juthwara

My baby has reached the ripe old age of three months, the official end of the newborn stage. His skin has gone from mottled and translucent to smooth and creamy. He's lost his werewolf pelt of dark hair on his ears and shoulders. His eyes are alert and fixate on objects and faces, no longer gazing into the mysterious world only newborns can see. He's eating larger and larger amounts at a time, which gives him the ability to go longer between feedings. His skinny little chicken legs have been replace with meaty drumsticks. He can stay awake happily for two hours at a time now, and happily entertains himself under his activity arch, grabbing at the dangling toys on his bouncy seat and investigating the myriad wonders of his new Jumperoo.

He's a very social little thing, doing his best to flirt with and charm whomever he meets. He spent Sunday at church developing a devoted fan following by smiling indiscriminately at anyone who talked to him. He demands interaction from us by cooing at us like an insistent little owl and then flashing a full-face smile when we look at him. He loves being sung to, with favorites including Alouette, Lydia the Tattooed Lady (I'm not sure why this is a favorite of my babies, but they've both loved it), Alice's Restaurant (which turns easily into Alec's Restaurant), and Union Maid (which I would turn into Union Lad, but "There once was a union lad, who never was afrad" doesn't quite work*). What do these songs have in common? They're upbeat and I can remember the lyrics. It shows exactly what sort of library geek I am that I have been known to sing to my children with an open copy of Rise Up Singing in front of me, but when it comes down to it, the things I remember are the things I've listened to all of my life, which is mostly folk music and assorted oddities like Tom Lehrer. Thus, I have a wide repertoire of union songs and gospel songs which leads to my frequently singing to my children about the death and the coming apocalypse, along with populist rabble-rousing.

Physically, he is getting quite good at reaching out and grasping, as well as starting to manipulate the toys on his Jumperoo. He has excellent head control and when held up can stiffen his legs enough to hold himself in a standing position. On his stomach, he can lift his head for a little while and he's practicing frog-like swimming motions by lifting his arms and legs and flailing.

I'm a little afraid to speak of sleep, but it's perpetually surprising to me that we just swaddle him up or pop him in the sling and he's usually asleep within a couple minutes with no fuss. He's starting to be able to sleep without being held as well, and has even started falling asleep in the car seat. In fact, he's starting to not be too bad when it comes to the car seat. If he's awake and cheerful, he'll happily sit and entertain himself in the car, and when he's tired, he can now be convinced to go to sleep. Today, he even fell asleep entirely on his own. This can't possibly be a baby of mine.

Three months is one of my favorite baby ages. They're old enough to be social but too young to fear strangers. Old enough to start developing a routine but are usually still flexible enough to be able to sleep anywhere. Able to play and entertain themselves for a while, but not in any danger of moving on their own. Quite possibly the cutest things on the face of the Earth.



More pictures here.





*Oh, the words don't have to be clever,
And it doesn't matter if you stick a couple extra syllables into a line,
It sounds more ethnic if it ain't good English,
And it don't even got to rhyme...Excuse me, rhyne.

1. So the amended budget relief bill has passed the House, with most of the amendments the Senate added stripped out. Now it falls to the Senate to pass or punt it. They have four days before layoff notices go out and three weeks before the city shuts down. I hope they can pull their heads out of their asses and compromise before then.

Meanwhile, I've realized a problem with the move back to Michigan plan is that if we haul all of our stuff back to Michigan, then longstrider gets called the next week to get offered his job back, he'll get kicked off of unemployment if he turns it down. Yet at the same time, our lease is up at the end of November, and I certainly don't want to get to February or so and run out of money only to be stuck with another 9 months of lease. So it's going to be a weird timing act balancing the likelihood of the crisis being resolved versus needing to move. Assuming it's necessary.

Sigh. I don't do limbo well.

2. We went to a church picnic Sunday and had a lovely time. There were four babies in church today and we had a good time talking with two of the other sets of parents. One of the babies was a day older than Alec and K had a great time playing with his 2 1/2 year old brother, so I'm hoping we might be able to get together with them.

We've had the worst time trying to meet people since we moved here. It's been a combination of weird work schedules that prevent us from going to the places where we could meet people, having a small child and bad luck. We perhaps haven't been as proactive as we could have been in following up on continuing to get together with people after having an initial social contact, but, well, our phone receives calls too, so it's not like it should all be on us. This is the first time in a long time that I've had multiple good, long conversations with people I'm not related to or have known for 15 years. It makes me hopeful.

3. Alec and I had a productive thirty minute nursing session tonight. It wasn't enough to fill him up - I eventually ended it because he was getting frantic and handed him off to his father for a bottle top-up. But I had pumped less than two hours previously and got only two ounces when I pumped again after feeding him when I would have expected at least four, and he drank only two ounces out of the bottle when a typical feeding for him is 5 1/2, so he clearly got quite a bit of milk from me.

