Sick Baby

Of all the things I've had to deal with, this is probably the hardest. I'm on the verge of packing a bag and moving to Europe. Okay maybe I won't do something that drastic.

Thursday night Charlotte started showing cold symptoms that I just chalked up to teething. After a rough night that included an overly soaked diaper, Friday and Saturday have been a roller coaster of coughing, severe diaper rash, an eternally runny nose, resistance to sleep, and drooling that would rival the big bad wolf. All this coupled with helping my brother-in-law move in the midst of an emotionally wrenching divorce, hearing about a friend who was shot in his car, and reeling from financial strain has made life almost unlivable.

So it's no surprise that Charlotte's cold is turning into our cold. Currently she is pulling tissues one at a time out of the tissue box and throwing them off the couch. Normally I would stop her, but this is preventing her from screaming in my ear or thrashing at my boobs or hitting me in the face or scratching me...so we're just going to have a big tissue mess.

I'm taking her to the doctor tomorrow. Whatever it is that she has, I hope they can make it go away. It was hard before. This is just damn impossible.

Sleeping Solutions

It seems like no matter how late it is I need to read to get myself to sleep. I'm not sure when this started, but it seems to be pretty ingrained. Last night I went to bed and realized I'd finished my book, so I pulled out The Attachment Parenting Book by Dr. Sears. I'm a fan of Dr. Sears approach to parenting and feel like I have a pretty good idea about his methods from the other books I've read of his, but this had better insight into the whole co-sleeping thing.

Somewhere along the way I decided that co-sleeping was over. It was getting more difficult to keep Charlotte asleep at night with me so close by because she wanted to keep nursing. To make matters more difficult she'd wake up whenever the hall light would shine under our bedroom door. So we decided to set up her crib hoping that if she wasn't so close to me she'd sleep better. We moved her a couple months ago and it has yet to be better. If anything it's worse.

I was so baffled by this thinking that a baby this old should easily be able to sleep in a crib on her own. I would have continued to try to keep her in her crib if I hadn't read the chapter on co-sleeping last night. I was reminded that if something isn't working you should change it. I'm willing to admit now that sleeping in the crib isn't working. I was resistant to having her back in our bed because I wake up every hour to feed her. When I really think about it, she wakes up every hour or two in her crib anyway. At least if she's in bed with me I don't have to get up and she goes back to sleep without any trouble.

Sleeping methods work different for every family but I think we should probably go back to this one. There are lots of different opinions on sharing your bed. For me, I do it to maintain my sanity! There are also ideas floating out there that it helps baby feel more secure early on and thus more secure and trusting of their parents as they get older. I'm not sure how much of this is really measurable, but it sounds good to me anyway.

Perhaps the crib will work out later on, and I'm starting to think that perhaps we moved her too soon. It should have been pretty obvious to me when she'd scream in her crib and immediately stop and nuzzle into my neck the second I picked her back up again. So I'm going to listen to what my baby wants because she is still my baby after all and it won't be long before she doesn't want to sleep with me let alone nuzzle!

Sleepocolypse 2012

A few nights ago Charlotte slept for 6 uninterrupted hours. We both woke up and thought for sure that my mom or someone had fed her and put her back to sleep, but she had slept the whole time. I thought this might be a turning point. Perhaps we had finally reached a happy place where we could all finally sleep! She is almost 9 months old after all, this should have been the case awhile ago.

Sadly the next night she was up all night with a fever. I took her to her pediatrician who told us she had a sore throat and we just had to wait it out. We managed to survive the nights by taking sleep shifts with her. She wouldn't sleep unless she was being held.

Yesterday her fever had broken and she seemed to be much happier. I figured that since she was feeling better she could sleep in her crib - I don't want her getting into the habit of thinking she needs to be held the entire time she sleeps. I managed to get her down around 10:30 and got her in her crib at 11. Surely this was success! We went to bed and sure enough, she woke up around 1. I went out to nurse her right away thinking it would calm her back to sleep and I could put her in her crib. Not so. She would relax and doze the second I picked her up, but the second I even started to put her down she'd start screaming. And this isn't just your run of the mill grunting snorting protest, this is full on ear-piercing shrieking like I'm stabbing her in the leg with a knife screaming.

