5 posts tagged “parenthood”

Pebbles

And may I just say that it took all of my willpower to not give her any chocolate last night. Well, except that not giving it to her meant I got to eat it. So not THAT much willpower.

The tiny baby, she isn't so tiny anymore. Today Dora is 5 months old. 5 months! Holy crapoly batman! This weekend I will be buying her some size 3 diapers. If you'd told me when I brought this tiny munchkin home that she'd be in those HUGE diapers in a mere 5 months I would have laughed. Disbelievingly. In your face. And then some more in my heart, for good measure. She is working VERY hard on sitting up and crawling, but has mastered neither. She is a champion roller-over-er, and she is very good with her hands. She can grab a hold of your neck and remove your trachea, especially when she's hungry. Does anybody remember that Mortal Kombat game that was all the rage when I was in high school, and there was the trick move where you could rip somebody's head off, and their spinal column dangled from it? Yeah, she's working on that, and I think if she held the A button down, she'd have it. Seriously, though, she can reach out and grab something these days without the faltering around that has presiously been accompanying that task. I can see her eyes light up when she figures out some cause and effect thing. She figured out something I didn't even know the other day, about pulling on a toy and it playing a song (Why does EVERY child's toy play the Twinkle, Twinkle/ABC tune?) and now when I lay her under that toy arch, she remembers and pulls on that toy to play the song. It's really amazing to see all of the things she's learning. It seems like her long term memory is starting to enter the game, too. For a while she was having to re-learn something everytime she encountered it, but these days it only takes a few (or in the case of the toy, one) times for her to remember something permanently.

Enough gushing about the baby, let's talk about me. I'm back into my skinny jeans. YAY! However, I fit into very few of my shirts. The upside of that is breastfeeding and pumping are still going very well. Dora hasn't had any formula so far, and it would be nice to avoid that very costly aisle in Wal-Mart, thankyouverymuch. She has started on some rice cereal, and she really likes it (see picture), but she doesn't seem to care whether she has it or not. It doesn't affect her sleeping or how often she eats. Is that weird? Oh wait! Back to me! I also talked to my boss and am going to start trying to work four 10's rather than five 8's at work, so I have Friday's off. I'm looking forward to that Friday off thing, and I'm hoping it sustains me through those rather grueling 10 hour days. Anybody have any tips on that?

And also? My baby gives kisses. Granted, it's while she has both of my cheeks in a death grip that reminds me of nothing so much as the fact that it's been exactly 11 days since I cut her fingernails, but still. Kisses. From my baby. I never knew baby drool could taste so sweet.

I've been thinking for a while now that I wish I had someone who really understood to talk with about this FEELING. The feeling (Guilt? Not quite.) of leaving my child with a babysitter every day for 10 hours. I know I would not be a mentally healthy person without a job. A challenging job in my field that I really LIKE, by the way. I know our family's financial stability would suffer if I did not have a job. Still, the "I'm not letting someone else raise my child." comments get to me. Anyway, I think I maybe found someone to talk to about this, only now I need to work up the nerve to see if she'll fly across the country to have a drink with me. Anyway, framed in the context of wishing she had friends in similar circumstances as she and her husband, read what hola, isabel has to say. Pay attention especially to the paragraph about what her day is like, and the paragraph after that about some people not being cut out to be a SAHM.  Because that's what I'm trying to talk about here. Only she does it much better than me.

I was driving home from my mom's house a few weeks ago. It's about an hour drive and halfway through it Dora started fussing. As any mom can tell you, 30 minutes in a car with a fussing baby gets pretty old, but it's close enough to home that you hate to stop. So I did what I could, which happened to be stick the end of my right pinky finger in her mouth (I've since put a pacifier in my ashtray). She sucked on it and was happy. I, however, was getting a dead right arm trying to reach around the infant carseat to get to her face. No biggie, at least she's not fussing. Then my husband calls. I manage to get to my cell phone without any crying or wrecking. So now, I'm using my right hand to take care of my baby, my left hand to take care of my hubby, my right foot on the accelerator to keep me moving forward, and my left leg to steer.

Taken metaphorically, there's not much of anything left to do my job with. I've been at work full time for 2 weeks now, and I'm finally beginning to feel like things might be ok. Of course, I have the hard core mommie guilt over not being the perfect mom, wife, housekeeper, and employee right now. And I still want to cry everytime I leave Dora at the babysitter, but I have hope that I can handle all of this. I guess when you get right down to it, hope is all I've had for quite a while about anything baby-related, so I should feel like an old pro. I don't.

The good news is at her 2 month check-up she was perfectly healthy, and growing fast, so at least I know the boobies are working!