It took a while to get up the will to try again. First I had thrush, then he developed painful reflux. And as it turns out, I felt so defeated after his one months appointment where he was only half a pound over his birth weight despite bottle feeding on demand that it took a while to get up the courage to trust that he would get any real nourishment. But as it turns out, I really hate bottlefeeding in the middle of the night and would give quite a lot to be able to breastfeed him in bed, especially when I find myself dropping the bottle on his face as I accidentally drift off and lose my grip. I also have the pressing dealine of wanting to be able to breastfeed him on the plane when we fly to California next month. Even if we have to give him formula as well, I really don't want to have to figure out how to pump on the plane and there's no way I won't have to relieve the pressure somehow on a six-hour flight. I don't feel the need to work towards exclusive breastfeeding; I like being able to hand him off to longstrider so he can do a late-night feeding or nudge him to get up with the baby in the morning. But the ability to breastfeed when it isn't convenient to pump would be the best of both worlds.

It seems like as I had hoped, getting older has increased his strength. I was reflecting today that it should have been a hint to me that when I was in the hospital, I was marvelling at the fact that my nipples weren't hurting at all despite all of the breastfeeding. I suppose they wouldn't if your infant isn't sucking on them with any real suction.

1. Since we're in the rare position this summer of nobody having to work on the weekend, we've been trying to get back in the habit of going to church. A large part of why we drifted away from our last church was the lack of childcare, since for some reason I find it difficult to develop my spiritual life when a bored toddler decides to play Edmund Hillary with me as her personal Mt. Everest. While K is now old enough for Sunday School, Alec is going to be starting up the pew wrestling matches soon enough so we decided to look farther afield. I found a nearby church that just recently declared itself Open and Affirming, offers a nursery and seems like a nice compromise of being large enough to offer good religious education and programs, yet not so large that you feel lost in the crowd, and we've successfully gone there three times in the past six weeks, which isn't bad given that we have two pint-size insomniacs who live to keep us up at night.

This Sunday was the first where we heard the minister preach, since she was on vacation the first two times we came. The sermon favorably impressed me in two ways. The first is that she was preaching on the armor of God, a topic heavily favored by Evangelical types* and nervously avoided by we hippy-dippy liberal progressive types because the literal interpretation of that particular scripture is that the armor is protection against Satan. However, this minister delivered a quite excellent interpretation for a progressive liberal Christian context. And she did it by referencing Star Wars, the Mirror Mirror episode of Star Trek, The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, and specifically enough that it was clear that she was very personally acquainted with all of these things, not just drawing from popular culture.

A challenge we've had in finding churches is that while everyone is always very nice, we never seem to find anyone we have anything in common with. A church with a minister geeky enough to be able to preach in detail on the opening scenes of book 7 of Harry Potter seems very promising on that front. Another good sign is that even though it was August and therefore sparsely attended, there were two other families there with babies - not having young families is another issue we've encountered while church-shopping.

So I'm hopeful we'll be able to keep up with attending as we move into the fall and I start working again.

2. We went to see Ponyo this afternoon. Oh my, it was a cute movie. The animation was gorgeous, as usual. The plot didn't bear close examination, but it was enjoyable and didn't even hit us with the 2 x 4 of environmental awareness. It was K's first Miyazaki in the theatre ex utero, since we saw Howl's Moving Castle when I was a week overdue with her. She absolutely loved it, and while she said it was scary afterwards, she didn't need to leave the theatre, which we've had to do in the past. So if you're the parent of a very sensitive small child that you would like to take to the movies, while it's not completely free of scariness, it's pretty mild and a good movie for the young scaredy-cat.

3. After months of frustration trying to figure out how to take good pictures on my camera without using the flash, I discovered quite accidentally last month that my camera has a specific setting for that right there in a place that should be obvious for anyone to see. The combination of discovering that, the fact that Alec's changing table is one of the few places that gets natural light in the house and Alec starting to smile has meant that I now have a lot of portrait shots of him on his changing table. But it's hard not to keep taking pictures when you have a model like this:





* Here's the story of how I became acquainted with the theology of the armor of God: when I was a teenager, the church I grew up in decided to purchase a Sunday School curriculum that consisted of a scripted series of shows using puppets and humans in a combination of skits and singing to teach concepts. It was called Caraway Street, and any slight resemblance to certain shows on PBS is a COMPLETE coincidence. I always felt it was kind of outrageous how concerned the creator of Caraway Street was with protecting his copyright considering that he was stretching the concept of fair use until it was practically doughnut-shaped.

