goodbyes and hello's

It's been 10 months and one day since Asa was born ... my how time has flown. It's amazing and little terrifying to see how quickly he's growing up. What a transformation from a tiny little guy who just laid around to our solid little guy who crawls, climbs and cruises around the house. Another amazing transformation that deserves some recognition would be me & my body. Hot damn, how things have changed!

Here is a quick run-down of things I've said goodbye in the last 10 months:

Goodbye: 40 lbs of baby weight, all you can eat buffets, midnight feedings (for me, not the baby), Häagen-Dazs caramel cone ice cream, chocolate chip cookies, McDonalds, maternity clothes, cute shoes my feet are too wide for now, extreme emotional mood swings, size 12, 10 and 8 jeans, engorgement, breast pads, conspicuous wet spots on my shirt, multiple mid-night feedings (for the baby this time).

Now a few things I've recently said hello to after so long of being apart:

Hello! pre-pregnancy jeans (size 2, I'm sorry, I'm giving you away this weekend, we shall never meet again), high heels, sleeping through the night, my sense of humor, clavicles, calf muscles, abs, a sincere desire to look hot, baby-fever.

As you can see, the list of goodbyes primarily revolves around food, and oh, I miss the eating! But every little bit of ab that over takes the flab makes it worth the heartache of missing my old preggo foods. And hey, as my final "hello" item reminds me, I'll have my shot at pigging out with reckless abandon again someday!

sleep like a baby

The idea that someone would want to "sleep like a baby" seems totally ridiculous during the first few months of a newborns life. They sleep off and on all day and night with little regard for daylight or schedule and make functioning through exhaustion an art form that new parents must learn quickly if they want to remain at all sane.

Of course time marches on and they sleep longer stretches and then you start to think that maybe to "sleep like a baby" implies that you have the ability to fall asleep anywhere, anytime and to sleep through all sorts of noises and location changes. I mean, Asa can fall asleep in my arms and stay asleep through transfers to his crib to his carseat and even into daycare. It's impressive what a baby will sleep through. But still is this really the goal? To be able to fall asleep on your couch and wake up in the backseat of your car? Or fall asleep in your bed and then wake up an hour later in a grocery cart at Harris Teeter? Seems a little freaky to me.

Last night, I think we finally stumbled upon what "sleeping like a baby" truly means. At 7:30, just minutes after Asa went to bed, Jeff and I laid down in our bed, headsie-toesies, fully dressed, and fell asleep. We woke up hours later, staggered around the house, locking the front door, closing windows, putting on pj's and were fast sleep again within 20 minutes. Next thing we knew, it was 4:30am and we were doing the quick early-early morning feeding with Asa and again, within 20 minutes, we were all sound asleep until a respectable 6am. For anyone too tired or lazy to do the math, we all slept 10.5 hours last night and we feel fantastic.

I have to say that going to bed before sundown and waking up just after sunrise has got to be as close to heaven as possible and truly I can say that last night, we all slept like babies and we loved it!

feed me ... no wait, don't

Meal time with a baby is sort of like what I imagine kite-surfing to be like, just a whole lotta crazy.

Asa, like me, goes from happy to hungry and irritable in 3 seconds flat. The only thing that makes this okay is that he is hungry at the same times every day so we can anticipate, prepare and try to prevent the meltdowns. What's nutty is, he can be done eating after just a few bites of food. I mean like 5 bites and he's suddenly not interested in anymore. And it isn't just food, he'll do this with nursing as well, which let me tell you, is incredibly annoying and painful.

Here's an example of a typical morning meal with Asa. It's 6am, we've been up for a few minutes and made it downstairs. He's playing on the floor while I'm sipping a hot chai and Jeff is starting to make breakfast for Asa. All the sudden I have a tiny person trying to climb my legs, whining and crying and basically begging to be fed. We plunk him in the highchair and toss some cheerios at him while the oatmeal and apple sauce warms in the microwave. The cheerios do the trick (he's had like 10 individual o's), and after maybe 4 bites of applesauce he's through and now he's twisting his body around trying to see what I'm doing and wanting to get down and play.

