It began on a Thursday.

We had ham that night, cooked in the slow cooker. It was a decent enough meal, but I didn't have the energy to clean it all up. The slow cooker pot went into the sink, to "soak" until morning.

I snoozed on the couch, half-watching TV. My husband did some overtime in the basement. It had been a long and somewhat disappointing week. We had a few little thrills of worry - the Thursday before had brought us a questionable BPP (no breathing movements). But maybe the baby was just a late bloomer, no big deal, really. We saw the OB on Monday, another questionable BPP. Long NST. All good. No reason to induce. We saw the high risk OB on Tuesday. His tech saw the breathing movements. No worries. Go home for birthday cake.

My day had been long. We saw our GP in the morning, nice FHR around 150. No dilation - so disappointing. I "worked", which meant cleaning out my office for my replacement. Went for long coffee breaks and gleefully answered "no baby yet?" questions. So, so, SO normal.

I went to sleep for the night in the nursery, where we had set up an air mattress that was easier on my SI joint while I slept. Before I closed my eyes, I read my mom's 25 year old copy of The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding. So dull, really.

I awoke to an odd sensation around midnight. I tossed and turned for a while. I didn't know I was going into labour. I didn't know the turn my life was going to take.

I didn't know.

It's so hard to think about those days - those few days before the world exploded. And yet I have been living with those what ifs as I dealt with these anniversary days. These birth/death days.

I have to write it here: what if I had pushed the OB to induce on that Monday night those 3 years ago? would she have listened? would she have cared what I said? what if my opportunity was there and I let it slip by so unknowingly?

Those questions don't rip me apart with pain anymore. But they are there. I don't know if they will ever leave. They are always there.

So far...

...not so good. Things have NOT improved on the time-management front. I know what I need to do to accomplish all of my to-do items in a day: curtail my "enjoying the baby" time to the bare minimum and completely give up all leisure activities.

I am not very good at doing either.

Something I learned when C. was born: nothing makes you feel like a guilt-riddled failure quite like becoming a mother. The sensation has only grown exponentially since then.

Speaking of failing, I made the mistake of reading about all the wonderful teaching moments that I have let slip by in BB's life. One year old and I have already coddled him too much. He's not walking yet and doesn't really eat much on his own and can only handle pureed (not mashed, etc.) food that I feed him in small bites (though large portions). Here's the thing, though. I don't feel guilt over those things. I won't push him; he is the most amazing child (everyone says so) and he can move at his own pace. But then I do feel like crap that I haven't managed to teach him a handful of words, that he is an individual person, and to communicate in full American Sign Language sentences.

Oh, and I think he might stop nursing soon, of his own accord. That is going to hurt my heart, it is. I fully intended to nurse until the summertime, albeit only morning and bedtime. He just isn't interested anymore.

I am too freakin' sleep deprived to make sense (we have all been very sick). OK. I have no idea what I am saying here.

I need a fairy godmother or a robot to come along and take some work off my list of things to do.

Worried...

...that my new lifestyle, wherein I am a stay-at-home-mom in the mornings/evenings and sell my soul working for The Man in the afternoons, will be the death of me. Seriously. Who thought working a 70% position in 50% time was going to be a good idea?

Playing Scrabulous with my sister on Facebook will definitely help this problem.

One

Happy Birthday, my very sweet little boy. I wanted to write long posts for you and for your big brother on these special days. But you are so miserable with your head cold, all we are doing is snuggling and trying to make you feel a little better.

I love you. You adorable, goofy little boy.

Three

Happy Birthday, my little love.

It's okay, I guess

So I have managed 2 days of work. BB seems to be okay at daycare and, frankly, I don't have the time in my work day to even worry about him. I am glad that I found such a trust-worthy care provider (though I am certain that she lets him CIO for naps, which I am not thrilled about, but realize that she really doesn't have much choice).

I was very nervous the night before - silly really. My contract gives me 8 weeks holidays in the summer and I am never nervous when I return after that. I guess 12 months is different.

I am trying very hard to process everything that is happening in my life. I know I am going to struggle to keep up with work. It will ebb and flow, but generally I will have to deal with overtime several nights a week.

C. and BB's birthdays are coming up. I am trying to plan a couple of parties for BB and trying to plan a couple of memorial things for C. I am so glad that they don't share a birthday, but having them one day after another is kind of hard, too. It would have been nice to have a buffer day between them... but, oh well. Nothing I can do about it.

We had BB in for his 12 month check. He is in the high percentiles for all measurements. He is tall, heavy, and has a big head. He made our doctor coo and smile, which I think is a nice gift for her, having been there for us through both pregnancies.

