes.

I say "I" instead of "we" because Scott has been in Vancouver, and has therefore missed the last week (or, as I like to remind him, the latest quarter of his daughter's life. He doesn't appreciate my humor). Aside from a three-day stay from my sister (a total Godsend) and brief visits from grandparents, it's just been me and my little girl. That means that the changes, as they occur, are pretty much noticed by me alone.

And what are those changes? Well, for one, she's become alert. Before, she would exist in the midst of whatever was going on around her, without any particular connection or response to that activity. But now, she's much more aware of what's going on around her. She can follow you with her eyes, reach out to you when you hover over her. She listens to sounds and voices. When you pick her up after a crying session, she looks at you with an expression on her face that says, "Mom, what took you so long?"

With this newfound alertness comes the best change of all: smiles. It used to be she'd smile when she was pushing out a fart, or as she was cycling through her facial expressions as she slowly slid into sleep. (Did you know babies do this? I didn't.) Then one day, she began smiling in the mornings, her best time of day. She'd look into my face and smile. She'd listen to me making silly sounds and smile some more.

The only problem? Mornings have traditionally been her only good time of day. Because starting around 10am, she wakes up and doesn't seem to want to go back to sleep. Around early afternoon, at the point when she's been up 4-5 hours straight, she always gets fussy, and by early evening she's downright cranky.

It's been driving me crazy, trying to figure out this problem. How can I get her to sleep more? Why is it so hard to get her to nap? I was considering this problem shortly after my sister left the house to go back to Orange County, after I'd dissolved into panicked tears wondering how I'd get through the next four days alone. That's when I remembered a book a friend of ours loaned us, "The 90 Minute Sleep Program."

The book is written by a neurologist (and mother), and her theory is a very simple one: the human body naturally operates within 90 minute energy cycles. 45 minutes after a baby has awakened from sleep, she's at her peak level of alertness, and 90 minutes after, she's at her most low-energy and vulnerable to sleep. The book recommends soothing your baby to sleep 90 minutes after she's woken up, regardless of whether she's awakened from a 3-hour marathon nap, or a 30 minute catnap.

It sounded unlikely -- remember, Sadie's capable of staying up for five hour stretches, becoming more and more irritable by the hour. But I decided to give it a try. When she woke up from her nap Wednesday afternoon, I fed her, changed her, played with her, and 80 minutes later, began her favorite soothing activity of bouncing on the yoga ball. When I began, her eyes were wide open. And guess what? Ten minutes later, she was out like a light.

Since then, the process has worked like a charm. The only wild card element is how long she'll actually sleep once she's been gone down. Often, it's only 20 or 30 minutes at a time, and then I have to keep her awake for another 90 minutes once she's back up, which is exhausting for me. But this afternoon, I put her down at 2:45 and she slept until 5:45, giving me a chance to take a nap, and I was so grateful to the author of this book that I wanted to cry.

Again.

3 1/2 Week Check-In

Do you know what a three and a half week old baby does?

Not a lot.

The things she does do are pretty cute, to be sure. She now holds eye contact, and when she's in a good mood she goes through a variety of facial expressions that make her look more like a human and less like a little goblin.

We've taken to entertaining her with silly, high-pitched sounds, which, on a good day, get her to break into a little half-smile. The delighted cackling that this reaction elicits is hard to believe. I think it's just that such a large portion of our days are devoted to merely keeping her from fussing that when she swings over into good cheer, it's cause for celebration.

She's discovered her hands, and is now very interested in them rather than just using them to flail wildly and whack herself repeatedly in the face. Sucking on her fists, putting her fingers in her mouth and reaching outwards towards us are all new signs of progress.

These are all small things, though. For the most part she is still very much a newborn. She spends much of each day sleeping in her swing, or in somebody's arms. When she's not doing that, she's eating. She eats ALL THE TIME. Constantly. It's great to see but exhausting to keep up with.

We're very happy with this little girl, despite the new challenges she throws at us every day.

While the Cat's Away, the Mouse Will Post

And by "cat" I mean Sadie, and by "mouse" I mean myself, and by "away" I mean "asleep for two minutes, finally, after five freaking hours of fussing and refusing to be anywhere but in my arms without pitching a royal hissy."

This is her new phase. She wants to be in my arms, not anywhere else, and being put down in her swing or her bouncy seat or, god forbid, her bassinet, is grounds for tears, wailing and gnashing of teeth. Literally as I type this, I'm shooting her swing suspicious glances, waiting for her to realize she's stuck in there and not with me.

And hey, she just realized it! Later.

The City of Sadie

Tummy time with King

Welcome, weary traveler, to our humble abode in the heart of the bustling City of Studio! You are welcome here. We are a simple people who co-exist with our neighbors and our animals in peace, but there is one thing you should know before you lay down your pack and rest.

