I was able to blog lots more immediately following Amelia's birth than I have been able to now. The irony is, Amelia was a much more difficult child to care for.
Yes, I am going to compare my experience with newborn Amelia to my experience with newborn David. I think it is difficult not to compare your children to one another, particularly when they are so different. I know that may make some of you wince, but I think it's okay to point out the differences.
And the simple truth is this: it is far easier to make little David happy than it ever was for little Amelia. After a few weeks of simply rather easy baby care, James and I both started to worry that we were both actually complete wimps when we received Amelia, and maybe she wasn't that hard.
Well. I pulled out my journal, and the evidence is irrefutable: I haven't had to walk David around the block for hours in the middle of the night to get him to stop screaming even once! We haven't had episodes of SCREAMING for no discernable reason (there's always a reason; you just might not know what it is). Amelia WAS a difficult baby to care for.
David gets "fussy" sometimes, true. But when something isn't quite right for him, I feel like I have a sixth sense to know what it is. I can tell when his "fussiness" is just him complaining about how uncomfortable his intestines are while learning the complicated skill called pooping. (No, newborns don't necessarily know how to do that perfectly at first. They have to learn how to simultaneously tense the right muscles and relax their little sphincters and let it all out... Great drama in the meantime.) I can tell when he needs a good burp. I can just tell.
And then when I can't get him calm simply with cuddles and nursing, often all it will take to calm him down is to stand up and start walking until he's asleep (within five minutes instead of an hour of pacing! amazing!) or maybe give him to James and let Daddy bounce him on the yoga ball. He likes being bounced. Even if the bouncing doesn't put him to sleep immediately, it will at least calm him down so that he's in that nice "quiet, alert" state rather than ballistic.
He doesn't scream the entire time he's in his car seat. We give him a pacifier when we strap him in, and then he doesn't imitate a banshee. (Yes, he does accept a pacifier! What is this black magic?) He will often go to sleep instead. Amelia would scream persistently for hours upon hours no matter what we did in the car.
He allows us to put him down, and he likes the swing. Not like some mythical babies I've heard, but he likes or tolerates it long enough that I can go to the bathroom, or clip my fingernails, or eat a bowl of cereal, or do any other such activity that is best suited to a person with two free hands. It is fabulous.
I can still imagine an easier baby than this, but considering that Mr. Gregarious (James) is his father, I'm not convinced it's possible for us to actually produce one. I suspect this may be as mild as a Dilts can get.
Nursing has gone flawlessly. No problems. Had slightly sore nipples for a few days, had a little engorgement right when my milk came in two days after birth, and then it's been sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows from then on. (Only the sunshine is more like milk lasers. Milk LAZORS!)
More evidence that nursing is going along all right... David is growing pretty quickly. Amelia did, too, but she was screaming whenever she wasn't nursing, so she nursed a lot. I was hoping David wouldn't grow quite so quickly... I mean, Amelia grew quickly enough that I was soon overwhelmed with how heavy she got, and how speedily she got into size 5 diapers and 12-month size clothing. But David is as big as Amelia was at six weeks old, and he is only three weeks old. Dang. Looks like I might end up with another chubster.
Oh, he sleeps, too! A lot. Especially at night. He doesn't really wake up in the night... I mean, he kind of does. He wiggles enough to wake me up, and I offer him noms before he has more opportunity to startle himself awake. I have to make myself disturb his happily sleeping self to change his diaper once a night so the two of us don't wake up in a puddle of his pee. Ew, gross.
Now... all this is great. But lest you think I am living a perfect new mom life, no problems whatsoever, let me remind you that I also have a tot.
Amelia must have heard rumors that when you get a new baby, the parents are not supposed to sleep for the next few months (or even years! I hope she didn't hear that rumor, even if it is true...) following acquisition of said baby.
She is doing her very best to ensure that James and I are getting as little sleep as possible.
Two nights ago, for instance, she would not go to sleep. She screamed for hours while James held her down in bed... and when David finally figured out how to sleep through big sister's screams, I left him to sleep on his own and then I held her down to sleep. She finally passed out at 2am. That's a new record. I mean, maybe she did that a few times as an infant, but gosh. For the tot version of Amelia, this is a new record.
All things considered, Amelia is adjusting excellently to having a new baby brother. She likes him a lot. She is known to exclaim, "CUTE!" and insist on holding him, and nearly smother him lovingly to death (actually quite scary for me) if I ever leave him unattended. She really loves her little brother and hasn't even once demanded we put him back wherever we found him. She is happy to have him.
All the time, that is, except for bedtime. Bedtime, don't you know, is Amelia's special cuddle time with Mommy.
Well, unfortunately... most of the time, now, when bedtime rolls around, Mommy is nursing and/or cuddling little brother. Which means that Mommy is unavailable to cuddle Amelia.
This has directly resulted in the Amelia-not-going-to-sleep-at-night problem. She had made lots of progress at learning to fall asleep without me before Dragon was born, but she still hadn't mastered it. Obviously. Hence the screaming until 2am. Oh well. The super late nights are (very gradually) happening less often.
James is having a really hard time losing this much sleep. He thinks it is partly so hard because it's more directly Amelia's fault rather than Dragon's fault. In his mind, it would have been easier to cope with lost sleep if it the newborn was to blame, because a newborn doesn't know any better. A toddler, though! Phaw! A toddler should already have adult sleep habits! (Okay, so he knows that isn't true. But he wishes it were. Oh, how he wishes.)
Sure, he is getting more video game time in the late nights while Amelia settles down from hyperactivity to a somewhat drowsy state. But these sleep mishaps are having an effect on how well his mind works during the day, which for an academic is a serious problem. Being able to think at your highest capacity is really important when your job is to mathematically prove something new and super awesome. Oh well.