Anyway, the creator of Caraway Street was some sort of Evangelical Baptist-type, and my church was UCC, which made for some incompatible theology issues. This particular church was not at all liberal**, but we still didn't traffic much in Devil talk or go in for heavy evangelism. So when the creator came to train us and showed us the pamphlet we could give the children so they could convert all of their friends on the playground,*** we nodded politely and somehow never remembered to pass them out after he left. And initially the scripts seemed fine. The emphasis on memorizing the books of the Bible seemed a bit inane, but harmless.

But through a complicated series of events, I wound up in charge of the program****, which meant I was in charge of making up cue cards, and found myself progressively editing the lines more heavily every week as more fire and brimstone kept creeping into the skits. And this is when I first encountered the armor of God: the week I had to start completely eliminating skits because Satan was starting to take on a speaking role. And the damn thing kept coming up again and again. I suppose I can understand why, since it lends itself to easy slogan-y chanting (the breastplate of righteousness! The sword of demon slaying! The tinfoil hat of alien-mindray repelling!). But I started to hate it very quickly, as I kept having to make the singing portions longer and longer to cover the fact that the scripts were starting to get quite anemic after I was done editing for hellfire.

** In fact, I believe they later left the UCC. The fact that many people didn't have nearly as many issues with the scripts as I did is a good indicator of why my family left the church later that year.

*** This being a heavily religious area (my home town had literally a church per every square mile, and a common question was "What church do you go to?" not, "Do you attend church?"), I think they would have been forced to convert the local squirrels due to a general lack of young heathens among their classmates.

**** The fact that a 16-year-old was in charge of the church's Sunday School program for a good six months is an excellent indicator of why we left the church later that year.

Lately, Alec has been earning the nickname Incontinent Lad. I know, all babies deserve that name, but they're not all quite so... aggressive about it. Incontinence isn't supposed to be an extreme sport, but try telling that to our baby.

Ironically, K, with her horrible painful reflux, didn't produce a fraction of the spitup her brother favors us with every day. But given the choice between spitup with no pain and pain with no spitup, the former is the clear winner. Alec is a much happier baby than his sister was at this age.

Slowly but surely he's uncurling out of the larval stage from a sleepy tiny package into a roly poly baby who coos and smiles and looks with fascination at the world. We brought the swing out this weekend to great success, as he sits back and engages the dangling giraffe in deep conversations on the world economic situation and last night's episode of Monk. Meanwhile, as much as we love his cuddliness, we sat back and enjoyed being able to put him down for half an hour, something that has rarely happened since he was about a week old. He's generally quite a happy baby and a very good sleeper - as long as he's being held. He hates his carseat with a passion because he sees no reason to be in its cold sterile clutches when he could be next to a nice warm body instead.

The tiny baby days go so quickly, it makes it hard not to think about having two or three more. Unfortunately, babies eventually turn into children who need to be sent to college, so we'll have to enjoy these days sprinting by as much as we can.

Wednesday alone with both children went much better, with absolutely no property damage. We even survived a trip to the mall with sanity and limbs intact.

I've been pondering lately how much of when things go dysfunctional is my fault. Well, fault isn't really the right word. It's more accurate to say that things tend to go badly when I allow my expectations to become unrealistic. K is four, and as such, it's a given that she's going to throw tantrums, be defiant and experiment with how much obnoxious behavior she can get away with. That's the stage of development her brain is at, and I shouldn't expect anything different. I can and do try to respond to all of these undesirable behaviors with gentle but firm discipline. But it's easy to lose patience and instead of turning things into a game or pointing out what she'll be missing if she doesn't cooperate, resort to a stern voice and barking orders in hopes that she'll just do what I ask without nonsense or dawdling. This almost never works, of course. The stern voice works well in dog training, but usually has exactly the opposite effect I want when dealing with a child who is trying to push my buttons with defiance. It's so easy to slip into yelling when I'm tired and trying to juggle groceries and a crying baby and just want her to GET OUT OF THE CAR ALREADY. But while it's entirely understandable for me to lose patience in those situations where K is behaving in a provoking manner, ultimately what I can control is how I respond, which will hopefully result in better behavior on her part.

Changing my expectations has definitely made Alec's newborn days more pleasant than K's were. He is genuinely a better sleeper than she was at this stage, and it helps a lot that she had started getting reflux at this age which he doesn't seem to have (I think. It's becoming apparent to me that I have a bit of PTSD when it comes to K's reflux, and it makes it hard for me to tell how much I'm overreacting when he shows any reflux symptoms). But part of why he's a better sleeper is that I've recognized that he will only sleep well if someone is holding him. So that's what we do - stick him in the sling and go about our day. But with K, I put myself through a lot of stress wanting to be able to put her down and have her stay asleep, which rarely happened. I also didn't know how much sleep to expect from her at which age, so I went through stress over her not sleeping when it was that she was simply starting to wake up. With Alec, I don't have any expectations for his sleep at this age, so I enjoy when he's awake and interactive, and do my best to encourage him to sleep when he seems sleepy.

