Blythe Spirit

Wind It Up

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Remember that last post? The one with all the starry-eyed wonder at parenting a snuggly babe in the darkness?

Scratch that. It’s day five of the jetlag soap opera and I think Theo is bent on torturing me. Also, there’s the teething and the growth spurt and did I mention that we scheduled his shots for Monday morning? Also, solid foods continue, leaving him two opportunities per day to cover me and my new pink Gap t-shirt in strained green beans, brought about by his special talent for blowing raspberries to signal his dislike for a particular food item.

In other news, we are very very old. We had tickets to see Gwen Stefani next week, an event that would require a two-hour (each way) drive, much pumping of the breasts, and Theo’s favorite buddy/babysitter. But hey, we were prepped and looking forward to a night out. Yesterday we learned that the concert venue had changed to a place without chairs. Yes, that’s right, no chairs at all, just little patches of concrete floor. And though I stayed far, far away from the Economics department in college, even this humanities major can calculate that this development has tipped the Cost:Benefit ratio out of favor. Three hours of standing around crushed against the filth of humanity plus car/parking time and also the pumping just doesn’t seem worth it even if the payoff is seeing Gwen yodel in person. So I’m planning to crank up Hollaback Girl on my iPod a week from tonight and wear red lipstick. Look out, neighbors.

As long as I’m just dumping the contents of my brain, I may as well share that I’ve joined The Working Closet photo pool, mainly as an incentive to bathe and dress myself. So if you wonder why I post pictures of myself standing around the house in different outfits, that’s why.

Jetlag

Traveling with Theo was not so bad. That’s probably because I expected it to be terrible, and it was better than that. He was a champ on the airplane, sitting up in his little bassinet, smiling at our fellow passengers and sleeping periodically so that we even got to watch Blades of Glory on the way there.

The worst part was coming home, as it is most of the time with vacations. I have always hated jetlag and the hating is at its peak right about 2:54 a.m. when I can’t get to sleep. It is at its second worst at 9:38 a.m. when I have to get up but feel like my limbs are dragged down by Wile E. Coyote anvils.

I thought that having a baby would make the jetlag so much worse, since my frustration level when Theo can’t sleep rises quickly even in the best of times. But, like so much about parenthood, I was surprised by the way a baby can make the worst stuff bearable just by shifting my focus from myself to him. Our first night home, Theo was terribly confused. He woke up every hour or so making creaky mewing noises and squinting his puffy little eyes. He just wanted to be held and bounced and rocked and sung to as he clung to the front of my pajamas. I would think he had fallen asleep but as soon as I even approached his crib to lay him down his pathetic sobs would begin anew. After an hour or so of the bouncing and clinging, Jeff would come into the room and I would hand over my little warm bundle, return to bed, and try to get some sleep before taking the next shift. At one point, I could hear Theo crying even though my head was underneath my pillow. I considered getting up to see if I could help calm him down, but instead I decided to give Jeff the privilege instead.

Now, when I say “privilege,” I am being just a tiny bit sarcastic, because I was really laying there thinking about how it was Jeff’s turn anyway, since I’d already been in there for an hour (and I’m sure Jeff thought the same thing when he heard me stumbling around an hour earlier). But after Theo quieted and I drifted off to sleep and Jeff crawled into bed beside me having successfully transferred our bundle of joy into his crib just as the sky got light, I realized that staying in bed was the right thing to do at the time.

I don’t have much advice to share about parenting a newborn, but here is one of the best things I’ve learned so far, and it’s something that I think women have a particularly hard time accomplishing. Let the other parent do the hard parts too. That goes especially for the middle-of-the-night stuff. Chances are, he wants to take his turn. He loves that screeching little angel as much as you do. Pump a bottle or hand over the baby monitor or take a long walk or do whatever you have to do to allow the daddy to roll out of bed at 1:27 a.m. and bounce the crying baby in his arms, even if he has to get up and go to work in the morning and you don’t, even if you are nursing and it’s just less trouble to do it yourself.

Because Saturday night, if I would have gotten up and taken over and let Jeff get some sleep, he wouldn’t have felt Theo’s warm legs against his torso or seen how Theo’s confused face relaxed when he recognized his daddy’s voice, or done a silent little cheer when he managed finally to lay Theo down without waking him (something I hadn’t managed to do anyway). And the two of couldn’t have reminisced together on Sunday morning about how last night was so much like those first few weeks when we were both joyful, terrified zombies because we were up together in the dark, caring for our son.

