Down The Rabbit Hole

Not much going on ’round these parts this week.  Áine continues to enjoy trying new foods.  So far sweet potatoes are the big winner, although she also seems to like pears and avocado.  Not too sure about bananas yet, but she ate them.  My mom gave me this neat little babyfood maker so I’ve been able to easily whip up some fresh purées for her. It’s been really fun watching her face as she tries all the new foods.  The first bite always gets a furrowed brow, but if she likes it then she’ll kind of lunge forward in her chair with her mouth open wide, ready for more.

But you knew I had to write about this sooner or later…

What solid food does to her diapers is atrocious.  Sorry for the ridiculous parental cliché of “let’s talk about my kid’s poop!”, but jesum crow, it’s something else.  She was one of those lucky (for Mama and Papa) breastfed babies who pooped once every ten days or so, and it was that interesting pumpkin-y looking, not smelly stuff that comes out of breastfed kids.  NOW?  I’m thinking of investing in a gas mask.  And it doesn’t all come out in one go.  She’s still getting the hang of this new pooping thing, so she’ll go, she’ll scream because she hates sitting in a diaper full of stinky poo (who can blame her), I change her, and ten minutes later she’s grunting again and we do it all over.  I should probably wait a little longer after I know she’s gone before I change her but I hate to think of her sitting around in a full diaper.

It’s silly I know but the changes in Áine’s poo are just one more sign of how fast she’s growing up.  She changes every single day.  Since she’s started solid food she’s been nursing less and I’ve been struck by how conflicted I feel about this.  For six months there has been part of me that has been really looking forward to her not being quite so physically dependent on me.  Needing to be present every 2-3 hours as her only source of nourishment has been at pretty taxing at times.  But a couple days after we started her on real food there was a day when she just wasn’t very hungry and after her breakfast rejected my breast all day long.  I freaked out – what if she was weaning herself already?  What if she liked that rice cereal so much that she decided she didn’t need her “deelicious meelks” anymore?

The next day all was back to normal, but I realized how not ready I am for her to stop nursing.  I need her to need me like that for a little while longer.  We tried so hard and so long to have our baby girl and now it’s not going to be too much longer before she’s not our little baby anymore.  She’ll be our little girl, then our big girl, and then our daughter will be a beautiful young woman.

And to think it all started with stinky poo.

We just got back from spending a week in Seattle with friends.  Given, it was the middle of July and Seattle is currently experiencing a particularly long stretch without rain, but people, it was glorious.  GLORIOUS.  I would move there in a heartbeat, but the hubs has an aversion to rain.  And I don’t blame him.  He grew up in L.A., so I’m surprised that he even knows what rain looks like.  But me, I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, so I need some gloomy grey skies and rain every so often.  But maybe not nine months out of the year.  That does seem a bit excessive.

It was our first time traveling with Áine where we weren’t staying with family, just friends, so I was a little nervous subjecting them to the idiosyncrasies of our barely-six-month-old.  But I needn’t have worried, Áine was perfect.  A couple minor meltdowns, but that is to be expected.  She had a growth spurt while we were there which meant that she slept for inordinate amounts of time for several days in a row.  This gave Mama and Papa plenty of time for wine drinking with friends.  We bought her this little tent to sleep in and it worked out great.  We’d prepared her for it beforehand by having her take some naps in it at home, and she took to it immediately.  Tent + baby monitor = happy relaxed parents.

We stayed the first few nights with friends on Bainbridge Island and also took an overnight trip with those same friends to Hood Canal.  There we ate fresh clams and crabs and swam in the ocean (until someone got stung by an evil red jellyfish).  The last three nights were in Seattle with other friends.  I also got to meet up with an old friend from high school and her two little boys.  Seattle is such a beautiful city.  It’s so clean and there’s lots of cool stuff to see:  Pike’s Place Market, Pioneer Square, the Experience Music Project, the Seattle Aquarium.  Loved it.

Here are a few pictures from the trip:

One of the biggest challenges of parenting for me so far (I mean besides the normal lack of sleep stuff) has been learning to take things in stride.  Case in point, a few weeks ago we transitioned her from the co-sleeper next to our bed to her crib in her room, and one night a little while after putting her to bed we hear her screaming. Turns out she had inadvertently flipped over onto her stomach in her sleep and woke up: “OHMYGODI’MONMYTUMMYHOWDIDTHATHAPPENWAAAAAAAAAAH!!!” She was like a turtle in reverse – on her belly, not quite sure how she’d gotten there, and not quite sure what to do about it.

Now, one of the greatest fears for any new parent is the threat of SIDS, and actually having known someone who lost a family member to SIDS, I was particularly concerned about it.  Everything I read prior to giving birth said that one of the risk factors is stomach sleeping, so we should always put her on her back to sleep.  We  even had a little wedge thing that she slept with when she was tiny to prevent her from turning over.  So when she started turning over on her own, we were pretty uneasy.  I tried putting her in the wedge thing, but she managed to turn over anyway and got herself stuck between the wedge and the crib rail.  The wedge was history.  I checked on her a million times that night.  The next night she didn’t cry after we put her down, but every time I checked on her she would be on her tummy.  At first I would just flip her back over every time.  We agonized about what to do about it, and again I got up countless times to check on her, and every time she would just be slumbering away, sweet as can be.

It became clear after those first couple nights that she really liked to sleep that way, so eventually we figured that a) if she was big enough to get herself onto her belly, she was probably big enough to sleep that way if she wanted, and b) she has a really strong neck and can hold her upper body up really well, so if she needed help because she was stuck, we would be sure to hear about it.

I guess what I learned from this little exercise is that I can’t totally control the world that my daughter lives in, or what she does in it.  She’s already, at the tender age of five months old, making decisions for herself.  After going through everything we went through to bring Áine into our lives, I just want things to be perfect for her, to keep her safe and happy, but I can’t live in terror that something bad is going to happen or I’m going to miss all the good stuff.  Not only that, but I need to set a good a example for her and teach her to be independent and resilient.  I don’t want her to grow up afraid of the world, afraid that something bad lurks around every turn.  I can try my best to be vigilant and do what I think is right for her, but even now there are things that I need to learn to trust her on.  I need to trust that she is healthy and strong, and that, for the most part, the world works as it should.  It’s going to be a constant struggle, since letting go of control is not something that comes easily to me.  But I have a long life of mothering ahead of me, and it will be easier if I can learn to stop holding my breath.

Now, a couple weeks later, we’ve got ourselves a little stomach sleeper.  At bedtime, we put her down on her back, and she promptly sticks a thumb in her mouth and flips over, asleep almost immediately.  And this sweet girl sleeps aaaaaaaaaall night long.