After about 30 minutes of picking her up to calm her down and then putting her back down again, I finally couldn't take it anymore. When someone screams in my face, no matter who they are, it starts to fray my nerves. I decided to let her scream it out. Surely then she'd wear herself out and sleep on her own. The problem is that this kid doesn't give up. After about 40 minutes of shrieking at the top of her lungs I tried sleeping with her. Eventually Paul had to go deal with her because I'm apparently a milk cow and this is very distracting when you're a baby trying to sleep.

Charlottes well baby visit is in about two weeks. Hopefully I can discuss her issues then. I wish that nights like we had last night were just because she's been sick, but my going to bed well after 2am after hours of struggling to get her to sleep is pretty normal. Its especially frustrating when I hear other moms say that their babies sleep not just through the night, but for 10 or 11 hours! What is wrong with my child that I can't get her to do this?!

I was warned when I was pregnant that I would lose sleep. I just had no idea it would be this ridiculous.

Double Life

Today was a very busy day and it's starting to feel like more of my days are getting to be compartmentalized and tightly scheduled. I started with Zumba, headed to the new mom's group at Andaluz, met my mom and her friend Camilla at Starbucks, came home, napped, and then drove out to Lewis and Clark for a 3 hour rehearsal.

I like keeping busy and I think the exercise is really giving me the energy I need to handle it. I just wish my sleep was keeping up with it too (blogging late at night probably isn't helping). The rest of my week is really just as busy. I added another day to my teaching schedule since I have new students now, I have two more rehearsals and a concert Saturday, and I'm sure I'm going to try to squeeze some more time in at the gym. I think when spring break hits, I'm going to try to keep my schedule empty and enjoy my time at home!

With all this busy I think I've found my threshold in terms of how much I want to be separated from my baby. I found myself missing her as I was driving out to rehearsal tonight and was happy to see her again when I got home. What I found to be even more strange was some of the weird feelings I had at rehearsal.

This concert is one where I get to sing with many friends and colleagues that I have sung with over the last several years. It was really nice to see their faces and I haven't seen many of them since before I got pregnant. I felt like I'd been on this really long journey and had returned back to my hometown full of people that had been there the whole time I was gone. It felt good to jump back in to the choral world and even better to be able to tread water on such a mentally engaging piece. Returning home to a baby that wanted to be nursed in a dark house full of people made me feel even more like I'm living a life in two different worlds. I think I like it though. I get to feel like I have the best secret!

8 Months and Getting Better

I haven't updated much because it seems like things with baby are starting to find their flow. I'm not quite as exhausted and drained as I've been for months, I feel less resentment towards being a mother, and I feel like things are going to work out in general.

Charlotte is 8 months now and has reached tons of developmental milestones. She has 6 teeth, she's crawling rather quickly, and she's very talkative and responsive. She also likes to smile and wave to people. She claps and "sings". She's a little person with opinions and interests. It's starting to finally feel like all those months of exhaustion were worth getting to this much more fun point.

The only thing that she seems to have missed in the whole developing thing is sleeping. Supposedly, she should have been able to sleep through the night for around 2 months now. That has yet to happen. At the very least Paul has switched to swing shift and is able to help me with her through the night which allows me to sleep more than 3 hours at at time. I just wish neither of us had to wake up at all because even though he gets up to deal with her, I'm still waking up every couple minutes to listen for signs that I need to take over. I've been trying to feed her more solids during the day to help keep her from waking up hungry. I think at this point it's more of a waking up lonely issue and nursing is really the only way to get her to go right back to sleep. Otherwise she really wakes up and stays up and is rather grumpy about it. Naps have kind of taken a hit lately too. She just doesn't sleep much during the day lately.

Her babysitters tell me that she doesn't nap with them anymore either, but she doesn't fuss as much and is getting to be more fun to play with. One of my students qualified for the state vocal competition this weekend. With Charlotte's being more at ease without me there all the time and with this boost to my teaching track record, I'm hoping that I can work on expanding my voice studio a bit.