The Summer of My Drunken Popstar

What can I say about Britney, Lindsay, Nicole, and Paris that hasn’t already been said? I find it interesting that, for a couple of them (if the tabloids are to be believed about Nicole), their arrests/rehab stints/head-shaving meltdowns have coincided with parenthood. I guess if the paparazzi were following me around a year ago, when I was hot and sick and pissed about being in a place where I couldn’t communicate with anyone, I might have shaved my head too. But I couldn’t have afforded multiple rounds of hair extensions during my grow-out, so it’s a good thing I just sat around complaining instead.

This year, my American vacation will be very much the same (same destinations, same time of year, same plans for eating my way through the western United States) and so very different. Last year, I was trying to decide which hand sanitizer to place in my carefully-packed carry-on next to my specially purchased snacks. This year, I’m not allowed to bring hand sanitizer on the plane and I haven’t even thought about whether I have any clean clothes to wear tomorrow, let along prepared snacks.

So if you see a woman wandering around the Frankfurt airport tomorrow wearing only a Baby Bjorn and a stained bathrobe, look away. And don’t worry, I’m sure there’s a rehab facility that specializes in my condition: frazzled traveling mommy disorder.

Status Report

Theo’s latest accomplishments:

-Remaining totally bald. I don’t really notice his lack of hair, but others have started commenting on it.

-Grabbing anything and everything, which reminds me of those people in the money cube on Name That Tune. You don’t remember it? The money and the person were locked in a glass cube, the air jets started and the contestant grabbed anything and everything he could get his hands on. In Theo’s case, that’s meant a lot of my hair, the webcam cord, and a big handful of Thai noodles. Of course it all ends up in his mouth. Maybe that’s where all his hair is? He’s ripped it out and stuffed it in his chubby little cheeks.

-Or not-so-chubby cheeks, if you ask the growth charts. He’s in the lowest quartile for both height and weight. Not surprising, considering his native gene pool. I’m secretly thankful that he will never be a linebacker. However, his veiny little head circumference is in the 95th percentile. Brainiac, that’s him. Perhaps his scalp is just growing faster than the hair can cover it?

-Vocalizing. A lot. Sometimes jabbering and other time just shrieking. It’s one of his trademarks. I hope the fine people on our transAtlantic flight appreciate his talent.

-Eating whatever his confused mother puts in his mouth. Thank heaven, because I am so confused about what to feed him when that I’ve just stopped thinking too hard about it. The German pediatrician told me to feed him a mixture of carrots and potatoes as a first food. The American books said rice cereal, followed by squash. One book told me avocado and my midwife said parsnips were the ideal first food. (Parsnips? Yes, parsnips.) So far he just seems happy to slurp down whatever we give him, which seems to have diminished the screeching. Do you think parsnips stunt the hair follicle?

In good time

Theo has been sleeping through the night – ten or eleven hours at a stretch – for almost two weeks. I almost didn’t tell you. But the adage that every superstitious parent follows – don’t talk about the good stuff or it’s bound to go bad – doesn’t apply because in a few days, we will travel halfway around the world and thoroughly screw up his sleep patterns anyway.

I share this information as part of my “parenting doesn’t suck” blogging philosophy. I read a bunch of sleep books before Theo was born and laughed along with everyone who advised me to catch up on my sleep before the baby arrived to steal it all away. And those people were totally right, Jeff and I walked around for the first few weeks of Theo’s life like zombies. We were all right during the daytime, but at night it felt like someone had sent a little alien into our bedroom to conduct an experiment on sleep-deprived human beings. His schedule was predictable but it was difficult for us to figure out our own day- and night-time patterns; since we were getting up every couple of hours, we had to finally say to ourselves, OK, it’s dark, I’d better put on my pajamas, or OK, the sun is up, I think I’ll eat some cereal. And, of course, in the time it took to put on the pajamas or eat the cereal, he would have slept for his usual forty minutes and would be starving and want to eat and then, especially at about 1:30am, want to be rocked and jiggled for an hour or so before going back to sleep. Of course, the zombie moments were immediately counteracted by marathon photo sessions and hours when he slept snuggled up on my chest while I watched FoodTV.

