Watch me grow

I love watching him grow.

The signs of his growth are increasing at an accelerating rate. They really do grow so quickly.

I'm filled with bittersweet pride and joy as in the last month I packed away his size 000 and brought out his size 00 clothing. My little Buddha boy is a four month old squeezing into 6-9 month clothing. What a healthy little munchkin. The most amazing thing he has outgrown is a hat that is labelled suitable for 9-24month olds. How could he possibly have such a large head? Larger than a two year olds? Anyone who has met my husband will find it easy to figure out. His head is preposterously large. Many people were visibly afraid for me when I announced my pregnancy.

Buddyboo has also moved on to 'crawler' sized nappies and indeed he started making the appropriate leg kicks on the floor, the seedling starts of a crawl. My husband and I were together when he first started attempting a crawl. It was nice and made me think of how many more firsts we are going to witness in the next years.

He started trying to roll from his stomach to his back this week. I left him on the mat on his tummy so I could pop some toast in the toaster. The next minute I turn around and he was sprawled on his back just off his mat like an overturned beetle legs and arms flailing gently with a quizzical look on his face. Probably wondering how his world view just got switched so swiftly without mummy coming to move him. So cute.

He also seems to have found his voice. His cries are no longer confused lengthy crying sessions but distinct calls and communicative babbling. I swear the little guy thinks he is talking sometimes. Strangely enough he talks the most when prone while I change his nappy. He must think its a bit of a hairdresser's chair...or a shrink's couch. A place he can unload his thoughts and worries while I groom him and tend to his needs. He is a headstrong little boy. Quick to voice his displeasure but so genuine with his smiles.

His sleep has been an issue but he is doing his best and has his star days and off days like anyone. The poor lil boy also has developed bad eczema on his face like his father before him once suffered as a child. It's heartbreaking having to hold him through a terrible night of itching and holding his arms down to prevent scratching just so he can get some sleep. How can I blame the poor sod when I as a full grown adult could barely control myself from scratching an itch during the terrible pregnancy rash (see first post). I now have a house full of discarded jars and bottles of creams, lotions and potions as we work our way though the chemist shelves for something that works. Fingers crossed the current regimen we were put on by the paediatrician this week will work. 

Newborns are a bit pinochio-esque but he is definitely a real little boy now. I still miss him all the time. I miss the him from the gangly little newborn he was, to the Buddyboo of last month, to the Buddyboo of five minutes ago. He is asleep in his cot right now in the same room as me as I type this and I still miss him. The depth of a mothers love is tremendous if not wonderfully obsessive. Oh dear he is going to find me so annoying one day.

Sleep my baby sleep

The last time I wrote I was at my wits end with a baby that wouldn't sleep.

The next week I sprung into sleep training action. Somehow it worked. For about a week my baby was responding to gentle shushes and lullabies whereas practically jumping on a trampoline while yelling in his ear was previously what calmed him down. Just like the guides said, for a magical week, I could lay my baby down awake and he would gently put himself to sleep while I enjoyed my dinner in the other room.

I was feeling so good, like being lost in a new city and finally figuring out where You were on a map.

I got cocky. I was a walking baby sleeping guide encyclopaedia sprouting all the super nanny theories I had read. I had it all in the works.. The dream feed, the routine, the baby sleep lingo.. I was saying things like, "we have to eliminate catnapping" and "he has to learn to self soothe".

I started aspiring for sleeping through to 5 maybe even 6am.

I started worrying about why we weren't performing better. Why he was still waking once or twice a night.

Then all of a sudden God stepped in and said ha, you wish!

This week all the wheels have fallen off and we're back at square one. Crying and wanting to be held at all times as though he'd completely forgotten that he'd been sleeping on his own all week.

I think has something to do with his sudden desire to put everything in his mouth including his hands. Due to a skin irritation that is very near infection on his face I have strapped him down at all times to prevent his hands from going near his face. This makes a very grumpy crying baby with no way to soothe himself.