You see, our home is ruled by a vengeful god known as The Sadie, otherwise known as She Who Must Be Appeased.

The Sadie is a mysterious being. We know little about her, though we have devoted many hours to studying her to learn the ins and outs of her capricious ways. There is precious little knowledge we can impart to you, weary traveler, but what knowledge we do have is yours.

To begin with, The Sadie must be placated with regular gifts of food. Milk is best; however, in the case of emergency, the severed head of a spring-born baby calf will also suffice.

The Sadie does not enjoy being put down, as this places her on the same level as everyday humans and she wants you to know she is more special than that.

There are two exceptions to this rule: The Sadie will deign to sit in her vibrating bouncy seat while you shower, as she is pleased by the sound of running water -- FOR A FEW MINUTES ONLY. (The Sadie does not like you to push your luck.)  Also, The Sadie enjoys lying on the changing table while you rub her ass with wet wipes. She likes you to know your place.

A warning! The Sadie can also be worshipped at the sacred baths, but you must take caution. She may seem to enjoy the bath by closing her eyes and smiling the entire time. Do not let her seeming pleasure lull you into a sense of false complacency. The next time you attempt to bathe her, she will react with great fury and outrage as if you are poking her in her belly button with sharp sticks. There is no rhyme or reason to this. The mind of The Sadie is unknowable.

Much like the clouds gather over the distant mountaintop of Haleakala each afternoon, the end of the day brings thunderclouds to our home, known locally as the Sadie Shitstorm. Yes, there is actual shit involved. Also screaming. There is no shelter from the storm. It can only be waited out with the coming of evening and that special, sacred time of day known as Sadie's Bedtime. No one knows why the afternoon displeases our great goddess. It is part of her mystery.

Should The Sadie make her presence known to you in the middle of the night, weary traveler, do not fear. Wrap her in a blanket, sit down on our Big Blue Exercise Ball, and get ready to repeat the sacred chant. Here are the words, sung to the melody of Buddy Holly's "Peggy Sue":

Sadie Sue
Sadie Sue
Pretty pretty pretty pretty Sadie Sue
Oh, Sadie
My Sadie Sue
Oh I love you, gal, yes I love you, Sadie Sue.

The chant MUST be repeated no less than fifty times, after which if The Sadie has seen fit to smile upon you, she may allow you to go back to sleep.

We wish you the best of luck, gentle stranger. Welcome to the strange, exciting world of The Sadie.

The Hard Part

Jungle Onesie

As of yesterday, Sadie is two weeks old. It really is hard to believe she's only been in our lives that long. Our old lives feel very, very far away.

Scott and I are struggling to adjust to life with this tiny, temperamental creature. On the whole he seems to be struggling a lot less than I am. A lot of things come naturally to him -- how to buckle her into her carseat and hoist it in and out of the car, how to tuck her into the crook of his arm and fall asleep with her on the couch, how to tell why she's crying and whether she needs something, or whether she's just being cranky and needs a few minutes to calm herself down.

Me, I'm still kind of this quivering bundle of hormones with limited usefulness. I cry so much now that it's kind of hilarious -- especially because I'm not crying because I'm unhappy. It's more like every single expression of feeling, whether positive or negative, immediately manifests itself as tears. I cry when I'm tired, when Sadie won't cooperate, when Scott comes home, when my mother calls. Poor Scott -- he probably never figured he'd be dealing with TWO wailing females once the baby finally arrived.

Luckily we have been very blessed by having family close by. We really do have the greatest families anyone could ask for. They babysit, they invite us over for brunch to get us out of the house, and they are generally awesome. It is because of them that I am not freaking more about the fact that Scott will be leaving for Vancouver in a week and gone for as long as TEN DAYS. AAAAAAAAAACK.

See what I mean about the hormones?

Enough about our fragile emotional states -- on to the more interesting stuff. And by "interesting," I of course mean, "Mildly interesting to anyone who's had a baby, and insufferably boring to everyone else."

Sadie is growing, like one of those pills you put in hot water that unfolds magically into a sponge shaped like a circus animal. Even the pediatrician was amazed. After originally losing about 10 oz after birth, she has regained it all back and then some, and is now over 8 lbs. She is also tall -- or rather, long. When she stretches her legs out and raises her arms, she looks like a noodle. Well, a noodle with a giant head.

Her hair and eyes are getting lighter. The most amazing things about her are her blonde eyebrows, and blonde highlights. How come I have to spend $200 to get highlights like that, and nature just gave them to her for free? As for her eyes, we're still playing the guessing game as to what color they will eventually be. They started out dark gray, but now seem to be turning bluer.