I feel like this year I should devote some more time and energy and emotion into memorializing C. I really feel like he got short-changed on his birthday last year, what with me being in labour and all. I keep thinking this will be his second birthday. Nope. I should have a three year old.

I have this weird expectation that everyone around me should recognize what a miracle BB is, in the intense way that I do. In the sense that he has survived my uterus and spent nearly a year as a living and breathing part of the family. But, no. To the world at large, he is just another one year old. Drooling and teething and covered in dimply smiles. It irritates me, in some small way. I guess I want people to gush and carry on every time they see him. Is that normal, or is that a grief thing? Don't know.

There has been major improvements on the sleep-front. BB now falls asleep on my lap, not rocking or nursing. He squirms around and cuddles in and falls asleep without intervention from me. So not "falling asleep alone" but rather "falling asleep on his own", if you can appreciate the difference. It resulted in 10 days of sleeping through the night (though teething and daycare-related separation anxiety have made for waking the last few nights...). Things are so much better, though, I don't dare to really complain.

This working mommy thing is going to be tiring.

Tomorrow

Tomorrow I return to work. I know most of you live in places where maternity leaves are substantially shorter than the year that we get in Canada, however, it still feels too short. I knew that I would feel this way, but it doesn't make it any easier.

Thankfully, I will only work afternoons, though I am moving into a 70% position (meaning I will have a lot of overtime work that I will have to do in evenings). It is a salaried position, so I am expected to get my work done, no matter how many overtime hours it means. Unfortunately, my husband does similar work with similar expectations, so I have to admit I am worried how we are going to balance family and work.

My resolution for this year, blogging-wise, is to post more. My stats tell me that I am getting half the visits I used to. I don't blame anyone - this is getting to be a really boring blog.

December Twenty Fifth

I hope that your Christmas was gentle. Or if you don't celebrate Christmas, I hope that these holidays have been gentle. Times of family can be difficult to negotiate, no?

It was wonderful to watch my baby open his gifts - his innocent joy as he played with his new toys. The other part of it - the silent struggles in my heart and mind - well, they deserve something, a post maybe, but I am tired. It is time for me to rest.

Tomorrow we will travel to visit relatives and friends. And maybe spend money on electronics. Until the alarm rings - I will rest.

The Season

The tears are never very far away these days. It isn't all deadbabystuff that sets me off. But the emotion is all stemming from my feelings of loss - where is my 3 year old. God. I think of all the things that 3 year olds do at Christmastime and I well up again.

I guess it is an emotional time of year. And it is seasonally imprinted on me. The last 4 years have been so emotional at Christmas. In 2004, it was complete and utter excitement. My husband talking to my belly, trying to convince C. to come early and be the New Year's baby . 2005 was agony. There were small, gentle moments of healing, but not many. Certain family members ignored our pain. We weren't pregnant. Our baby was dead. A horrible, horrible year. 2006 brought the hope of BB's arrival, but continued BH contractions, that terrifying (transient, turns out) arrythmia, and the polyhydramnios had us hardly daring to breathe.

This brings us to 2007. We have our boy. His brother isn't here. It is sometimes so complicated to live in my heart and soul, trying to reconcile those two sets of emotion. Joy, cuddles, and giggles. Silence, pain, longing, memory. I am so often amazed that I can and do continue on despite the torrent of conflict that I am bombarded with on such a regular basis.

Discovery

I have been over putting up new links on the Directory, something that I am not finding as much time for lately (my apologies to those who have to wait to get their links posted). However, I think it is important work, though small in the grand scheme of things, so I do it when I can. In the process of organizing the new submissions, I usually read the first few posts so that I know a little bit about the writer's background.

Today I came to a realization. I can't go backwards. I can't read the posts of these new mommies who only just had their hearts broken. I can't offer support. I can't leave any wise words of experience with them. I just can't.

I feel like I should. But I don't have it in me. I have worked too hard to get where I am. Something about dredging up all of those old emotions is too difficult and too painful. Because they are all still there, waiting for me, behind this precarious dam that that time and effort has built. And it would be all to easy for the dam to burst and the happiness I have struggled for would be swept away in the rush. I am not willing to let that happen.

So know that I wish I could be that person who offers the right words at the right time. But also know that it just isn't possible for me to do. There are too many hurting souls out there and there is not enough of me.

I will do what I can - with the people who are hurting in my offline life and by maintaining the Directory. But going back there is just not good for me.

Photos

I updated the photo site.

Catching Up

Wow. This has completely become one of those once-a-week blogs. Sorry. Like I have any readership left.