I feel like I have to choose between letting him scratch his face out to bleed but sleeping or holding him down and not sleeping. Both terrible choices. 

Either way I am completely at a loss. I think without his hands, so is he.

On the up side, he stared right into me while I held him today. I swear he was memorising my face with his deep thoughtful eyes for about ten minutes.

I already know that in my arms lies a deeply kind and sensitive boy. I can tell already with his expressive faces and his thoughtful disposition. When he looks around in new surroundings it's like he is really seeing everyone and everything for what they really are. He sizes people up when he first meets them but generous with his smiles once he's decided youre alright. He's quiet but not afraid to speak spiritedly. He really feels like a beautiful old soul.

In short, life is pretty hard right now because he is still finding his way as a three month old but I know one day I will have a beautiful friend in my son.

I have a difficult baby and I'm not ashamed to say it

Monday 12 May 2013

*Welcoming back Buddyboo's laid back disposition.

....................

Lol... I started this post almost two months ago.. It's now actually July.... and I seriously don't know where that laid back position has gone or what I was even going to write about.... Because I must have stopped typing in response to a cry that has turned into a two month grumbly cranky crying period which has robbed me of any opportunity to even start a single sentence of what was to be a happy post.

Goddam, I've just realised like a slap in the face with a fish.. I have a difficult baby.

At the moment he cries about everything. He cries when I change his nappy, he cries when he's feeding, he cries when he's sleeping. It's just a war zone here and the enemy is the grumbles.

Of course there are heaps of rewards in between for all the hard slog. He laughs now, even sometimes in his sleep. He laughs when he thinks I'm hilarious which is most of the time when he's not crying. He makes noises like he thinks he is talking back to you like he really believes he's having a conversation. In reality it just sounds like "wowowwowwow" baby speak. Pretty cute.

I'm told not to call him a "difficult" baby because all the books say there's no such thing, only that parents are not giving the individual baby his needs. Well eff off please because for example, a lot of  these books suggest "light shushing" as a calming technique for when your baby is "unsettled". 

Well blow me down. I have cooed a 25minute long "ooooohhhhmmmmm" into the baby's ear while holding him swaddled (which is a challenge to put on in itself btw), erstwhile bouncing on a giant bouncy ball with a white noise machine blaring at full blast carefully holding that at the perfect angle to the babys ear without dropping said baby.

I have devised hundreds of different creative techniques to calm my baby for hours and hours on end I try them all one by one in infinite combinations. I've tried gripe waters, oils, massages everything short of a witch doctor. In the end I have no idea if any of them work or whether the baby has just had enough of my shenanigans and gave up the fight and slept.

I just want to go back to that prenatal parenting class all those months ago and right at the point when the midwife taught us eager to learn pregnant-never-been-mums to "gently lay your drowsy baby down to his cot, pat him gently and walk away" ... I would just pause there, stop the class and yell "HAAAAAA!!!" with an accusatory finger right at the midwives know it all face.

And swiftly I would whip my baby out and demonstrate hours of coaxing to sleep and battling cluster bombs of yelling, and the finally drowsy baby shooting his eyes awake and scream like no tomorrow at the touch of the slightest fray of cotton from the cot as though I was laying him across hot coals instead of an expensive latex matress I bought him not realising that babies don't give a shit what material it is if it isn't your arms.

I am sleep deprived, tired but totally obsessed and dedicated to doing right for my baby.

So please, do not tell me that I can't call my baby difficult. 

I love him with all my heart and still I cannot grasp just how much I could love someone this much. Even in the hardest times, I cling to his crying body, cry with him and whisper to him just how much I love him. I see him for what he is: a love hungry, sweet, genteel baby boy who will grow to be a sensitive and kind man. So please baby book gurus, don't judge me just because I am finding this difficult. I have a difficult baby because at the moment its hard for both of us finding our way.