Her digestive system has come online with a vengeance, and she now happily burps and farts her way through every meal. Seriously, the pooping? Is out of control. Newborns are supposed to progressively poop less and pee more as they get older. Sadie obviously did not receive this memo. There is nothing she enjoys better than taking a loud, bubbly, giant crap. No, I take that back. If there's one thing she enjoys more than taking a giant crap, it's taking an initial giant crap, then waiting until we start changing her diaper, then taking a SECOND giant crap all over the the changing pad and the hands of whoever happens to be wiping her ass at the time.

No, wait. There's one thing she likes even more than that, and it's taking a giant crap while we're giving her a bath so that she goes from clean baby to a baby who is suddenly sitting a sinkful of poop water.

Babies are fun.

But late nights and stress and explosive poop aside, there is just so much awesomeness there too. Today, for the first time, she looked at me and burst into a big smile. Not a fart smile -- a REAL smile. And then Scott came over and leaned his head down at her and she looked at him, and she did it again -- a huge, sunny smile. It filled my whole heart with happiness. So what do you think I did? That's right -- I cried.

Taking a Breath

We've been home from the hospital for a week now, making Sadie officially a nine-day-old.

It really does feel like a lifetime ago that we were kid-less; it seems like she's always been with us. At the same time, she is a completely foreign being whose language we speak only minimally.

In many ways, she's a wonderfully easy baby. She loves to be held, tolerates having her diaper changed, and when she does cry, swaddling her up in a blanket and bouncing her gently in our arms quiets her instantly. Feeding times are a pleasure, occasional projectile spit-ups aside. Put her in her bouncy seat (with all-new Vibrating Motion!) and she's usually asleep in minutes, and will stay there for hours.

This is during the day.

Nighttime is a completely different experience, and is our punishment for the reward of having such a cheerful daytime newborn. She's up and down sometimes hourly; soothing her back to sleep can be an exhausting experience. When we get a 3 hour stretch of sleep out of her in the nighttime hours, it's cause for celebration.

We figured out pretty early that co-sleeping in the bedroom with us was nothing more than a way to ensure that neither of us got any sleep. Because she's still a couple of weeks away from being able to bottle-feed, I'm her only source of food and that means when she wakes up hungry, I'm the one who feeds her. We decided I should move into the nursery, and so that's what I've done.

What that means is that when she gets up, I get up, and when she whimpers or makes noise, I get up then, too, because I now exist in a constant state of mild anxiety wherein I'm always waiting for her to awaken and start fussing. It sounds like a rawer deal for me than it is, because she has her 5-6am meal, I wake up Scott and hand her off to him and then go into our bedroom for another couple hours of sleep.

I've gotten a lot better at getting her back to sleep when she does wake up. The routine has become: check the diaper for poop, have a feeding, then bounce on the yoga ball and sing softly until her eyes close. It works, but it's also an exhausting routine to cycle through three or more times a night, considering it can take as long as an hour from when she wakes up to when she finally gets back to sleep.

Everyone says this will pass and she will eventually start sleeping in longer stretches, so I'm focusing on that.

Next entry: the joys of bodily functions, and how bad it makes you feel the first time you get shampoo in your baby's eyes.

Exploiting Her Baby

I've been reading Teresa Strasser's blog, Exploiting My Baby, for the past few months. She and I were due at the same time, and I loved reading her dry, funny, neurotic take on the pregnancy experience. As my time drew near, I occasionally wondered how she was feeling about hers.

We must have given birth within a day or two of each other because she just made a funny and touching blog post about her experience and I wish I'd written it. This was my favorite part because I understand exactly what she's trying to say:

There aren’t that many main courses on the menu in this life, when it comes to the big experiences.

So, despite wanting to be terminally unique, at some point you order
the chicken or the steak. Maybe the surf and turf. Because there are
only so many dinners available at the cosmic table. The real comfort,
and the big bombshell, isn’t how I felt too good to have what the rest
of you were having, but not good enough. And here I am with my baby,
like a billion and a half mothers before me, and we all want to hear
that our children are chunky monkeys, and that we are not,
and that’s where I find magic where I least expected it, right in the
hackiness. There aren’t many offerings for dessert, either, and that’s
the sweetest part, that we’re all telling the same stories and scooping
our cold spoon into one infinite pint.

Snapshots of one day in L.A.

It's 6pm. Scott and I are jumpy and nervous. We can't think of anything in particular we'd like to go do.

We decide to get manicures. But when we get there, they're too busy to take us. We decide to go to Solley's next door for deli instead. My belly gets to the door about five minutes before the rest of me.

"I don't want to answer another pregnancy question, ever," I tell Scott, just before the waitress comes up and asks me when I'm due. "Tonight," I tell her, and for the rest of the meal I am peppered with questions from a woman who, I'm fairly sure, is twice as excited about my baby as I've ever been.

When we leave, she asks me what kind of dessert I like and sends me off with a black and white cookie, on the house.

We try for manicures again and again are told that it will be a wait. I tell Scott it's okay, I don't need nice nails for the birth, but I do feel bad that he didn't get his done. "I didn't need it. I just thought it would calm you down," he replies.