Mind you, it would take Yoda levels of zen to actually maintain the levels of patience I'm talking about about. I'm going to lose it with K, and just want Alec to go to sleep already or stop being so freaking fussy so I can just put him down for two seconds. But life goes better when I remember that it's changing my attitude that can make all the difference in a bad situation.

My first day alone all day with both children did not go as well as I hoped. And Mount Vesuvius caused a little bit of property damage.

It started out so well. longstrider was working late tonight, so I dropped him off at work at noon and decided to take K out to lunch. It was going just fine - Alec slept angelically, I got K a cookie as a treat and she happily ate her lunch,* and we made plans to go to the park and feed the ducks and play Pooh sticks. But then I got up to get K more to drink, and I'm not entirely sure what she did while I was gone, but by the time I got back, she had woken Alec up. I was displeased, to put it mildly.

I packed us up in the car, and amazingly, Alec went back to sleep. This was K's cue to keep playing with him - putting her hat on him, tickling his feet - no matter how much I told her not to, until she woke him up again. I was livid. But then, miraculously, Alec fell asleep again. Only to be woken up a third time by his hellspawn of a sister.

Fortunately, we were very close to home, or she may have gotten punted out a window. Instead, we arrived home, and I got our stuff and Alec to take inside and opened K's door so she could get out. At this point, she decided to pull her supremely annoying trick of climbing into the back of the car instead.

I know the solution to that trick is to just open the back to let her out and she'll stop thinking it's a great trick to pull. But when I'm already angry it's very hard to do that. However, I held it together and just left a door open while I took a howling Alec inside and changed his diaper. I was a bit calmer when I went back out to get K out of the back of the car, when she told me she had wet her pants. Which of course wouldn't have happened if she had just gone in the damn house instead of fooling around in the back of the car. At that point, I hauled her out of the car and growled at her to go in the house and change her pants. I was working up a lecture on the theme of not fooling around and leaving her brother alone when I told her to as I closed the back door a bit harder than normal.

It wasn't really that hard, but since I wasn't paying much attention to what I was doing, I had my hand on one of the panes of glass in the window as I closed the door. Which then proceeded to shatter.

Thankfully, K was about ten feet in front of me, so she was nowhere near the glass. I was able to stay surprisingly calm, as I told her to stay back and checked Alec for glass shards (none, thank goodness), then carefully brushed myself off. I went upstairs, put Alec down and went to deal with the small cuts on my hand.

The one positive aspect of this is that the breaking window cowed K into obedience. So she readily obeyed when I asked her to go play in her room for a while. Then I put Alec in the sling where he calmed down quickly and sat down for a few minutes while I contemplated dealing with the broken glass. Then I asked longstrider to come home. And ate K's cookie.

So I made it about three hours on my own with both kids today. K has blessed, wonderful preschool tomorrow so I have a day to recover before I face the gauntlet again on Wednesday. I've been thinking about how I can start the day better so hopefully I can deal with the horrendous behavior K's been favoring us with lately** with a bit more grace. Things like getting dressed as soon as I get up and making breakfast for myself before I give Alec his morning feeding, so I don't find myself still in my pyjamas and starving two hours later, feeling trapped and unable to cope. As for K, I'm hoping a combination of working really hard on keeping my patience, ignoring the button-pushing and maintaining firm consequences for the defiance will help. And of course, a cattle prod could work wonders too.


*Behold the power of not restricting sweets: K took one bite of her cookie, then demanded my apple and happily ate it all. This is because cookies aren't anything special to her, so she doesn't feel the need to gorge herself on them when she gets one.

** I never thought I'd say this, but oh my hell, I've found an age I hate more than 21 months. We've seen a return of the same delightfully piquant blend of hair-trigger tantrums and oppositional defiance, only now she's smarter and has a better vocabulary, so she can press our buttons with fiendish accuracy while mouthing off and hurling insults when she gets mad. Ah, the wonder years.

Forgive me, the hospital had no wireless connection. I didn't mean to leave you all hanging:



Alexander (Alec) Foster Atkinson-Freeman, born June 23 at 10:03 AM. 8 pounds, 14 ounces, 21 3/4 inches. Currently plotting world domination.

We are all home and well, albeit quite sore. More later when I'm not dealing with a clingy four-year-old who wasn't allowed to visit us in the hospital because of the swine flu.