So it was wonderful and difficult and there were lots of tears (not just Theo’s). But I realize now that my anxiety had a lot to do with the books and advice, and little to do with my concern for our tiny baby. I wasn’t worried that Theo was sick, or too hungry, or underweight, or turning yellow. With either my naivete or my new-mom-intuition, I could tell that he was all right. But I was terrified of becoming one of the case studies in the books, or the friends-of-friends, the ones who co-slept and couldn’t get their ten-year-old out of the bed; who had to wear the baby around the house in a sling until he was five; the ones who had broken their babies’ spirits by letting them cry too long or who said, “If only we’d done it right at first, we wouldn’t have to call the SuperNanny now.” All the useful information had become jumbled up in my sleep-deprived brain and it added up to the idea that if I didn’t teach him what he needed to know from his first hours at home, our whole family would pay in the months and years ahead.

And then, one day, instead of reading a baby book in the bathtub, I cracked open a novel. And I decided to put the books away for a while. And I started to notice that the things I had read that I was going to have to teach him how to do along with much crying and patting and gnashing of the toothless gums, he was learning to do on his own.

I know so many parents who, like me, just want to be informed and “do” parenthood the right way. We freak out about preventing nipple confusion and sleep training and eating tuna while we’re pregnant. But the one piece of advice that no one told me – or I just didn’t hear – is that Theo, like most babies, would have only handful of the hundreds of problems and issues that I’d read and heard about and prepared for. And the rest of the time, he would eat and sleep and grow and change and do what most babies do without anyone teaching him how. And even when I try to teach him, he usually does everything in his own time anyway.

We’ve had our moments (The Nap Wars) and I know we have a long road ahead (I don’t even want to think about the day we take away the binky) but I’ve started to assume that he’s doing what he needs to do, when he needs to do it. And when he doesn’t, I have a library full of books with helpful strategies for coaxing him along. Now I’m going to go back to enjoying the fact that I got a full night’s sleep last night, because since I’ve told you, it probably will never happen again.

I’m With Stupid

Last week I met my hospital roommate for lunch. She is Scottish and had just given birth to her third child when I moved into the bed across from hers in the maternity ward after Theo was born. I was so grateful to be rooming with an English-speaker that I almost wept when I met her. She cheered me on and said nice things about Theo and was an all-around pleasure to be around, which was a good thing because with all the breast pumping and follow-up exams and nurses kindly asking about our bowel movements in a game attempt at German/English, we are now more intimately acquainted in some areas than I am with my family members (thank heaven).

I was worried that I might not recognize her, since it’s been six months and many pounds ago for both of us, but we had no problems, possibly because once you have a baby you can practically track the scent of other children the same age as your child. Since her son is just two days older than Theo, we homed in immediately. The four of us had a delightful time discussing scintillating topics like naps and those tiny fingernail clippers and what’s grosser: strained carrots or pureed peas. I came away realizing how totally clueless I really am about babies and what to expect from them. I’ve read a bunch of books and websites but there’s nothing like a real live mom to remind me that sometimes walking around and around and around the block with the stroller is just what you have to do to get the baby to nap, so stop worrying about it. Her baby was in the middle of teething, in fact, so she gave me a bunch of friendly tips and I thanked her and filed them away for the day, far far in the future, when Theo might cut a tooth, because I kept feeling his gums and there were no bumps or lumps or white spots, but thanks very much anyway. <—FORESHADOWING

Theo has been screechier than usual lately. He doesn’t cry so much as let out high-pitched screams periodically. I came up with a thousand theories – He’s a prodigy and trying to talk already! He has a hair wrapped around his toe! He is starving! Jeff said, “I think we just got a loud one.” And then we sat around listening to the screeches while plunging further into denial about our upcoming transAtlantic flight and how the screeching might be handled at that time.

I’m sure you know exactly what happened this morning. Theo, who must have been bemoaning, once again, the idiocy of his parents, finally grabbed my finger, shoved it into his mouth, and all but said, “HERE IS MY TOOTH. WOULDN’T YOU SCREAM TOO?” And sure enough, I practically sliced my index finger open on that sharp little chomper. So, the good news is that we know why he’s screeching now. The bad news (especially for others on our plane, you might want to avoid flying Lufthansa for the next few weeks) is that it hasn’t stopped yet. And the even worse news (for Theo) is that this probably isn’t the last time I will mis-read his cues. But by the time he’s in junior high, he will probably be used to it and will just roll his eyes when I ask him to kiss me on the lips before I drop him off for school.