I'm not allowed to call the hospital to confirm my induction until 9pm. To pass the time, I watch America's Next Top Model. I am absolutely positive that when I do call, I will be told that an army of laboring women have just taken up all the beds and I'll have to wait to come in until next week -- so why not get absorbed in a little prime time television?

At exactly 8:50, I lose my patience and call. I am told to come in at exactly 10pm.

As we fly around the house, making last minute phone calls and double-checking hospital bags, I try to catch the final segment to find out who is no longer in the running towards becoming America's Next Top Model. It turns out to be Lulu, which is good because she was really mean to Bianca and also had a nasty boob tattoo.

Our ride to the hospital is surreal. Sunset Boulevard is hopping and so is La Cienega. I start thinking back to only a year or two ago, when I was going out three or four nights a week. We shake our heads at two drunk guys wearing black shirts, trying to jaywalk across the street. So irresponsible!

I expect to wait a long time once we arrive at the hospital. But instead, everything rushes way too quickly. We're crammed into the tiniest room possible and Scott has to fit his body into a chair too narrow for him.

A doctor -- not my doctor, but one in her practice -- comes to check me. They're supposed to put in a Foley catheter to help me dilate, to get me ready for the Pitocin. "She doesn't need the Foley," he pronounces. "She's already 2-3 centimeters dilated. Let's go right to the Pit." My first thought is, "this should shorten labor by a few hours. Good."

I listen to a couple of Adam Carolla podcasts, and watch some bad late night television. Every time I have to pee, which seems like every twenty minutes, Scott has to unhook the fetal monitor and help me across the room with all my IV tubes and bags hanging everywhere. This alone is embarrassing enough that I kind of just want to get the epidural already.

I get the epidural around 4:30am. I'm only 4 cm at this point, but I'm also a giant wuss. I explain this to the anesthesiologist. He's young and handsome and his name is Dr. Yang. He understands. Scott and I try to think of friends we have who we could set up with Dr. Yang because this guy is a serious catch.

I'm still able to feel contractions, and it makes me nervous. The question I want someone to answer is, Is this normal? No, I'm not in too much pain. I'm just concerned. Is it normal that I can still feel contractions, that they're still uncomfortable? Does that mean as they get worse, my pain will get worse -- that the epidural hasn't taken effect correctly? This is what I try to ask, but what happens is that Dr. Yang comes back, thinks I'm saying I need more painkillers, and ups my medication. Suddenly I am completely, utterly deadened. This annoys me because I totally COULD have handled the pain and now I'm that girl who demanded the super-powered ultra-extreme epidural and yes I'm a wuss, but not THAT much of a wuss.

Our nurse is gruff and Canadian. This makes no sense to me. I thought all Canadians were really nice?

I'm being wheeled into the delivery room because the doctor is on her way. It's already early morning, 7am. How did that happen?

I am fully dilated -- after three hours? Wow. Apparently it's unusual for things to move this quickly. We don't know what to do. The doctor leaves to deliver another baby, and we realize for the first time that this baby might come a whole lot quicker than we'd anticipated. None of our family is scheduled to arrive until after lunch. Scott starts making phone calls. We're trying to stay calm. No wait -- I'm not trying. I AM calm. Very calm. Hell, I can't feel a thing!

Strike that. I'm really cold. Shivering a lot. When is the doctor coming back?

She's back! And gruff Canadian nurse has been replaced by awesome Jamaican nurse. She and my doctor ask me to push. I do, as hard as I can, and they look concerned. They need to wait for the baby to move down, and for my epidural to wear off enough for me to aid in pushing. They comically lift my legs, which fall over of their own accord. "She's really numb," Jamaican nurse says, amused. DAMN IT, DR. YANG.

The doctor is gone, will be back in two hours, and awesome Jamaican nurse is leaning over me. She counsels me to push on my own with each contraction, to help move the baby down while we wait for the doctor. It's like she's letting me in on some guilty little nurse secret.

Time passes. It's really cold.

I joke about the little hoity toity touches I can see all around us that remind me Cedars is the favorite birthing hospital of really, really rich people everywhere. I order Scott to take pictures of the sink in the corner, which isn't standard issue stainless steel, but rather one of those aesthetically pleasing stone bowls that stand separate from the faucet. I also really want him to take a picture of the popsicle they have given me to suck on, which is actually an imported Italian strawberry sorbetto. It strikes me as hilarious that the ingredients listed on the side of the wrapped are in Italian.

I ask Scott to turn on the television. Even though there's no sound, it's a distraction. We find a station that seems to be nothing but beautiful nature images: flowers floating on a lake, an oak tree at the top of a misty hill. "How nice," I think. "The hospital has a labor channel."

After two hours, the doctor comes back and checks me again. I'm still not ready. She tells me she's going to the office and will come back at eleven. That gives me another two hours.

