Boddler

So when does a little person transition from baby to toddler? I don’t know the answer to this, and lately I’m perplexed. G isn’t quite the warm little bundle (or bunson, as my sister calls her) that she used to be. She moves, she talks, she yanks on everything, she laughs and gets other people to laugh, and she has attitude! And emotion. I sometimes say that she’s just months away from being a teenager.

But she’s not wearing shoes or even eating finger foods yet, nor can she outscoot our cat. She’s still my “littles.”

So I’ve invented a new developmental phase, for those of us baffled parents who are in that venn diagram space between infant and toddler: boddler. Our little wobbly boddlers, with their jagged little fractions of teeth, adorable entonations, rapidly cycling emotional states, and drunken little movements. My friend Gigi calls these the “golden months,” and I must admit I get it. I get that we’re moments away from the treacherous power that comes with being able to walk, climb, and hoist.

Anyone out their with boddler stories to tell?

I know the phase is short and soon I’ll be quietly looking away while my full-fledged toddler has a a full-fledged tantrum in some extremely public place. Soon after, the power of speech will render volume testing and a litany of “why’s” (all absolutely developmentally necessarily and adorably precocious in their own ways). So G’s boddler phase will come and go quickly.

But she’ll always be my baby…

I think I'm going to fire my equipment manager/ safety inspector/ industrial hygenist... oh wait, that would be me.

I am exhausted... becoming a parent entails all sorts of equipment decisions and equipment maintenance. Yes, yes, as us newbies are repeatedly reminded by veterans (which is an extremely relative distinction), babies don't come with manuals. The problem is, every stinking contraption that comes with being a parent does have a manual, and if you were to stack them all cover to cover, you'd have an impressive tower of Manualese. A dusty, seldom if ever visited, library of Manualese. I am of the generation of wifi, as well, so along with recycling all of the boxes and Amazon boxes that my plastic fantastic world now comes in, out go most of the manuals and extraneous paperwork with the recycling (or we would be featured in the show Hoarders). Yes, I don't read all the manuals; fortunately, the exhaustion overcomes the guilt. But in my activity budget*, I fail to account for two things: (1) that in addition to counters and floors, the many pieces of "equipment" (think everything from toys to crib to diaper genie to high chair to car seat to... picture gotten?) need either maintenance (batteries, adjustment, linens changed) or cleaning, and (2) that my daughter is growing, all the time, and will need new things or have things sized for her.

Sometimes I think that if you were to follow all the rules, be babywise, expecting what you're supposed expect, and have the happiest baby on the block, you'd need a jobshare just to be a stay at home parent (i.e. two people staying at home!). So you can't, of course, and you cut corners where you can, some here, some there, and you learn to drown out the judgy judgsters (mostly in your head, but clearly not always!). I often say that becoming a parent has made me more empathic, rather than more judgmental, because I am now confronted with the hardest job I could ever imagine and some days it feels like I am either a pin ball or a cat toy and I know all other parents feel the way I do. I may not let G watch TV (go me) but I did let her fall out the stroller. I may have an organic mattress (!!), but it's likely that a toy or two of hers were made in China. Point is, if I'm mentally pointing the finger at someone else, they could point it right back at me. I'm not saying I don't have values or standards, of course I do, but I feel a whole lot warmer to everyone, young and old, parent and not, because most of the time, we're all just doing the best we can.

Tonight I finally figured out how to adjust the car seat straps (make them go through the next slit up!). Probably should have done that a few weeks ago; G has been looking a bit hunched. I guess my jobshare forgot. That's okay; no judgment.

*Tip of the hat to my old animal behavior days... how we measure animals in the wild in their time between behavior states. I secretly would love it if someone would, without my knowing, observe me in the wild and report back to me how I spend my time. I'm sure it would be shocking at first, then very dull.

Grace

"Grace, it’s a name for a girl… and a thought that, changed the world."

-U2





It’s so fitting that we named our daughter after a state of being that I so often aspire to and yet can’t quite reach. Whether I’m tripping over my feet, our cat, or my words, I am so far from that. Grace seems to know something, a secret, about the world that I hope she keeps and spills at the same time. She takes such pleasure, such joy out of all of her moments, and her bouts of sorrow are short (though often very dramatic). The U2 song I quoted above goes on to say, “Grace makes beauty, out of ugly things.” I love this simple image, because it is such a message of hope for a tired parent, a frustrating traffic jam, even an unpleasant interaction with another. If we could all just take pause and allow the ugly to happen and then just let it go, surrender and just let it wash over us and away, and then embody, just for a moment, grace… then the afterwards is just so sweet, and so beautiful.



This is what my daughter teaches me. All of the moments are special, even the tough ones, with grace in my heart and Grace in my arms.

