girlfiend

I’ve always given him the benefit of the doubt but I’m done now. It’s official. The Fiendling’s not a good sleeper. With only five weeks until his first birthday he’s still not even close to sleeping through the night. I know that I’ve said in the past that he was, more or less, sleeping through the night, but the experts who say six hours is “through the night” are lying because six hours just isn’t long enough, especially when the majority of the six hours are before eleven p.m. and the sleep that follows the six hours comes in one or two hour intervals.

Last night was a fluke. He slept for nine hours in a row and went back to sleep for another three. Once he slept for eleven hours straight. Where once I would have said that those extended stretches of sleep prove he’s a good sleeper who goes through rough patches, I now think it’s proof that he’s a terrible sleeper whose body occasionally gives in to exhaustion.

My son is happy and healthy. He has a great personality and he is a pleasure to spend time with. Developmentally he’s right on track if not advanced in some areas. He’s thoughtful and interested in the world around him and he’s learning how to communicate effectively. He’s utterly charming in almost every respect. But he’s a shitty sleeper and I’m done fooling myself about it.

The Fiendling got it Thursday, I got it Saturday and Boyfiend’s currently fighting it off. The good news is that this particular flu is a 24 hour thing, not a four day affair like the one I had in November. The bad news is that it’s a stomach flu, and though the violent symptoms subside quickly, the residuals remain. Tonight’s dinner will consist of applesauce, toast, rice and possibly bananas and jello.

I was just going to write about the Fiendling’s first real illness, a stomach flu that came on last night, but I decided that no one really wanted to read about me being covered in vomit. Consider yourself lucky.

1. I still haven’t gotten around to doing anything about the chapstick fiasco. The clothes are still sitting in the laundry room covered with wax. Awesome.

2. Today I checked two blogs I haven’t seen in a while only to learn that both bloggers are just into the second trimester of pregnancy. How do people keep their mouths shut? I lasted like a week before I blabbed all over the internet.

3. What’s up with people at the gym who insist on doing their hour long yoga practice on the stretching mats? There are two empty rooms with mats and mirrors at their disposal but they prefer to practice in the place that 90% of the gym members use to stretch and do ab work. It’s bright, it’s noisy, and frankly, the mats are pretty fucking nasty. Why not take a class? And people who talk on the phone on the treadmill? Shut up already.

4. What do you get people who have everything for a housewarming gift?

I never really thought about the day to day reality of nursing for this long. While the initial, round-the-clock duties have lessened, nursing an older baby (well my older baby anyway) is much more of a commitment. Regardless of how much solid food he eats during the day he still nurses 5 or 6 times a day and 2 or 3 times at night. Now that he’s old enough to be interested in everything he can’t nurse in public- I have to take him into a dressing room or a car and even at home we have to go into a darkened room or else he’s just too damn distracted.

He used to eat calmly and quietly, now he’s a wildman while he eats especially when he wants to fall asleep. Instead of sweetly sucking he’s burrowing, flailing, kicking, pinching, and struggling to find a comfortable spot. It’s often painful and I have to say, “No, you’re hurting mommy,” and he stops and cries and I hold him still while he tries to fling himself off of my lap and it takes what feels like forever to get him calm enough to nurse again and eventually fall asleep.

I thought that by this point he’d be replacing at least some nursing sessions with solid foods, but the reality is that no matter how much he eats, and some days he eats quite a bit, he still wants to nurse afterwards and other days he doesn’t want to eat anything at all. All he wants is breastmilk.
The reality of it, the inconvenience and the struggle and the constantly being on duty, isn’t too hard to deal with. Since I’m just at home with him all day it’s just what I do, and I wouldn’t want it any other way. I just hate that his grandmothers think I’m starving him. My mother stuffs his face the entire time she’s with him and gets irritated if I only bring him one type of snack while she babysits. My mother-in-law, who is the nicest woman in the world and would never say anything to me, is the same way. At parties she gives him crackers and he can’t get enough of them so she thinks it’s because he’s hungry. It’s not because he’s hungry, it’s because they are salty, and salt is something he doesn’t get much of at home. The other day she asked Boyfiend if the Fiendling was eating enough. She was concerned that we don’t have any jarred baby food in the house. I don’t understand why the jarred stuff is so much better than the real stuff. Why would I buy a jar of pears instead of giving him a pear to eat? He’s ten months old and has a ton of teeth. He’s fine with small pieces of food and doesn’t need purees anymore