I fret, thinking about everyone arriving at the hospital already expecting the baby to have arrived. What if they get impatient sitting in the waiting room together? What if they leave? Will they be mad that we called them all at 7am to tell them the baby was on her way when she really wasn't?

I'm noticing a definite change. I can feel more. Things are finally happening.

At 11am exactly, I have a total classic birthing moment: I turn to the nurse and say, "I think I need to push." And suddenly the doctor is back in the room and we are getting ready to push. "I think this baby will come in the next hour," the nurse informs me. I want to cheer!

Being on my back isn't working.

I'm turned over on my side.

I'm turned over on my back. "Did you remember to take a picture of of the Italian popsicle?" I ask Scott as one point. He tells me he forgot, which annoys me. My job is to push a child out of my womb. His is to take a picture of a popsicle. I'm temporarily very disappointed in my husband.

We use something called a squat bar. We take it away.

Scott and the nurse wait in silence, watching the contraction monitor.

I realize I can see the monitor in a reflection from the mirror across the room and watch as well.

The doctor returns. I can tell from her concern that it's been too long. Progress is not being made.

I can feel the tension in the room. Above me, the doctor, the nurse and my husband all stare intently at the monitor, waiting for the next contraction, then the one after that.

I study the images on the television. An image of a maple leaf is replaced by a bible verse and suddenly I am struck by the realization that for the last two hours, I have not been watching the labor channel -- I'm watching the God channel. And I don't even care.

Clear snapshots fade into a blur here as the last hour ticks down. Scary words and phrases are flung about. Words like vacuum, c-section, episiotomy, you need to try harder. It's this last one that really gets me. Nobody gets to tell me I didn't try hard enough. I try harder.

The ceiling of the room is white. If I weren't an athiest, I'd be praying. But instead, I'm just talking to myself. Try harder. Try harder. Try harder.

"It's her stupid shoulders," I say, frustrated after another failed push. My doctor gets angry. "Don't talk like that. Not in my delivery room," she snaps at me. I'm not too distracted to feel guilty. I just called my daughter's shoulders stupid. I'm going to be a bad mother!

What's going on? When did all these people come in?

The baby is here! She's here! Hi, baby! I'm sorry I called your shoulders stupid. They're beautiful. And...ugh, kind of messy.

She cries right away.

I have never, ever seen Scott's eyes so wide in my life.

It's 2pm and I have a baby. Her name is Sadie.

I hold her on my chest. For a long time. This sounded like a good idea when they told us about it on the hospital tour, but now everyone's gone and I'm kind of really wishing they would just wheel me to recovery already. The room is really, really, really cold.

Scott walks in the door with a chicken salad sandwich from Starbucks and a giant Coke. He offers me water, but the Coke is what I want. It is the best thing I have ever tasted.

The sandwich has cranberries in it. Scott wonders why Starbucks needs to ruin a perfectly good chicken salad sandwich with cranberries.

Now I'm being wheeled down a long, long hallway towards my room. In this snapshot, I'm not sure if the baby is in my arms or if someone is carrying her next to me. All I know is that a group of people is standing just beyond a set of automatic double doors. They aren't my people -- they're waiting for someone else. Another mom is being wheeled in behind me. But I get there first, and the people greet me as if all along, it's me they have been waiting for. They cheer for me. They wear huge smiles and congratulate me and tell me my daughter is beautiful.

In the recovery room, my family files in. Everyone got there in time! Their faces are filled with happiness. I have been holding it together pretty well this entire time, but when my dad walks in I can barely look at him because I know if I do I will burst into tears.

It's funny, the lasting impressions you leave with after an experience like this. They're small and personal, rather than large and monumental. A nurse with a Jamaican accent, the God Channel, a chicken salad sandwich with cranberries, and a little girl who was almost named for a great American scientist, but wound up with a name cobbled together from the letters of the names of her grandparents -- made up of parts of us all.

I'm Already Ready, Already

For the last few mornings I've woken up and realized that, to my supreme irritation, I feel great.

"Great" being a relative term, of course. The recent heat wave has exacerbated my carpal tunnel, which manifests itself as soreness in the middle fingers of both hands and makes me feel like a crotchety old woman paying her dues after a lifetime of flipping pesky little kids the bird. Walking further than half a block makes my back feel like it's going to give out, and the simple act of sitting down to pee in the middle of the night is more of an ordeal than ever because when I try to stand up again, my knees respond thusly: "AW HELL NO."

Despite all of this, my overall feeling this week has been one of good health. I'm nowhere near the crying, hysterical mess I was two weeks ago when, without warning, I collapsed in Scott's arms and moaned, "Everything hurts so much. I can't DO this anymore." Is this the last-minute burst of energy they always tell you about, where the day before you go into labor you get the sudden, uncontrollable urge to buff the house clean with a nailbrush? If so, it's gone on an awful long time.