So mums out there, don't feel ashamed to admit that your baby is difficult. I struggle so much with feeling like I'm doing something wrong because he is so cranky. But really I know I should take heart in knowing I am doing my best and I have a healthy boy who gives me his beautiful gummy smiles every morning to show for it.

How a mother feels

There's the poster image of motherhood. We all know it, seen them on tv rubbing vapour rub on their child's chest with perfect hair and makeup at 3 am with their comforting faces unwavering.
There's the warm sunny feelings the nappy and baby toy ads talk about. The militant pride that women's leagues and associations furl their flags to.
I do feel amazing things as a mother. Like the swelling of pride when I noticed all the new amazing things Buddyboo can do this week. The wonderment in every new experience and sensation. I can't describe how hilarious it was watching Buddyboo marvel at his own reflection in the mirror for the first time.
The amazing side of motherhood that everyone trumpets is real. It is warm. It is lovely.
But I've found motherhood is also extremely lonely.
I hear how boring I am at adult conversations now. How I have nothing to say even to my own husband that is not an anecdote of the minutiae of a 9 week old's day. And it is common knowledge that 9 week olds don't do much beyond eat, excrete and sleep. I practically have to roll my own eyes when I hear myself describing the change in the consistency of his poop or the slight variances in his sleep cycles.
Motherhood is oft celebrated and acknowledged as one of the toughest things in the world and how mothers are so tough and resilient.
But what if I don't feel strong? What if despite the warm and fuzzy moments I also feel things that aren't celebrated? Things that invoke worry, advice and unwanted misdirected encouragement. Feelings like worthlessness. Lost. Lacklustre. Like I'm just a vessel. A thing. No spark. No life. No one.
It's part and parcel and that's the beautiful tragic dichotomy of my motherhood experience thus far. And I'll take it everytime.

Him and I at two months

So it's been two months. A lot has happened, but then again in some ways not much has.

When I look at the eight week old Buddyboo and I see a real little boy emerging from the gangly cute little monkey newborn he was, I feel at once the infinite stretch of time that's elapsed since I gave birth. I almost have to consciously remember what life was like before I was a mother. You hear people say that all the time, but I feel the full force of such amnesia now.

The loveliness of this is the complete surrender to the wonderfulness of being someone's mother. I don't think it would be everyone's cup of tea, but for me nothing feels warmer than his little button eyes looking up at me and knowing exactly what he wants without a word. I seem to have also developed super bionic ears. I start walking towards his cot at the sound of his mouth opening to a cry from the other side of our apartment. We don't have the biggest place but we do have quite a bit of white noise from the road. My husband often looks at me open mouthed almost wondering if I foresaw that cry or if I really did hear his miniscule jaw opening up to a yelp.

The poop of being someone's mother is well... how to explain. The last 48 hours probably best sums up the yoyo rhythm that my life and ergo, my self has become. At the beginning of the week, I decided that Buddyboo was old enough to get into some sort of routine. The reality is that we were probably already in a natural routine worked out by his tiny little two month old biological clock. Trouble is that his clock is on a two, maybe three hours cycle if we're lucky. Especially at night, getting up every two hours to feed (takes around 30 minutes) and change (sometimes also a 30 minute ordeal of poop explosions and clean up), and settling him to sleep (another 30 minutes) means that I am getting 30 minutes of sleep in between. Which needless to say, absolutely sucks.

So I heard about Gina Ford's Contented Little Baby routine which imposes a very precise timetable for feeds, sleeps and plays which allegedly has millions of happy mothers around the world singing its praises for the uninterrupted 7 hour sleeps their baby achieves. Now I did not buy the book because it is so sought after and expensive for what it probably is. I am generally skeptical of magical self help guides that turn out to be just common sense with marketing. However, I did read enough about parent-led schedules for babies to get the gist and combined it with my own sense of what my baby is like.