I have found day care. It is a wonderful home situation, and the care provider has been doing it for 17 years. Also, she is a survivor of 6 miscarriages and her living children are both the product of fertility treatments. She works with babies and kids all day. That is heartening, somehow.

I am almost prepared for the holiday season. Gifts are purchased and will hopefully be all wrapped by the end of this evening. I am not doing any baking. I love to eat it too much and it the new suits I am buying for work will not look good with extra Christmas weight under them.

I had a very long and heavy moment where I was absolutely dumbstruck with the grief of doing Santa gifts for the first time. 3 years after the birth of my first child. Not what I pictured for my life.

I promise to add some photos of BB on the other site soon, and will notify.

I also will write a not-sucky post someday.

But he's MY baby

I return to work on January 7 (afternoons only). I don't want to; I am really struggling with the idea of leaving BB with someone else, especially considering his issues with sleep. However, if I want to keep this job (which I like well enough, and would be nearly impossibly to replace without adding a huge commute to another city), I need to return once my maternity leave is over.

So I need to find daycare. I know, I know, I am really into last-minute mode here. I have less than a month to find someone. It could prove to be very difficult.

We will definitely be using home daycare, as anything else is almost non-existent here. So we are relying on word-of-mouth to find someone.

What questions should I ask? Should I ask to come and spend an afternoon with BB to see if I think it will be a good fit? HELP! I know nothing about this.

Clearing Out

My mother set impossible standards for cleanliness and tidiness in the home of our youth. Most tension and anger in our family revolved around housecleaning issues. As a result, I have impossible standards for my own home. I assure you that these standards are never met.

When the main floor is clean and tidy, the basement is a disaster. The reverse is true. It bothers me to the point of constant irritation. And spending all of my time in this messy/dirty house can make me a horrible person to live with.

All of this history makes it a little easier to understand why I am just so satisfied that my bedroom is clean and tidy. It has been vacuumed and dusted, the sheets are clean, and clean clothes are starting to make their way back into the closets and drawers.

The kitchen floor has no food stuck to it. The baby can crawl in the bathroom and suck on the toilet without causing me to disintegrate in panic (I disinfected the hell out of it today - and no I don't let him suck on the toilet, but he's getting really quick....).

Yesterday, I started this cleaning binge with a closet purge of momentous proportions. I ruthlessly disposed of anything that I don't wear and anything that I do wear but look horrible in. 5 large garbage bags of clothing were neatly piled into the trunk of my car and donated to the lovely people at the Salvation Army. (incidentally, as soon as I got back from the Salvation Army, I had to rush back to beg and plead with them to let me recover my husband's good coat, which was accidentally donated)

The most satisfying part of the whole thing is that this is something that I have been daydreaming about for a long time. Although it is always good to get rid of the clutter in our lives, this was the sort of clutter that carried extra weight with it. So many of these clothing items were ugly, and I knew it when I bought them. But these are the things that I bought between pregnancies. When I was looking for something cheap to get me through to next month, when I would surely be pregnant again. No use spending a lot of money on something you aren't going to wear for very long.

These clothing items spent too much time in my closet. And every time I put them on, I would remember wearing them when I didn't care about how I looked. When I gave up on appearances. When the only thing that mattered was my desperate charting of basil body temperature and cervical fluid.

These things carried with them the spectre of death. Yesterday, I purged my closet. In so doing, I moved even further away from a life of Death towards a life of Life.

On Sleep

Well, I can't post everything I want to on every topic that comes to mind. My Baby is too busy these days, and that is a blessing. But the blog suffers.

So, I will tell a tale of Ferb*er.

This is the system. Break the bad habit of nursing to sleep and get BB sleeping through the night, all in one fell swoop. This is how:

Nap 1: put baby in crib. When he cries, go in to comfort at 5 min, 10 min, 15 min, 15 min, 15min, etc. If he doesn't fall asleep, get him up after an hour and skip that nap.

Nap 2: Repeat.

Bedtime: Pleasant bedtime routine, then into bed and the same method as the naps.

Day 2, etc.: add 5 minutes of cry time to each interval.

Baby should be responding after 3 days to a week and the cry times will have decreased.

What happened in our house:

Day 1

Nap 1: Nursed to sleep, as per usual.

Nap 2: Cried for the hour. Cried harder when I went in to comfort. Didn't nap.

Bedtime: Cried for 45 min, and gave up in exhaustion. Whimpered in his sleep for hours. Slept through the night. Hmmm, this might be working?

Day 2

Nap 1: Cried the hour. Cried harder when I went in to comfort. Didn't nap.

Nap 2: Cried for 45 min. Fell asleep for 20 min, then woke screaming.