I'm not the only impatient one, either. My mother and sister have taken to answering the phone with a breathless, "Hello? Hello?" Every time I call, expecting to hear that I'm on my way to the hospital. I know there are people who have been crossing their fingers that nature will take its own course before the doctors help prod me along starting tomorrow night. Looks like we're all out of luck in that regard.

The ironic thing about feeling so capable right now is that I literally have NOTHING LEFT TO DO. I actually planned too well. As a result, my hospital bag is packed, I've pre-registered at the hospital, the laundry has been done, the house is clean, the dogs are taken care of, there are groceries in the fridge for when we get home, and I've completed all my freelance work.

"Maybe I should buy some new underwear," I muse to myself as I play my 500th game of fetch with Pepper and idly surf Go Fug Yourself. "Like, some ugly granny ones I can throw away in a couple months. That's probably a smart idea." Then I turn over the idea of negotiating Target in my head, ultimately reject it, and decide that the granny panties I currently own will probably do just fine.

The induction process is an odd one in part because it's potentially so long. Unlike labor, where they urge you to hold off checking in for as long as possible so that you can hang out at your own house through the first phase, with an induction they are monitoring you for the entire process, and the process can run 24 hours or longer. When I check into the hospital tomorrow night, they will be inserting a balloon in order to begin the dilation process, and throughout the night I will simply be hanging out, waiting for it to do its job well enough to move to the second, more serious phase of labor, which is the point where I can demand painkillers without feeling like a total wuss.

This gives us an entire night to basically sit around and wait. Once Scott determined that I was not going to allow him to just go home and sleep until things started getting interesting, we came up with a gameplan of ways to pass the time. We're bringing cards for games of gin rummy, we've loaded up our iPods with podcasts, and we're downloading some TV shows to watch on his laptop. Knowing me, I'll probably wind up surfing the internet, posting to Facebook and various forums from my hospital bed, because that's how much of an internet addict I am.

"OMG nurse just said 4cm dilated! Water just broke all over the bed! They just gave me opiates! Sooooo excited, y'all!"

If you get a cracked out email from me at 2am Thursday morning, reporting facts about my uterus that you never, ever wanted or needed to know, this is why.

So that's it, people. If you don't hear from me again, you know where I'll be.

 

Natural Birth Advocates In My Life, Read This Editorial

I don't expect it to change your mindset.

I just expect it to help you understand my own.

Rational Moms

39 Week Appointment and Some Big News

Yesterday we went back to the doctor's office for my 39 week appointment.

This one was bound to be exciting for a couple reasons. For one, ever since I measured 1cm dilated at my last appointment, I've been trying to encourage the process through various means, and was excited to see if any of it had paid off.

Also I was scheduled for an ultrasound, and have been looking forward to seeing how she was growing. I've had two ultrasounds in the past two months -- in the first one the baby measured unusually large (76th percentile) and in the second, she was right on track (54th percentile), which just goes to show you how imperfect these things are. So I was less concerned with her potential size and more interested to see how she's positioned and to make sure everything looks good otherwise.

I should have been concerned about the size. She's back to being big. Quite big, as in she's measuring well over 8 lbs. "She has a very round belly," the tech told me cheerfully.

But it wasn't the belly that concerned my doctor. Rather, she explained to me that the baby's shoulders are measuring broad, and that's the kind of thing that makes doctors nervous because it increases the risk of getting a shoulder stuck in the birth canal.

"Ouch," was my reaction.

Next came the cervical check. I've had my hopes up this past week that I could do some basic tricks to help speed up this process and help with dilation. So I've been walking every day, sitting on an exercise ball, eating spicy food at night, and, well, you know. The other thing you're supposed to do, that your partner has to help you with, that I can't mention because my dad reads this blog.

None of it worked. I'm fully effaced but I'm still only 1cm dilated, the same as I was at 38 weeks.

So my doctor sat us down for a "little discussion." She told us flat out she didn't intend to let the baby go too far overdue because of her size and the breadth of her shoulders. She asked us how we felt about induction.

As it happens, I've been thinking quite a bit about induction over the past couple of days, although I've never considered it as a likelihood before. My thought process went a bit like this:

"Scott's leaving town the middle of next month. I really, really, really hope I don't go a few weeks overdue, because it would suck to come home with a newborn and then say goodbye to my husband for a week. I wonder what my doctor's feelings on scheduled inductions are."

Then I went and did a whole bunch of research on the subject, most of which agrees that unless there's a sound medical reason for it, most doctors don't like to schedule inductions before the 41st week or so. I'm not against elective induction, but at the same time, the thought of asking my doctor to do it just because I'm physically uncomfortable all the time and afraid of being alone in a house with a one week old newborn also didn't sit right with me.