I understand that breastfeeding and self feeding are things that are completely foreign to my mother and mother-in-law. Their experience was that babies got formula on a three to four hour schedule for a month and were expected to sleep through the night with no nighttime feedings by six weeks. As early as one month cereal was added to the bottle to help with sleeping through the night and pureed solids were started in earnest at four months with meats by six months. I’m sure by the time their babies were ten months old they were eating a full breakfast, lunch and dinner with snacks and desserts.

My mother is constantly saying things like, “Can I give him some steak?” or “can I buy him a lollipop while we’re out?” No and no. Boyfiend’s mother just worries about his health which is ridiculous because developmentally he’s hit almost all of the one year milestones which she should know since she works in a pediatrician’s office. He’s fine. Better than fine, which is why I’m not planning on weaning him yet. The one year milestone is quickly approaching and it would be lovely to wean him soon after, but the truth is that I probably won’t. I’m not even going to attempt to set a timetable yet, but I will say that these women are batshit crazy.

Although finding three dollars in the dryer is generally cause for at least a small celebration, finding an empty tube of chapstick in the same dryer counteracts all of the three dollar goodness.

After putting the rest of the greasy clothes in a bucket of Oxy-Clean, I rewashed two of the six ruined shirts in hot water, one after dousing it liberally with stain spray the other after a careful application of WD-40 and Dawn. I’ve not yet returned for the results. I have a feeling I’ll be heading to Old Navy later this week to replace at least a few of the shirts to get me through the rest of the winter.

I spent more than an hour today driving around trying to get the Fiendling to take a nap. He wasn’t having it. I ended up in King of Prussia. At the fucking mall. Where I walked and walked and walked trying to get the Fiendling to take a nap. Again, he wasn’t having it. The child hasn’t taken a decent nap since Friday. By decent I mean more than 25 minutes. I might lose my mind if this nap strike doesn’t end soon.
While I drove I didn’t actually hit any traffic, but if I did, I would have written something like

…And then the guy cut me off in traffic! I rolled down my window and yelled “The Codes will fuck your shit up motherfucker!” He had no idea what I was talking about, so I asked him, “You ever suck cock for cash? I bet The Codes have!”

1. Hug. Not me, of course, just his creepy talking Lambchop doll who says, “I need a hug.”

2. Play ball. Not well, of course, but he does know how to roll it back and forth with someone else.

3. Find things. He can find the cats and his blue ball when asked.

4. Ask for milk. When he’s busy playing and realizes he’s hungry he’ll crawl over, pull up on me, rub his head against my chest and with both hands he’ll sign furiously for milk.

5. Stand unassisted. But only when he forgets to hold onto something. As soon as he realizes he’s standing solo he sits back down.
6. Walk. He can walk, but only when he’s pushing an object not meant to be a walker, like a coffee table or chair.

7. Take off his shoes and socks. Especially in the car.

8. Play with blocks. He doesn’t do it very well yet, but when he’s not sucking on them he can put together and take apart blocks.

9. Flirt shamelessly. When he smiles and waves the ladies love him and he knows it but he also flirts with everyone else, especially people with dreadlocks.

10. Ask me to read. He’ll pick up his favorite book, crawl over and hand it to me. He has a favorite part (This little baby wants her mommy) which he indicates by turning the book to that page repeatedly, and a part he doesn’t like (This little baby is sad) which he communicates by closing the book every time we get to that page.

I haven’t posted one of these things in years, but the results were too perfect not to.

Please forgive me for posting about the weather, but for fuck’s sake it’s snowing out there. It was 70 degrees at the Mummers parade on Saturday. I had to borrow a short-sleeved shirt from my sister-in-law. In January. Now, four days later, it’s flurrying.

Click on the original size if you’re curious. People are wearing t-shirts and shorts. Today it’s parka weather.