Scare Tactic

I was terrified of becoming a parent. I had heard so many stories and warnings, all those people telling me to “sleep while you can!” and bemoaning their ignorance about current cinema since they hadn’t been to a movie in a year, and shaking their heads about how their marriage would never be the same. I finally held my nose and jumped not because I thought it was going to be fun, but because I imagined there must be some redeeming factors once the kids get older, or everyone would be an only child like me.

Since Theo arrived, I’ve realized that a) I was probably tuning out some of the glowing reports, figuring they were just saying that stuff because they thought they should and b)it’s really hard to write and speak about positive events while remaining humble and self-deprecating. And I like humble and self-deprecating people. Ergo, most of the people I talk with and read about don’t gush over how much fun it is to watch a five-month-old finally manage to get his left big toe all the way into his mouth.

I hope I can find a way to write and speak about my child that conveys the humor and beauty I feel as I watch him grow, without boring everyone around me to tears. Because everyone knows that there’s nothing more boring than hearing stories about someone else’s kid (unless it’s watching someone else’s vacation video).

Just then I deleted the beginning of a sentence that read “Sure, I get tired and frustrated every day…” because I think there’s enough information out there about the fatigue and frustration. So for today, I’ll share with you the information that Theo is currently sucking on his left big toe, that it cracks me up every time he does it, and leave it at that.

Because, trust me, it’s a hoot. Really.

(This post inspired by Susan’s post at Friday Playdate.)

Parenting Tip

For a rosy-cheeked baby, install terry cloth sheets just as baby learns to scoot from one end of the crib to the other, especially if he’s not quite holding up his head yet. He’ll have a rug-burned face in no time.

Father’s Day

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Since I’m the milk machine in our household, Jeff has taken on the title of Burp Expert. Jeff took the month of May off as parental leave, so for the past few weeks I would feed Theo and then hand him off to Jeff. Sometimes he would let loose with an enormous belch (Theo, not Jeff) just as we made the transfer, and we would laugh and Theo would give us a big, gummy grin. Around lunchtime on Monday, he finished nursing and started to fuss like he usually does, a sign that he wants to sit up and get on with the day. But as soon as he sat up and I patted him on the back a few times, he began to cry inconsolably. He wasn’t interested in eating more (shocking) or in staring at his gorgeous mama, or in dancing around the room to the Talking Heads.

I think he missed his dad.

I’ve done enough complaining about German life and its quirks that I think it’s time to show the other side of the coin. This is a community-based culture, where neighbors don’t hesitate to tell one another how to sort the recycling, and where old men in the empty grocery story parking lot feel it is their responsibility to shout menacingly at clueluess drivers who aren’t following the preferred traffic pattern. These same community values mean that people who have babies are expected to want to spend a bunch of time with them, and to care for them with quality, unbureaucratic health care, and to have the opportunity to return to work after their babies are a little older. Even the dads.

So Jeff got to hang out with Theo for a whole month (and another month later this summer), and I got to relax and leave the burping to someone else for a few weeks. And now Theo gets so excited when Jeff comes home at night that he practically wiggles across the room on his own. Theo, I mean; not Jeff.

Entry

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Theo turned one month old over the weekend. He celebrated by taking a nice long nap and wearing his jammies all day. We should all be so lucky on our birthdays.

I’ve heard people say that after a baby is born, it’s hard to remember what it was like in the house without him. I haven’t found that to be true; I vividly remember sitting around with an aching back and hips, bored and impatient, wondering when he might arrive. I can even remember last year at this time, feeling aimless and wondering what to do with my days. I was primed for change.

And change arrived, beginning at 2am the morning after my due date. My water broke at home, I woke Jeff, and after showering and taking one last look around our apartment at life as we knew it, we drove through the deserted city to the hospital.* During the five days I spent there, the quiet of early morning was my favorite time. Hospitals are never completely dark or silent, but the nighttime hum of beds being wheeled through corridors and quiet conversations in the hallways soothed me.