So I'd pretty much already made the decision not to press the issue and to let nature take its course, but it was still in my head. The fact that the doctor is the one who brought up induction as a possibility was a relief. My immediate answer to her was, "I would be fine with it." Scott agreed.

After that? Everything was a bit of a blur. My doctor suggested we come in for it first thing next week. Scott wigged out a little bit and suggested the end of the week instead. We compromised on checking into the hospital late Wednesday night, which means that in all likelihood, I will be induced on my original due date, Sept. 24th.

So there you have it! All of a sudden, the game has changed -- I know for a fact that even if I don't go into labor naturally within the next few days, I will still be greeting my daughter in less than a week.

In future entries, I'll write a little bit about what the induction process involves, because I find it very interesting. In the meantime, I feel like a little kid 5 days before Christmas -- who has just been told that you never know, Christmas could always come early.

Getting Organ-ized

In the past few days, I've devoted more thought to the dispersal of several of my internal body parts than any normal person should. Other than an organ donor, I mean. And even if you do choose to become an organ donor, you generally think of your body as one whole unit, as in "I am donating my organs...to somebody, maybe," rather than, "I think I'll donate my left eyeball to some guy in Dubuke who poked his out with a fork, and my liver could definitely do some good for someone who's had a few too many Jager shots at the old Chimneysweep."

Today I worked out the details of three body parts which will soon become separate from the rest of my self:

1. We registered at a cord blood bank, which stores and freezes blood from a baby's umbilical cord. There are public donation banks and private banks, and we're paying the fees to have the blood preserved privately -- that is, stored in giant freezers. It's not wacky like cryogenics, I swear. There are already proven uses for cord blood, in that it can be used to harvest healthy stem cells which could then be used to help family members with various medical conditions. The technology is still being developed, but as Scott pointed out when I hedged on the cost of collection and storage, "It's worth it to gamble on science." That was the right thing to say.

So there you go. I get a collection kit in the mail, which I then bring with me when I check into the hospital, and instead of being chucked in the garbage, my baby's umbilical cord may one day be capable of doing great things.

2. Let me just ask you a question. If you found yourself in possession of a spare placenta, what would you do with it? Would you take it home and toss it around like Laura and Mary Ingalls did with a pig bladder in "Little House on The Prairie"? Would you use it to play practical jokes on people? Would you save it for Halloween and then donate it to a local haunted house to be used as realistic guts?

Or, would you find someone willing to freeze-dry the thing and turn it into pills, which you could then take on a daily basis for aid in post-partum depression?

If you chose the fourth option, then you're me. This unusual detour into crunch-itude was brought to me by my sister-in-law, and my doctor thinks it might not be that bad an idea. Whether it does anything is completely unproven -- there's no scientific research either way. It's one of those anecdotal things, where women have been doing it for centuries and so some of them swear by it and blah, blah, blah, they say that about homeopathy too. In this case, there's actually some kind of legitimate theory behind the idea, which is that you're replenishing iron and hormones that have been depleted from your body through the process of delivering. At the very worst, it will do nothing at all and I'll have an interesting story to tell my grandkids.  

The only obstacle is for me to get past the idea of what I'll be putting in my mouth every day, and I figure if I've been able to swallow giant horse-pill-sized fish oil supplements for the past nine months, this should be a cakewalk.

3. Oh, I almost forgot the third item. The third item is a baby. Shut up, it's a body part! She's currently a part of my body, is she not? The third item is a baby, which we will be bringing home with us, very soon.

One Billion Trillion Days

I was going to post something today about patience and how I have been searching deep within myself to make it through these final days of pregnancy with fortitude and grace. I was feeling very magnanimous when I woke up this morning (after a rough, rough night) and was kind of floating around with a Mona Lisa smile on my face.

"Oh, another Braxton Hicks contraction! What a positive sign. I will take this discomfort, internalize it and use it to build my strength for when the real thing happens in a few days. What a blessing this all is!"

But then I went and read on the internet that the average pregnancy for a first-time mother is actually 41 weeks and 1 day. That's average. As in, two and a half weeks from now. As in, half of them actually go longer than that.

Eff magnanimity. I'm going to go sulk now.

I Snore Now

Snoring has always been the one thing I could confidently give Scott a hard time about. Well, that and his habit of absentmindedly rubbing his hands together while ordering food at a restaurant, as if he's a cartoon villain sharing the details of his latest diabolical plot. But that's just really cute. The snoring, not so much.

He's always been a snorer, but we've figured out a way to maintain a good sense of humor about it. I compromise by wearing earplugs on the rare nights that it really bothers me. He compromises by not getting grumpy when I wake him up to turn him over by leaning into his ear and whisper-yelling, "Honey. You're SNORING."

But neither of us really knows how to deal with this new symptom of my pregnancy: I now snore. A lot. Every night.