Live and Learn

G is now just beginning to show little signs of fear. Her daddy put her on his shoulders and she was so happy, but then she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and her lower lip started to tremble. She was scared! Of course we brought her down right away and reassured her, but the experience is teaching me that G is learning; learning about cause and effect, or more broadly, that information learned from one experience can be applied to another.

Sadly, some of these realizations have come with unpleasant learning moments, like when she had to get three daily consecutive shots of antibiotics and on the third day, a very happy and bubbly G who was interacting with the medical office staff begin to cry, not after the shot, but when the nurse swabbed her leg with alcohol. She had remembered yesterday’s experience; the swab was joined in her memory with the pain of the needle. Oh the little one cried herself to sleep on my chest that afternoon. But you know, the shots worked, and her 5 week long ear infection is (finally) clearing up.

Before this blog entry gets too sad, let me also mention that G is also learning about love and laughter, too. She finds people, especially little bitty people, hilarious. They’re her size but they do all kinds of crazy things, like play with toys she’s never seen before, say sounds she’s never heard before, and give big fat crazy grins right back at her. She thinks her cousins S and L are just about the funniest people she could ever imagine. And she’s now trying on different laughs; she’s got a glee shriek, a rather dry cackle, and an anticipatory giggle.

It’s such a gift, the best kind, the kind you keep receiving over and over again, to watch babies learn. Whether it’s how to roll over, how to protect oneself from falling, how to make a new sound, or one of the millions (infinite, really) connections that the vast array of developing neurons make, it is such a gift. It’s getting to learn everything again, anew, and it makes the whole world into such a better and simpler place. Watching a baby learn is falling in love with the world, all its hangups, pitfalls, missteps.

This too shall pass

I recall thinking, when G was about 3 months old, about how I worried her cradle cap might never go away, despite the fact that I was scrubbing it with olive oil and a brush, and despite our pediatrician's reassurance that it goes away for all babies. I remember thinking (but not really worrying), but what if my baby is an outlier? What if she has cradle cap into her teens? Granted she'd have hair before then, and there are far bigger fish to fry than cradle cap, but this memory comes back when I think about milestones and what moving targets they are.

I think about these in my work life; I'm an academic with looooonnnnggggg lasting projects, some so long that they just sag against my neck and shoulders like old and decaying albatross carcasses (wow, what a rather gross or bleak depiction of cancer epi studies!), and I'm constantly having to create timelines, either for my many advisors (think bosses) or my own nagging anxiety. Point is, the deadlines (usually self-imposed and always unrealistic) keep shifting... backward. So the draft I thought would be ready in May isn't ready until July, the analyses that I should have finished weeks ago still loom undone. But not for lack of trying, slaving really, away at the computer until my eyes are bloodshot and my tendonitis flares. It's just that life (and well-meaning) coauthors get in the way, making things take longer than they "should."

But what is this "should" anyway? Hard work and good results take time. So does development! And each one of us has her own internal clock, but we forget this innate truth and compare ourselves to some higher standard of "should." So-and-so has this much done, these many publications, this much accomplished by this date, so I "should" too. Or, so-and-so's baby (or Baby ABC in book XYZ) is already smiling/rolling-over/crawling/walking/talking so mine "should" too. Whatever happened to variation? Diversity? Individual pace?

It's always been there, always will be, but so many of us subscribe to this idea of the "should." Yet, before you know it, the paper gets written, the cradle cap passes, and your baby sits up!

The Boob Juice Vacuum

“You know, there’s a kind of psychosis that acccompanies breastfeeding, and only moms that have gone through it and come out the other side really understand it.”

This was the beginning of the rather eloquent, rather humorous, and most definitely needed response I received from my ob/gyn as she helped coached me out of my four-times-a-day pumping bonanza. Yes, I often and regularly pump four times a day (during my Mon-Thurs work days – Friday I usually pump twice and feed Grace directly). Here, wait, let me walk through a typical day:

5:00am – M leaves, I contemplate rising and working out (this happens 20-30% of the time, otherwise I snooze on and off till…)
6:00am – Rise, as quickly as possible shower, blowdry, don work clothes
6:30am – Go downstairs to prep bags: usually 4: Grace’s bottle bag, my pump with cooler, my work bag, my lunch bag… more if I also have odds and ends like a diaper bag (if we’re going somewhere after daycare) or just stuff I need to bring for daycare.
6:45am – Make and eat breakfast as a I listen to G stirring and cooing through the monitor (NOTE: I have to eat something, as I am ravenous at this point)
6:50am – Go upstairs to breastfeed G, change her, and play for a lil bit
7:30am - Come downstairs, situate G in her chair or jumper, schlep bags to the car (note: in the dead of winter this also involved scraping ice and turning on the car (and pray no one steals it!) to warm and defrost
7:45am – Leave for daycare
8:05am – Check G into her room, sign her out, deliver her deliverables (bottles, extra stuff)
8:15am – Drive to work, usually get there at 8:45am
9:00am – PUMP #1
work work work…
12:00pm – PUMP #2
work work work…
3:00pm – PUMP #3
work work work…
4:15pm – leave work to get G at daycare, arrive at 4:40pm
5:15/5:30pm – Arrive home, depending on traffic gods!
5:30pm – begin arduous transfer of leftover bottles from daycare, lunch dishes, pump parts to dishwasher (and clean parts out of dishwasher), pumped milk into bottles for daycare next day, all while attempting to play with and spend time with G (unless of course she is cashed out from not napping at daycare… another topic for another blog entry!)
5:45pm – Feed G in her high chair the New Food of the Day (super fun)
6:00pm – Bath time, play time jammy time
6:30pm – Breastfeed G, settler her down
7:00pm – Rest her in her crib, tiptoe out, make some dinner and eat it while working/ catching up on email
8:00pm – start laundry/clean up, maybe sneak in some shows
9:00pm – PUMP #4
9:30pm – prep G’s dreamfeed – always a bottle, go in and give it to her
10:00pm – crawl into bed, usually a little wired and needing to read to calm down….
(repeat 4 times; Friday is my work at home day, and both Thursday and Friday we have an angel in the form of a part-time nanny who loves on G and gets her to make up for lost nap time at daycare!)

Yes, the days do vary, and occasionally I only squeeze 2 pumps in at the office, but 3 I the norm. Wow, makes sense I’m tired, right? So when my obgyn gave me “permission” (yes, I needed it) to cut back on pumping, I literally walked out the door 2 inches taller. Which is good, since according to today’s measurement I’ve shrunk a quarter inch this past year. G is almost 7 months, and pumping this much is really overwhelming me. And I’ve needed to pump this much to keep up with what we feed her during the day, because I can’t keep getting up in the middle of the night to give her the extra calories she needs to thrive and grow AND be the least bit productive at work. I sit in front of a computer and have meetings with really smart people and I need to at least fain cleverness, if not actual ability, which I can’t do when I’m waking up 3 times a night (I was doing this for about 2-3 months before we instigated the dreamfeed and a little bit of sleep “coaching” as my yoga studio likes to call it, yes, it’s just ferberizing). Now we’re stuck with the legacy of the dreamfeed (which we’re slowly easing out of).

But the point of this (now rather long) entry was to focus on the conversation with my obgyn and the moments of clarity that followed. Dr. L also began to tell me of the travesty that is parenting today, that we’re all so hell-bent on the perfect we’re missing the really good stuff, as she put it, the “messy.” And parenting is messy, she continued, and needs to be. But we’re all too wrapped up in our own little tight, pressurized cocoons, trying to do parenting as best as we absolutely can. So we kill ourselves in the name of doing what we think is Best for our Children. We think we can be the allstar we always used to be at work, albeit with our pump sessions (which we of course do with a handsfree pump so we can work along with… I shudder to think if at this stage I had a treadmill desk!). We can be supermoms and steam and puree organic farmer’s market food veggies for our little ones. We can even get back into shape by working out at 5am during the week to workout videos and jog strolls on the weekend. And although we can’t go out to much any more, at least we can make sure to update those web-based photo albums every month to keep everyone abreast of our babies and our families and our witty witticisms! Okay, I’m inserting a little (a lot!) of autobiography here. But in the interest of honest, sanity, and community, I’m coming clean, or at least trying to.

Rant’s over. I am that person on some level, but I am also the person who can step outside and see this crazy, earnest little mom… and love her all the same.

And this little crazy mom is going to wean herself, bit by bit, from her boob juice vacuum.

I wish 30 days hath May...

Or less! M is off to Pittsburgh this month for a rotation at Mercy Hospital, so it's just us girls at the house. We're having a lovely time, but we miss Daddy. He'll be home on the weekends, so we just have to tough it out.

I've often heard and read about the fears that some couples have that having a child will change your relationship. Presumably the fear is of drifting apart or losing romance in the constant upheaval of raising a child. Although I suppose I can understand this fear, the fact that people forego having children over it has saddened me. In my opinion, of course having a child changes your relationship; but if there was any way to deepen my love for my partner, it would be to watch him become a parent and to watch him fall in love (and fall hard) with this tiny little human that I am also so in love with. To have someone to share in all the triumph, heartache, and overwhelming oblivion of becoming a parent is the greatest gift I have ever received from my marriage. I of course recognize that this is my experience and my interpretation; I know that not every relationship has the same goals or investment. I am sad for those that do not, however.
So yes, my relationship is changed; where it was once unidimensional, a continuum stretching from M to me, it is now become multidimensional, with energy stretching out in these three, intersecting directions. I love that I will get to watch M and G's relationship grow as much our own relationships grow. I love that we are a crowd, a trinity, a family.