Around 7:30 I start offering him bites of food on the go. A spoonful of breakfast in between toys, another on the stairs, more while we sit on the floor and watch the morning news. By 8:15 he's either eaten all of it or left over half of it, I can never predict how it will play out. By 8:17 he's ready to nurse because apparently, he's starved. So we nurse and he either is totally focused and nurses for 10 minutes or totally distracted and spends 3 minutes just licking/poking/gnawing on me until I throw in the towel and decide the nutritional benefit for Asa isn't worth the risk to my abused body.

Either way the story ends with Asa happily snoozing before daycare and me scrambling around, starved, trying to pull myself together to get out the door, usually forgetting to feed myself anything besides that hot chai (that is no ice cold and only half drank) three hours earlier. Kite surfing and feeding a baby, both physically challenging and never exactly the same from one day to the next.

best day ever

I somehow totally lucked out in life. Not only was Mother's Day the best day ever (thanks again Jeff for treating me like a queen), but yesterday was another best day ever! Asa and I spent the entire day together doing all sorts of random, normally dull things. We went to Bed Bath & Beyond, we went to Starbucks, we went to Rite Aid, we went for a walk ... Nothing out of the ordinary there. But what made it so great was that Asa is really fun, happy person and that makes him a joy to be around.

He may not smile at every stranger or wave bye-bye on command, but the kid has got a sense of humor to rival any one! I sneeze and suddenly he's in fits of laughter that melt my heart and make me laugh too. We dance-walk our way through a shopping plaza singing a song about (you guessed it ...) dance-walking and we're laughing and giggling and I eventually noticed, attracting a lot of attention from strangers, all of them smiling right along with us. We play with blocks, me stacking them, Asa destroying the towers and it's hilarious. He knocks over a book, I read it, he kisses the pages that have fur sewn into them, I laugh, he smiles and tosses another book at me to read.

Everything he does, he does with joy. Maybe babies should tag along to big international meetings to help bring everyone back down to earth and remind us why we're all here. I'm no expert but I think babies could teach most of us a lot about what's important. For Asa it seems to be that love, cuddles, applesauce, sneezes, birds, dogs, music, tickles and toys are the secrets to a happy life. I would think most of that could translate for adults as well.

Anyway, thanks Asa for a perfect Monday.

mother's day

I'd like to wish all the other mother's out there a happy mother's day, I hope yours was as great as mine! Today was the day that I let go of the guilt, for the very first time since Asa was born and it was liberating.

When Asa woke up at 5am and I couldn't nurse him back to sleep, I didn't feel guilty when Jeff got up with him and let me sleep (okay, I felt guilty but I successfully ignored and went back to sleep). When I rolled over nearly two hours later and realized I'd been snoozing all that time, my first instinct wasn't to jump out of bed in a tizzy but instead to roll over, stretch and take in the beautiful day outside the window.

Later, when Asa has pooped his diaper for probably the fifth time today, I didn't feel guilty when Jeff offered to change it yet again. I let him and he didn't give me any crap about it ... please tell me you got that (hit the like button if you did).

Long story short, today was a perfect day. We all took two naps, ate a smoothie, played outside, ate a delicious Indian dinner and I felt like a pampered princess. Thanks Jeff for taking such great care of me, I'm sure I'll be wracked with guilt about it all tomorrow!!

sleep is for sissy's

So as everyone knows, babies keep people up nights and they keep them extremely busy throughout the day as well. We lucked out with our baby, he's always been a "good" sleeper. This means that from day one he tended to sleep 4 ~5 hour stretches overnight. This sounds pretty good if you just focus on the 4 ~ 5 hours of sleep part of the statement. But once you dig a little deeper you'll see why we all still qualified as 'sleep deprived' during this phase.