This next weekend we're going to start looking at houses again. It's been about a year since the last time we looked at something. I'm a bit apprehensive about getting my hopes up because we don't have our whole downpayment saved yet, but I also feel like I want to find a house to picture us living in so that saving is a more present priority in my head. You're less likely to have what you don't dream about right?

With that, I must head to bed. Paul's rocking Toot to sleep so maybe we'll get to sleep before midnight! Wish us luck!

Being Reminded

A couple nights ago I was feeling really tired and frustrated mostly with dealing with teething and the restless nights and with how frustrated I am with my weight loss. I cancelled my weight watchers and for some reason this just got things stirring. I wanted to find some sort of support because I feel like the only mom I know who hasn't had any luck at all with losing the baby weight. I need someone to tell me to quit whining and get my ass in the gym. I suppose my doctor did a fair job of trying at least.

Anyway, in my moment of angst I remembered how I had joined a weight watchers group on the baby center community. I've never posted in it and I don't really read any posts in it either. Honestly, I kind of feel like I don't fit in with weight watchers people. So I went looking for another group.

I found a weight loss group for moms who had their babies last June. I figured I would get some sympathy there but my angsty post about how I'm so frustrated with my lack of weight loss didn't get any responses.

When I was pregnant I spent a pretty fair amount of time posting and responding to questions in my various groups. It was a great place to network with moms that were of a similar mindset when it came to birthing and pregnancy. After I had Charlotte and posted my birth story on my natural birth group, I sort of lost my zeal for it and haven't really read or posted anything in months. In my pathetic attempt to get someone to feel sorry for me I started to read some stuff from some of my old group pages.

There was one post in particular that I think sparked something. A lady in the crunchy mom's group invited us all to make a list of the things we do that are crunchy. It was essentially a way for us to be positive about the things we do rather than the things we don't do. Now, this crunchy mom group can be intense and even when I was active on babycenter, I didn't read posts from it all that often. There's only so much guilt I can muster for not churning my own butter, or going for days without shampooing my hair (I often wonder how that really works)...you get the idea. So when I started reading peoples lists I really expected to feel inadequate.

Surprisingly I didn't feel that way. Instead, as I read through list after list, I started to feel really proud of myself. I live with people that really don't get why I care about these kinds of things most of the time, and in spite of that, I still manage to do quite a bit for myself and my baby. I was reminded of all the reasons I wanted a natural birth, of why I encapsulated my placenta, and drink mothers milk tea, of all the reasons I use homeopathic and herbal medicines before I go hunting for the mucinex or the tylenol, of why I breastfeed and cloth diaper, and co-sleep and baby wear. I added my own list and the more I thought of, the better I felt about all of the decisions I've made as a mother.

Since then it seems like being a mom has taken on a new light. I don't feel like I've lost some sort of sleep war when I keep Charlotte in bed with me. I don't mind dropping what I'm doing to play with her or feed her. Its amazing to me how much happier I feel when I'm not resisting my role as my baby's mother so much. I guess I just needed to be reminded that being my baby's mom is something to be proud of.

State of the Family Address

I was thinking about what I typically post in my blog and the majority of it lately has been about not sleeping. While this is a very worthy topic for a new mother, I feel that there are other things I should report about. Especially because this blog is something that my baby can go back and read when she's a mother...given that she even wants to. Maybe I'm kidding myself. At any rate, I can read these old posts when I'm feeling nostalgic about my grown children.

So my first topic is sleeping. Okay maybe I lied. After multiple visits to Ikea, we managed to get Charlotte's crib assembled in the Living Room. She's been sleeping in it the last 3 nights or so.

This would be fine except that the monitor broke and I had to send it to the manufacturer to be replaced so I have to sleep with my door open. This has me waking up more frequently because I "think" I hear something. I thought perhaps she would sleep for longer periods of time at least. I was wrong. So now instead of getting up four or five times a night and walking across my room, I have to walk across the house and sit up with her until she finishes eating before I can go back to sleep. I'd try to let her fuss a bit first to see if she'll go back to sleep on her own, but then she wakes everyone up and my mom gets up with her and I feel bad when she has to get up at 4 to go to work in the morning.