I do agree that babies don't know what they want, they merely spontaneously feel hunger, discomfort, tiredness etc but are unable to know what to do about it. I find that when Buddyboo is tired, like most babies he won't just go to sleep, he has to be put to sleep. I carefully zip him up in his swaddle, put on some calming yoga music and sing to him a lullaby I have made up for him. Over time I think he now understands that the combination of all these things is me telling him to sleep. So I decided that a structure to their day is on a grander scale, telling the baby what to do with their hunger, boredom, tiredness etc and thus providing them comfort in predictability when they don't know what to do.

For the past week and half I decided to try this sort of routine:

For a few hours of a day we pretty much stick to it and when that happens I feel like Mother of the Year.

Then there are days when looking back at the end of the day, on balance we sort of stuck to it and I feel like maybe not Mother of the Year but deserving of some sort of small medal anyway.

But always, or I should say ALWAYS there is some point in EVERY day when the wheels fall off, Buddyboo reminding me that he did not get the memo about this so-called routine he's supposed to be on. He shows his complete indifference to this routine I've devised by crying inconsolably despite being fed and cleaned, or refusing just flat out REFUSING to go to sleep despite being in fits of rage at his exhaustion. His face contorts red, his fists beating at my chest in frustration or rubbing his eyes, yelping in desperation helplessly ignorant of the simple fact that if he just stopped and slept, his discomfort would ease.

It's tiring. So tiring. There are hours of tireless coaxing, lullaby singing, rocking, swinging, shushing a baby to sleep, only to have my marathon effort at baby whispering completely shattered by an alarming bowel movement, or just inexplicably startling awake. There are many dinners left to grow cold because inevitably the baby calls out for me always at the beginning of a beautiful meal cooked by the hubby. At least the dinners I don't have to worry too much about. Husband is currently very enthusiastic about cooking and for that I am thankful and will proceed to lap it up while it lasts.

Yesterday was one of those days when everything just went wrong. "Wrong" I suppose is the wrong word. Noone said this schedule I decided on was the "right" way. I suppose by setting a schedule I also constructed a standard that a baby could never understand and therefore I am destined to never achieve it.

Budyboo woke up in the morning and just wanted to sleep and cry, sleep and cry all day long. He was not hungry, sick or in pain as far as I could tell. It was like something was going on in his little head, little neurons connecting, new sensations he could not explain. His eyes looked overwhelmed by some invisible phenomenon and I could not help him. No matter how much I comforted him there was nothing I could do and I had often been told that babies just do this sometimes.

I was alone at home for hours on end of the same cycle of baby despair. The clock usually dumb on the wall was somehow loudly reprimanding of all the routine markers I'd missed. With each passing hour I watched the aspirational routine dissolve along with my confidence.

When days like yesterday happen, I start questioning everything. Is he hungry? Or tired? Or both? Each little sign that was just a few hours ago so clear to read were now contradictory at every turn. I find myself force feeding a baby that in hindsight was never hungry. Or putting to sleep a baby who was just hungry. My self confidence explodes just like poop into a dirty nappy.

And this gloomy force cascades into all other forms of self doubt. As I hold the crying baby in my arms not really sure what to do with him anymore, I start wondering if I know anything at all. I wonder who I really am. I start wondering if I am more than a patting, swinging, shushing rock-a-bye milk jug and whether I am still the woman I was before any of this.

The self that was a lawyer confidently advocating for people's rights to a stuck up Magistrate was completely defenseless ironically to a helpless baby. Was I still that person who could do so much more than change nappies and breastfeed in her pyjamas all day long?

It's a dark road from there but I tell myself to just keep on walking.. slowly, in time to the gentle pats I am giving to the little one's bottom to soothe his despair.

Eventually after hours of breakdowns and run ins, it just stops. He coos. He smiles right into me as if to say "I know mummy". And right there in the middle of the night with poop in my hands and hair, I know I could and would do this forever.

I see him and his chubby little legs and feel glee knowing that Ihave physically and mentally contributed to those cute sausage limbs. Most of all I see that in the space of eight weeks, both him and I together have come so far. And maybe that's why my past life seemed like a lifetime ago.