The mild contractions I’d been experiencing for the past few weeks had not changed by the time the doctor admitted me that Tuesday morning, and she advised us to spend the next few hours walking around. My midwife had told me that time is elusive during labor; some hours seem endless and others pass in a moment. The next fifteen hours went by relatively quickly. We walked, we napped, we read books, we ate lunch and dinner. Midwives checked on me at the beginning of each changing shift. We made frequent trips to the nursery to stare at the new babies.

By Tuesday evening I had not progressed much at all, so I was advised to swallow a pill to get things moving. The medication succeeded in making my contractions more intense, but unfortunately failed to persuade my body to give up its precious cargo. We learned later that the meds I received are regularly administered repeatedly over several days in order to get things moving, but after some negotiation with several different midwives and several hours of painful contractions, at around 2a.m. Wednesday morning they agreed to give me an epidural and (the German equivalent to) Pitocin to induce labor instead. I moved to a delivery room and when the anesthesiologist left, I remember telling him he had saved my life. I was left to sleep for a few hours (heaven) and Jeff returned to my room to nap as well.

At around 7:30a.m. another shift of doctors and midwives arrived and the activity around me began to buzz. The Pitocin had done its job, and it was almost time for Theo to make his entrance. I asked the midwives (three times) to rouse Jeff, and he made it back to the delivery room with plenty of time to spare. My epidural dosage ran out and the midwives waited until it had worn off completely to call the doctor for delivery. At this point I had been in labor for over 30 hours. I was tired and, judging by Theo’s heart rate, he was tired too. The two of us worked hard and made progress, but the doctor finally decided to help us along using a vacuum cup. Theo arrived at 10:20 a.m., pinker and cleaner that I expected. I squeezed his little foot to make sure he was real.

Though the three of us normally would have stayed in the delivery room together for a couple of hours, instead Theo was taken straight to the children’s ward (KinderKlinik) to be checked out by the pediatricians due to his stressful delivery. He sported a big black bruise on his head from the vacuum, and the doctors wanted to make sure he began healing smoothly. Jeff went along with him and reported back to me that everything looked fine, but they wanted to keep him in the KinderKlinik overnight to make sure.

A couple of hours later, I boarded a wheelchair and Jeff took me to visit our Theo. He slept in an incubator, attached to heart monitors and an IV drip. When I look back at the photos from that day he seems tiny, but compared to the preemies in the room with him he looked like a giant. I imagine I should have been just a little scared for him, but it was so nice to finally hold him and see his swollen eyelids and tiny fingernails that I felt only happiness.

We spent the next several days waiting to hear that Theo could join me in the maternity ward, but the cautious doctors kept extending his stay in the KinderKlinik since the bruise and his blood type indicated increased risk for jaundice. He eventually moved to a room with healthier babies, but remained in his isolette, where we learned to diaper and dress him through plastic openings and around tubes and monitors. I visited him every few hours to feed and hold him, then returned to my room and the ever-present breast pump. I spent the rest of my time on the phone with friends and family, eating hospital food (not bad), and chatting with my roommate, a Scottish woman who had her second baby via Cesearean section a day or two before I arrived. Having a friendly, English-speaking roommate was a huge bonus.

I was set to be released on Saturday, but the doctors weren’t sure if Theo would be ready to go by that time. I got permission to stay one additional night in the maternity ward if he had to stay, so Jeff and I lounged around eating junk food from the hospital gift shop, waiting to hear the doctor’s decision, assuming that we would be there one more night. When the call came around 2pm that Theo was free to not only leave the KinderKlinik but to go home, we threw my belongings into a bag and Jeff ran to the car to get the carseat. The midwives gave us a few words of advice and several boxes full of free baby lotion samples and sent us on our way.

When we visited the hospital for our tour last fall, we passed a couple with a brand new baby in a carseat carrier exiting the front doors. They looked exhausted but smiley, their baby asleep and somewhat crumpled behind the wide nylon straps. Walking out the doors, knowing that we were introducing our child to his first breath of fresh air, watching his eyes scrunch up and his fingers wiggle around in the cool breeze, those parents were us.

*P.S. I’ll post a nuts-and-bolts account of my labor, delivery, and hospital stay for the Having a Baby in Germany series later.