This is another issue. The living room isn't exactly a quiet secluded place in the house. So starting at 4am and going until about 8am, there are people up and around the house getting ready to go their various directions. It really doesn't matter how quiet they are since Charlotte is a light sleeper and its not really fair to ask them not to grind coffee or watch the morning news.

Another obstacle is that everyone's been fighting colds in my house lately, myself included. I've been trying to kick cold ass with a continuous supply of umcka, emergen-c, and sinusalia. They seem to be working, I felt much better today. But back to sleeping. Charlotte has a bit of a cold, but she doesn't seem too sick, she just has a faucet of a runny nose. She won't sleep without the binkie, but she can't breathe through her nose, so she's super tired when I put her down, but keeps waking up because she can't breathe. To remedy this I use the snot sucker which makes her hysterical. She practically heaves she's crying so hard, but then she goes right to sleep once her nose is cleared up. I kind of wonder if she wouldn't sleep longer in her crib at night if she wasn't sick. I suppose we shall have to see.

It's nice to have it for daytime naps at least. Before I was basically having to hold her if I wanted her to nap. I couldn't put her in her regular bed because Paul sleeps in our room during the day and she wakes him up - kind of like how she wakes me up all night. So at least I can put her down for a nap now. Lord knows I need it!

Okay, now on to other things! 7 months has brought all sorts of milestones. Charlotte started crawling a bit around 5 1/2 months but she's got it all figured out now. She's got it figured out enough that she follows me or comes to find me if I leave the room. Before I could leave her in the family room and find her sitting in a pile of computer cords. Now if I leave the room too long it starts to be a scavenger hunt to find her and what she's gotten in to. She tends to like little bits of paper and dog food.

For about a month and a half she's been standing with something to grab on to. This is pretty easy for her now and she's been trying more and more to stand on her own. I'm really hoping she'll hold off on the walking stuff for now. Crawling is enough of a challenge to keep up with!

Since she's gotten crawling and pulling herself up to standing down pretty well now, of course she finds her way to me when she's hungry. My baby is a fraud! She'll pull herself up and stand at my legs looking up at me and chattering away like she wants to give me kisses and cuddle. But as soon as I pick her up it turns into a frantic search for Milkbags McGee. She cons me every time.

Speaking of Milkbags McGee, I'm starting to feel kind of over breastfeeding. I've never felt like I produce enough milk to keep her satisfied, I don't enjoy sitting with her and feeding her and I can't pump anything. It feels like I have to try so hard to just to do something I dread. But it's awfully cheap and awfully convenient. Theres the rub. She still wants to all the time though so I'll keep doing it as long as she wants to. I feel kind of guilty that I've never enjoyed it. I've really tried to though. I try to think about how I'll miss the quiet time with my baby who needs me. And then she bites my nipple and I'm pretty much over it again.

This Saturday will be our third swimming class with her. Honestly I could probably do without the "class" but since we paid for it we make it a priority to go, and that's what matters. Most of the babies tend to have a "what the hell is going on here?!" expression on their faces during the class. It's rather amusing actually. Charlotte seems to be comfortable kicking in the water and getting her face wet, but she hasn't started really having fun with it yet. Part of the problem is that she's so skinny and the pool is kind of cold. We had to pull her out before the class was over last week because her lips were turning blue and she was shivering really hard. I ordered her a baby wet suit that we should be able to try out this week. Hopefully being less cold will make the class more fun for her.

We have multiple things to look forward to on the horizon. Friday is my NATS competition (National Association of Teachers of Singing). Hopefully I will be well enough to sing! As soon as we get our W2's in the mail we can file taxes and start our downpayment fund which means we can start to look for houses. My hope is that we are moved by May. Our goals after we find a house are to find Paul another job that pays enough for us to make our house payment and doesn't make him work 50+ hours a week on the graveyard shift. Ideally this job will allow him to continue his nursing degree track and will afford me some time to have a part-time job during the summer. In this magical happy land I'll find a part time job teaching voice lessons at a community college and Paul's classes will be at a discount!

I want to finish my post with the thing that makes it all worth it. I really love it when Charlotte's tired and I pick her up and she rests her head on my shoulder and stares off into space. I love stroking her hair and feeling her dead weight. That's what keeps me going!