Every moment

I've been feeling quite reflective recently.
To be honest, things have been slightly bumpy with the sausage in the last few weeks. While I've never come close to wishing I didn't have him, and never stopped liking him, I really faltered in my confidence in my ability to be a good mother to him. He seemed never to be satisfied, and for a couple of weeks he just cried all the time - relentless, insistent, despairing crying that I could at best delay by holding him, but sometimes even that didn't work. I was starting to ask myself what I was doing wrong, particularly after each version of that conversation where someone asks your baby's age, and you tell them, and they say OOOOOO such a lovely age, you can really enjoy them at this age, can't you? And I'd nod and agree, and walk away thinking well, I love him, but I don't seem to be enjoying him that much. It was just firefighting and I was devoting so much attention to making him not-cry that there wasn't much left in the tank for anything more positive.
So it's a joy for me to able to say things have moved on. Whatever was troubling him (or me) seems to have passed for now and for the past week I have really, truly, actively enjoyed pretty much every moment with him. The cries have always made sense to me, and I've known what to do, or when there's not much I can do; I'm understanding his cues for feeding, sleep, or a change of activity; he is engaging so very much with me, so much eye contact and laughing and smiling; he has periods of at least a few minutes where he will sit in his chair while I get on with something, or where I can lean him on me and let him happily play with something. I feel as though we have weathered something significant - we've come out of the other side of a time when we weren't quite synchronised, when there was something he was telling me that I wasn't 'getting', and I'm reaping the rewards now in a baby who seems to like me almost as much as I like him.
Oh, and he's sleeping for the odd stretch longer than 2 hours at night now. Of course this makes a huge difference.

I'm not silly enough, or blindly optimistic enough, to think that I now have it nailed and it will be plain sailing right through to adulthood. The draft post that I've been writing in my head called "attachment parenting fail" may well still get an airing when it's been refined a bit further. I also know that it's not as if we weren't having plenty of nice times during that difficult period - it wasn't weeks and weeks of living hell, or anything close to it. But still, it feels as though a page has turned. Bliss! 

Home alone

It's day 2 of a week where Isaac and I are alone together, his daddy having gone away to do interesting things in hot places.
My learning points so far:
1. It's a lot harder when you don't have someone to pick up the slack, even if it's only of the "oh god, can you just entertain him for 10 minutes while I slump and stare into space?" variety;
2. Nights, on the other hand, have been easier so far. He's feeding about a million times a night but I don't mind so much when there's no one who's asleep. I appreciate that this is deeply irrational, and that there's no need for my beloved to be awake while I'm feeding, but clearly (from my reaction this week) it's been simmering with me, because really last night I felt quite serene at each feed, even though they were every hour;
3. The thought of the possibility of my getting ill is TERRIFYING. I felt dreadful yesterday, all shivery and achey and cotton-wooly, and went to bed very very early thinking oh god, this is it, I have the flu, how on earth am I going to look after the baby? Luckily I turned out to be fine but still the fear of breaking my legs, or something, pervades;
4. I have a new depth of respect for anyone who does this alone full-time. My baby is (obviously) gorgeous and wonderful and lovely, but he's also hard work and intensive and really, just a few minutes of being able to share his care (and I don't mean a few minutes is all the beloved provides, just that it's the sanity-provider) makes quite a difference to how exhausted you are at the end of the day;
5. I'm so glad that he's old enough that he's still going to know his daddy when he gets back. Again this probably doesn't sound too rational, as it *is* only a week, but I feel so confident that daddy will get the almost hysterically delighted reaction that he always does;
6. We had two awful nights just before this week, where instead of waking for feeds and going straight back to sleep, he woke, howled, refused to feed, howled, howled, howled, needing us to take it in turns to rock and pace. I was terrified this pattern would continue, but it hasn't two nights so far. I think it would actually kill me, doing it alone;
7. I thought that with all the time I would have alone in the evenings I could do lots of sustained reading, without the worry of being antisocial. So far I've not even picked up a book, though I've done some excellent wallying around on the internet, and have managed some studying (study books don't count as books). Still, three more evenings, even if you don't count the rest of this one;
8. I may be coping just fine without him, but I still miss him.

Six months ago...

How did my boy go from this to the great big smiling hulk below?
Six months ago today was when I first met him, and I don't even mind if that sounds a bit naff. He was small and really quite incapable, and now he's huge and healthy. He has two tiny teeth, the fattest wrists you can think of, and is even working on getting some hair. He can sit with just a hand near to him for support, he can grab objects one handed and transfer them efficiently into his mouth, he has a huge range of vocalisations, and the most luminous smile in the world. Describing his physical characteristics and "achievements", if you like, is a hopeless way to explain what he is, but how can you possibly do justice to a baby's personality in words?
There's only an occasional day that passes without me having at least a fleeting moment of OHGODTHISISTOOHARDIWANTMYOLDLIFEBACK but there's also not been a single day when I haven't had a time of a deep sensation of blessedness. I can't get over the good fortune of having this amazing infant growing and developing in front of me. I can't quite get my head around the fact that he's "mine", that I built this thing, I grew him inside, I pushed him out, I've fed him solely off my milk for all this time (if I could do footnotes I'd add one here saying that he has tripled his birthweight, and all from my boobies), and yet he is so distinctly himself, and I can't take credit for that.
I hope the next six months will keep feeling like this, perhaps with not so many of the capitalised moments, but I don't want to take anything for granted. I'd not swap these highs and lows for a lifetime in the middle.
Happy half-birthday, my darling sausage-boy!