It's not like cute, petite girl-snoring, either. It's like that choking, rat-tat-tat machine-gun type snoring where you're struggling to pull air in and you wake yourself up from a combination of suffocation and sheer noise. As of last week, I discovered that the only safe position was to sleep on my left side -- that way I didn't snore. And it's easier than you'd imagine to sleep in one position all night, because turning over is such a huge pain-in-the-ass procedure these days that I'm not likely to change positions accidentally in the middle of the night.

But last night was the first night that, no matter what position I shifted into, the snoring would not go away. Every time I was about to slide into sleep, I'd feel my own breath catch in my throat and hear a giant, loud HUUUUUUUNK sound and then Scott would get up and stomp his way into the bathroom, which in husband language means "You are really, really irritating me right now but I am too polite to say so."

Now, after so many years teasing my husband about his own breathing issues, I finally know what he's been going through. Sleep apnea both sucks and blows.

Checkup: 38 Weeks

Exciting news! Scott and I went in for my 38 week checkup today, and things are progressing very nicely.

Shortly after warning us that first-time moms often progress slowly and that I shouldn't be disappointed if there hasn't been much change, my doctor checked me out and reported that I am currently 1 cm dilated and 80% effaced (that's the shortening of the cervix, for all you laymen out there.) The baby's head is also at a +1 station, meaning she's dropped low and is ready to go.

I have a baby's head lodged in my pelvis. It is attached to arms, a torso and legs. She has a heartbeat I can feel, a diaphragm that gives her hiccups after I've eaten a meal, and a thumb she sometimes likes to suck, making her body undulate softly. They all make up a tiny person who will very soon come out of me. This still blows my mind when I think about it.

The checkup doesn't mean anything as far as knowing when labor will begin, but it's definitely a positive sign. And now, my friends, the final countdown begins. Next week I'll get one last ultrasound to make sure everything looks okay, but it appears the baby is already eager to reassure us that she's just as ready to get going as we are to get her there.

An Actual Phone Call that Took Place Today

*Ring ring*

ME: Hello?

NURSE PRACTITIONER: Hi, Amanda? This is the nurse practitioner from your doctor's office. You left a message for me?

ME: Oh! Yes.

NP: Is everything okay?

ME: I think so. Well -- here's the thing. I'm 38 weeks pregnant. And I receive these weekly emailed updates on what I should expect during my pregnancy? From a website I signed up for?

NP: Uh huh.

ME: And -- well, I'm sure it's nothing. But in this week's update, it mentioned I should be conscious of any vision changes, like if you start seeing flashing lights or floaters? And the thing is, two days ago, I noticed that sometimes I see little flashing lights, if I turn my head really fast?

NP: Okay...

ME: And um...the site said it could be a sign of pre-eclampsia. And that I should call you. Just to be safe.

NP: Have you experienced any dizziness?

ME: No.

NP: (tiny, barely audible sigh) Well...you haven't had any other symptoms, have you? Swelling? Rapid weight gain?

ME: Just...normal amounts, I guess.

NP: Have you had issues with high blood pressure?

ME: No, as of last week everything was normal. (beat) I mean, I know it was nothing. I just thought...because it said I should call my doctor and check, just to make sure.

NP: (gently) It's something new, every day, isn't it? The good news is you won't have much longer to wait.

ME: Can't be soon enough! Ha ha!

NP: (dead silence)

ME: Well, okay then! I feel better! Thanks!

NP: Uh-huh.

*click*

This conversation brought to you by my extreme paranoia.

Drop It Like It's Hot

So, this happened!

After so much waiting, it's a relief to finally get an obvious, irrefutable sign that this crazy journey is almost at an end.

I realize now that the dropping ("lightening," if you prefer, although I have no idea what part of me has gotten any lighter) has actually been taking place over the past week, maybe longer than that. Walking is tougher, I get up now every hour at night, and by mid-day I've developed a pronounced waddle -- usually accompanied by some muttering and groaning under my breath. Guess all that bouncing on the exercise ball didn't hurt, either.

It's a good thing, too. I was desperately in need of a sign. I'm 16 days out from my due date, and up until this past weekend, there's been no indication that this child will ever, ever come out of me. No Braxton Hicks, no identifiable false contractions, nothing. I really was convinced that I might be the first woman in history to be pregnant forever. Yeah, I'm aware every woman thinks this. But I was going to be the first one who was RIGHT.

In three days I have my 38 week doctor's appointment, where they will check me for cervical dilation for the first time. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that things are getting started.

Nursery Photos

Nursery

Click on the photo above to access a bunch of nursery photos. The room will never, ever be this clean again, which is why I try to go in there once every day to appreciate it.

Surfing Ventura

You know it's hot and I'm pregnant when something like this happens and my first thought is not, "Oh, those poor businesses," but rather, "You know, if we went out and bought a couple of inner tubes, we could TOTALLY float in that."

Water main break