Bunch of Rookies!
Corey and I feel like a pair of rookies parenting Felix because he is so different from Miles. And when I say different, I mean he is like a typical baby. He sleeps. He has periods where he is simultaneously awake and NOT screaming. It’s so strange and so far removed from our experiences. We have no idea what to do.
We took him out with us to dinner on our anniversary and risked carrying him into the restaurant in his car seat, since he was asleep in there. The host got a high chair out for us. Corey protested, “No, no, he’s too little to sit!”
The host looked at us like a bunch of rookies and explained that at restaurants, you can turn the chair upside down and place the carseat bucket in there and the baby sits next to you at dinner. Asleep.
We looked at each other and laughed. We just laughed and laughed and laughed. And ate dinner while our baby slept. Sure, he woke up to nurse when I was halfway through my ahi steak, but otherwise he was asleep.
He also is starting to be predictable, as in we know that he likes to be napping around 9am. It was about 10 months until I could predict ANYTHING Miles was going to do. Felix wakes up every day at 5:30. No matter what, he wakes up at 5:30 and poops and farts for a few hours. He has a “fussy time” in the evening, during which I choose to nurse him because he doesn’t cry then, just nurses for 2 hours. (Corey is usually engaged putting Miles to bed and it’s just easier to sit and nurse than to stand and jostle or bounce. Though sometimes I take this opportunity to go for a walk with the baby in the Mei Tie)
But let’s say I stop to go to the bathroom or something. He cries, but it’s like normal crying. It stops when someone picks him up and jostles or bounces him vigorously.
Not to continue doing this comparison to Miles’ infancy, but when I would go for walks with him in the carrier, it was because I couldn’t bear the reverberations of his screams bouncing off the walls any longer and just wanted a change of venue for the crying. One time, a woman chased me, barefoot, down the street to ask what was wrong with my baby.
I hope Miles doesn’t sit down and read this some day and think we think he was a monster. I mean, he sort of was, but my point today is that we got a normal baby this time and while it may seem like that would be easy and we’d just coast on through, we are still total newbies because we don’t know HOW to parent a typical kiddo.
I still have residual shock waves from summer 2009. My shoulders get tense when Felix cries and my body braces itself for battle. I don’t know how long it will take to disarm that Pavlovian response. Certainly, I’m tense much longer than the fussing lasts for a diaper change.
What strikes me as hilarious is that Felix hates the car with the same passion Miles hated the car. This, we know how to deal with. We blare the static, tense our shoulders, and drive as fast as we can or avoid leaving the house if it involves a car trip. When we arrive, we dash out of the seat and scoop up the baby and prepare to insert a breast into his mouth IMMEDIATELY.
Otherwise? I spend really quite a lot of time checking my sleeping baby to make sure he is still breathing. Total rookie move, right? I even jostle him sometimes to be sure, because an infant couldn’t possibly sleep on his own for more than the time it takes me to go to the bathroom.
June 14th, 2012 at 10:32 am
I suppose my tension eases pretty much as soon as the crying stops, but I wanted to share that even with my unusually easy baby who is consistently easy to comfort, I nonetheless tense up immediately when she starts crying, and must fight against springing into immediate action if I’m, say, sitting on the toilet, or am otherwise indisposed. So…you may not have as much Pavlovian as overstimulated evolutionary response!
June 15th, 2012 at 6:45 am
With E, I dealt with the early evening fuss by continuous nursing as well because I assumed she was cluster feeding. Supposedly cluster evening feeding helps babies sleep through the night? In her case it seemed to.