The best moment of the day

It's not the moment when he goes to bed, even though that might be a relief.
Instead, it's usually about three hours after that. I've made and eaten dinner, and settled down to some reading or studying or wallying around on the internet, and then I hear a little chirp on the baby monitor.
This is my place to confess that I always bound up the stairs, without waiting to see whether he'll just roll over and go back to sleep, because after three hours I miss him and I want to scoop up his sleepy little body. I want to watch and feel his head roll into me with his eyes still closed, and I want to snuggle him up while he feeds. Last night I found myself reaching to stroke his hair, and at exactly the same time he stretched up and stroked my face, eyes still closed.

Night feeds are a bugger, and he is a right one for them, but the evening feed, oh, the evening feed, I don't want it ever to stop.
(apologies for the worst photo in the world. But, could anyone resist gathering up that little bundle?)

A bit helpless

Of course this is the trouble with vowing to write on your blog more often: you end up with the slightly gloomy bits.
I wouldn't give him up for a million squillion pounds but life with a six month old can be, as I might have mentioned before, hard work. And on days like today, where he's just popped out one tooth and is visibly working on another, and so is one big ball of misery, and your only job is to be his mother, and he's cried all day, you can't help feeling that you haven't done that job too well, and that if it were any other you'd probably have been sacked by now.
(Yes, I know that I'm not making his gums hurt, but I should be able to distract him out of it, or know the best time to drug him out of it, or at least have the saintly patience not to mind the way it saps every ounce of energy from me).
As soon as I have a toothy picture I will post it up and the blog will return to sunniness, as, I hope, will the boy.

A post I am writing in November

Oh, gets easier, gets harder again, gets infinitely more rewarding, gets infinitely more draining...
I would really like to get back into writing this blog because it feels like the sort of record that I want to have, but to do this reliably I'd need to have more evenings where I'm capable of something other than staring blankly at the floor recovering.
Briefly:
- My beloved sausage baby is approaching six months, is still the plumpest baby on the block, and has the most beautiful smile that anyone has ever had.
- He is also what I believe Dr Sears would call a "high needs baby". A really intense involvement in the world demands a high level of input from mummy when you still can't quite support yourself sitting up or reach any of the things you want or stop thinking for long enough to sleep. He has no middle gears, and I adore him for this but it's TIRING.
- Newsflash: new mother finds having a baby tiring.
- I probably don't even count as a new mother any more.
- I have been reading a little, honest, but the reason my last post has only just made it up is that it was all written in draft and somebody closed the tab without saving it so it lost the second half which was a book update, and now I can't guarantee the list would be complete, and I don't know what to do about that.
- I've changed. I don't know what I've changed to, and whether it's all for the good, but I'm definitely not the same person I was pre-bonzo.

So I have some targets that I can start pursuing as soon as he tips over six months. Definitely not in order of importance:
1. Get back into writing the blog more regularly, including updating what I've been reading, which might even encourage me to read a bit more again;
2. Work out what I'm going to do about him and work. It's clear to me that I can't possibly go back at the end of January as I'd planned, but the most I could get from my current job is up to the end of April. Maybe I could go back there part time, but I need to do some serious soul searching about this. Working 3 days a week would perhaps, at a stretch, just about pay the bills, but I don't want someone else to have my baby 3 days a week. I know he'll be a lot older then, so I need to start thinking about future-Isaac not current-Isaac, but he'll still not be big enough to tell me if he doesn't like it, or to understand why I keep leaving him. But, we need to get some income from somewhere, and if I plan ever to go back to work then I probably need not to stop completely now (I could get rusty quite fast), and there is just the tiniest bit of me that thinks a bit of adult company occasionally would be quite nice;
3. Get thin and beautiful like all the other mummies. Ha!
4. Start a super healthy eating programme so that as our baby led weaning progresses he is only eating the purest and best food, but also very economically.
5. Flap wings. Fly to moon.
6. Make sure I have my sense of perspective right. I don't know if I'm spending too much time thinking/worrying about the baby; I don't know if I'm becoming a boring person about him; I don't even know whether it's good for him to have me so attached. And I have no idea how to find out.
7. Keep up with the OU stuff so that I get my degree finished in the summer. Easy...

A post I wrote in September that never made it up

Take a deep breath, and whisper it.....I think it's getting easier. I read in a few places that at 3 months a switch just flicks, and I think it has. Suddenly he goes to sleep for the night at somewhere between 7pm and 9pm, and although he is waking up all the time for feeds, he goes straight back to sleep. So I have evenings again, and even more spectacularly I've learned that the best way to get him to sleep in the mornings is to pop him in the pram and go to the park. There, it seems necessary to imitate something of the morning routine of my other life, my long-distant, seems-like-a-hazy-memory life, and get out the coffee and book. Bliss!!

What's most relieving and rewarding for me is that it's not really about the physical improvements, the fact that we're getting there with the breastfeeding, and that his sleeping is getting more predictable. It's that I'm adjusting to the whole thing emotionally and developing both flexibility and resilience in quantities I didn't know I had. On the way to the park on Monday morning, a jogger passed me, and I had a moment of envy. But so, so quickly I found myself thinking well, I have the remnants of a mummy tummy unlike her lovely flat one, my hair has been finger-brushed only unlike her sleek lovely ponytail, I am wearing jeans which I think are now held together by various baby fluids, but I really, honestly, don't care, and wouldn't swap it. My new kind of freedom is about spending time with my baby; my new exercise is lumping him around; I've found a way to get in a window of time for reading on a bench - and I wouldn't swap any of this for being younger and thinner and less surrounded by obligations. Of course I do plan to be gorgeous one day, but given the choice now between a pound off me and a pound on my baby, there's no competition at all.