First of all, a newborn (in our home) doesn't sleep in his own room or even his own bed, he shares a bed with us. Nestled safely between us in a small little nook. We hear every breath, every whimper, every sigh, every rumble of his belly. And we love it. We lay awake just to listen to the music of his body. We drift off to a light slumber and wake up an hour and a half later to a crying baby. We pat his back, we roll him over (yes, we allowed our baby to sleep on his side, and even his stomach), and he drifts back to sleep. An hour later and he's up again, this time for real and I'm nursing him while Jeff is bringing me food to stave off my ravenous appetite (does my body realize it's not pregnant any more?). We change the 13th diaper of the last 24 hours and we're all snuggled back in bed within an hour, drifting back to sleep for perhaps another three hours, maybe four. I, as a nursing mother, wake up soaked in milk two hours before the rest of the crew is awake. I get up, I get towels to sleep on top of, I change my shirt, I pump, I get back in bed and before I know it, we're all awake again to begin the routine once more.

Time passes, the baby grows and he moves into his own room down the hall. Now we sleep with a monitor on, straining our ears for any sign of a problem, and thankfully all we hear are the occasional snores of a congested baby. We're getting 8~10 hours of sleep a night, and its a beautiful thing. Some nights we don't even have to wake up to feed him. On those nights I wake up with aching breasts so large that even Anna Nicole Smith would be jealous. I drag my butt out of bed and to pump. To pass the time I read, I eat, I play sudoku at 3am while my family sleeps. I envy them. I'm back in bed by quarter to 4, asleep by 5:30 (because now for some reason despite my exhaustion, I cannot just fall asleep) and we're all up at 6:15 ready to start the day.

Time marches further on and the baby sleeps 10 hours a night, every night. My breasts have realized their job is nearly done and they allow me to sleep as well. We can go to bed at 8pm if we want to, and we know we'll sleep uninterrupted until at least 4am, sometimes 6am. Now this is a beautiful thing! When the baby does wake up we've got the routine down to a science. I lay in bed, Jeff brings the baby to me, I nurse him laying down, we all fall back asleep and I eventually realize the baby wants his bed and so I deposit him there and return to my own for another hour or two of sleep. It totally works. The daytime exhaustion has become second nature.  I can no longer remember a time when I wasn't tired so it's not even worth mentioning anymore.

This is life. Wake up with the sun (or in our case, wake up with the son), change, feed and play with him. Change & feed ourselves. Feed him again, put him down for a quick nap. He wakes up, comfort him, play with him, change him. Feed him. Play with him. Change him. Put him down for a longer nap. Feed yourself. He wakes up, comfort him, play with him. Take the dog for a walk. Feed the baby, play with the baby. Feed yourself. Change the baby, feed the baby, put him to bed. Finish feeding yourself, brush your teeth and off to bed. Life is busy, life is routine, life is the same for so many of us with babies and yet, it's anything but ordinary. Life is truly extraordinary with a baby, and sleep, well sleep is overrated.

snot another ear infection!

Carrying on from our previous conversation, "Snot so Bad" ...

We're back from the doctor again. Asa has his third ear infection since the new year and we've been told our assessment that he is pretty much sick for all but one week a month is just typical. According to our doctor, babies and kids go through a phase of catching between 7 ~12 colds per year for roughly two years. Each cold generally lasts between one to two weeks, so they are sick basically half the year and are either on the mend or on the road to being sick for the other half. This either happens when they are babies and starting daycare as is our case, or when they start playschool as a three year old, or for the hyper-sheltered I suppose it wouldn't start until kindergarten.

So if you missed that small detail, babies are sick about half a year each year for two years. So by the time our son turns two he will have spent half of his life sick with a cold. How f*cked up is that? And on a more selfish note, as his parents, it will mean that we've spent about a year of our life feeling sicker than we have since we were babies ourselves.

At any rate, babies get sick, their parents get sick, and some how we muddle through and learn to laugh at the copious amounts of dried and fresh snot that cover all exposed skin and toys in our home.