Now, Amelia hasn't been getting enough sleep either. It's not just James and I who are tired. For those of you who have ever had a sleep-deprived toddler, you can see where this is going.
We have a chronically sleep-deprived toddler. Yeah. She isn't at her rosiest lately. My goodness, she is a volatile mess way more often than we parents are used to dealing with. Rosy toddlers can be a joy, but thorny toddlers without enough of those blossomy moments can really just suck. Especially when you are adjusting to having more than one child at once.
So sometimes we parents are less than stellar at fulfilling her needs. She would probably be doing even better if we weren't so physically and emotionally sapped, because then we'd be able to give her more of the love and attention she is craving, but alas. We are somewhat sapped and it is showing.
It is, however, tough to get too upset with Amelia. Her cries, though deafening, are immediately followed by wails for a hug. I think that's a good thing. She recognizes that she needs help to calm down, and even if you are really ticked at some horrid mess she's made, it is hard to stay too angry when she says she just needs a hug.
(Amelia's cries have gotten LOUDER these last few weeks. Enough so that I one point, instead of responding to ear-shattering shrieks like any normal person would, I just laughed and mourned to James that we didn't have an instrument to measure how many decibels the sound coming out of Amelia's face was. It was simply an awe-inspiring level of noise, and I just itched to measure it in quantifiable terms. Ha.)
As I said, all things considered, things are actually going fairly well. We have a new baby and a chronically sleep-deprived tot who sometimes doesn't feel like she's getting enough hugs, but! Things are going well.
Oh, what about me? Uhh... Well, as I like to shout from the rooftops... I'M NOT NAUSEOUS ANYMORE! HUZZAH!
Other than that, I am recovering pretty well. My down-there stitches hurt for a while, as could be suspected. Now they itch sometimes, as can also be predicted. I'm no longer actively bleeding (you bleed for roughly two weeks after giving birth, kind of the mother of all periods). "Down there" is doing fine.
The bad news is that I overexerted myself soon after David was born so my recovery isn't as fast as it could have been. I could tell I overdid it because my pelvis got really upset at me--sore, and more uterine bleeding, and the urge to sleep for forever.
I know what did it. We went to a science museum-type place a few days after David was born, and Amelia had a blast. I was attempting to follow James and the tot around while carrying David in the car seat, because I really wanted some cute tot pics, but this proved too much for me. My pelvis decided to start yelling, "HEY, LADY! Would you puh-leez quit it? I just pushed out a baby, and I need some time to recover! LIE DOWN!" It was kind of a bummer. I finally had the energy to chase after a tot, and then my body wasn't ready to handle it yet.
So yeah. I had to force myself to relax and not pick up the thirty-pound tot, or the ginormous boxes full of baby clothes, or the heavy car seat containing a not-so-heavy infant, even though I finally felt able to. I had to depend on James a lot more.
(My journal tells me I did the same thing after Amelia was born. I forgot and made the same mistake. Doom! Note to self: After your third baby, resist the urge to do ALL the things! I know you feel great, but you won't feel great if you do ALL the things!)
I am doing pretty well now. Again, I have energy! Yay! In the week following birth, James kept saying, "Wow. You OBVIOUSLY feel better." It was apparently like night and day. I was suddenly smiling and laughing so much more. Making jokes. Moving more like a healthy person. I don't know. You'd have to ask him to elaborate. I wasn't exactly an outside observer.
So yeah. Now... all that leaves to tell you, I guess, is the big thing that has been really stressing me out for the last week. I am now feeling a lot better than I did when I found out last Wednesday during David's two-week well baby checkup... I'm not freaking out about it anymore. I have plenty of time to freak out about it some more later.
David is perfectly healthy except for one thing. That one thing has a fancy name (hypospadias) but all it means is that his urethra ("pee-hole") is not where it's supposed to be.* Whoops. He may need a surgery sometime between six months and eighteen months old to correct it.** It's not for sure, though.
Sometime between three and six months old, we will take him to see a pediatric urologist to check it out. Until then, we won't know whether or not he will actually need surgery, but I predict that he will indeed need it.
Doom. This'd be very stressful for me, even if it's not a "major" surgery. As far as I'm concerned, any surgery is a major surgery on my baby. :( I had a really hard time emotionally this last week just because of this idea of likely surgery. On my BABY.
I think so far I have only mentioned this to James, my mom, and my best friend here in Oregon (and I guess a few others overheard when I told her). Even though I am usually quite open about a lot of things, it was hard to talk about this for some reason.
I think it might be hard to talk about because it's a penile abnormality. It's not exactly your standard bit of conversation. "Oh hey, my son's penis is a little wonky. By the way. This isn't awkward or anything." Yeah. How do you even bring it up? It is easier to bring up the possibility of surgery before bringing up the reason for the surgery. If it had been any other body part, it might not be so hard. Oh well.
So yeah. Hypospadias. Darn it. Between this, my research to help us decide whether or not to circumcise our son (we didn't), and the nature of my work at the fertility clinic, I now know WAY more about the male reproductive system than perhaps any laywoman has any right to, ha. Possibly more than James does. Okay, definitely more than James does.
Love and milk lazors,
Jenna and Amelia and David
*The urethral opening is on the underside of the head of the penis. Yeah. Not where it belongs.
**Not correcting it will theoretically lead to problems when he's older. Like having to pee sitting down because the pee stream is... very messy, or multiple streams, or whatever. Okay, that's not too bad... But also, more importantly, difficulty with erections and such. Possibly painful erections. Important. If we want grandbabies via David, we will have to consider these things. (Gosh, it is strange to think that my infant son will grow up someday.)
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