Bedtime: Cried for 90 minutes, fell asleep for a few hours, whimpered in his sleep for hours, woke to nurse (kept him awake), cried an hour before going back to sleep.

Day 3

Nap 1: Cried the hour. When absolutely ballistic if I went in to comfort. Didn't nap.

Nap 2: Done. Back to nursing.



So why did I quit? On paper, it looks like it was working, that he was starting to learn to sleep on his own, right?

The change in his personality was horrible. He went from being the happiest, most easy-going baby in the world to the neediest, most anxious baby in the world, literally overnight. He would scream when I left the room. He would scream if we walked anywhere near his bedroom. He would lose his mind if I put him in the crib. He would scream if I lay him down to change his diaper. When he woke from his last Fer*ber nap, he would scream unless my husband and I were both holding him at the same time.

I realize that this could have been a temporary situation. That he might revert to that easygoing temperament in a couple of weeks. But the possibility that he would remain in this anxious state was there. And it seemed a sacrifice that wasn't acceptable to me.

Also, the concern we both had for BB's well-being was putting major, worrisome strain on our marriage. It wasn't worth what was happening between the two of us.

It took me a week of comfort and gentleness with BB to get him over his fear of the bedroom. He is still crying when he wakes up, something he has never done in his life (he would usually just play or call out to me). He still sometimes cries when I lay him down to change him.

I think the problem is that I tried to go from full-on attachment parenting to this very detached style. I don't think it could have had much success. There needed to be an intermediate step. Though, most people say that you must stick with the CIO method for at least 3 days, and I (admittedly) did not do that. Who knows? It might have worked.

Incidentally, I also picked up Dr. Sears' book when I brought home Fe*rber's. It is all about attachment parenting and says that CIO isn't affective. Imagine my guilt when I picked it up and started to read that night.

So, the whole experience has taught me this: I am an attachment parent. The solution to my child's sleep problems isn't going to come from him CIO. I bent to the pressure all around me, from mothers swearing up and down that CIO was the "best thing they ever did". It doesn't suit me and it doesn't suit BB.

So how is the sleep now? It is going quite well, actually. I have stopped nighttime nursing; he has gone a week without middle of the night boobie. If he gets up in the night, I rock him to sleep or bring him to bed with me. And we are getting the best sleep we have for weeks. He even slept from 9:30pm-7:00am this week (in his crib, no waking).

It is a moving target. Naps aren't always of good length, but are improving. We are sticking with a daily schedule, religiously, and following the 2-3-4 rule (works like a charm).

And I have decided that the "problem" was always one of perception. Nursing to sleep is not necessarily a "bad habit". It is a parenting choice. I agree with Dr. Sears on this one - it can be a healthy, comfortable way for a baby to fall asleep. He will grow out of it as he starts to wean.

The major stressor in the whole situation is my return to work in January. However, I have managed (just this week) to arrange my part-time schedule so I work from 1:30-4:30 daily. I can put him down for his morning nap at home, his afternoon nap at the sitter's, and home for bedtime - he never needs to stop nursing! (Ha, Ha, little joke there....)

It just took me 10 months to figure this out. I'll let you know what happens if all my best-laid plans go the way of mice and men.

As the days go by...

There is no point in making excuses. I took on too much at this point in my life and I am reaping the results of it. So no big, important, introspective post here.

But there is one brewing. Truly. And I intend to elaborate on my Fer*ber experience, you know, so others know a bit about it the way I see it.

Till then, I will be daydreaming about my upcoming visit to Toronto.

An Open Letter

Dear Doctor F,

I quit you. Sorry.*

Sincerely,
d

*How Canadian of me, this apology. I snicker at myself.

Fe*rber

Not fun.

Coming attractions

Well, I am excited that this will be our weekend away. A weekend away that is just for us, not going to visit the grandparents or going to a wedding or whatever. We are going to cheer on Our Team vs. their Arch Rivals.

It will be a heckova road trip, though. Google Maps tells me that our route encompasses 1,636 km. Perhaps that sounds daunting. It is, a little. But nothing in Western Canada is close to anything else. Which means these road trips are always long.

I am hoping that BB's cold will continue to improve, as it has seemed to over the past 24 hours. I am not sure how this all is going to work. He won't sleep in the car. Perhaps this road trip will cure him of that? I don't have high hopes.

If he is well when we return, I guess I am ready to go Fer*ber. I guess I should mention that the main problem we have is that he will not go to sleep on his own. On good days, he nurses to sleep. On bad days, it takes an hour of rocking and walking and bouncing and patting and hairpulling to get him to sleep. When you account for 2 daytime naps, bedtime, then 3-5 night wakings (thankfully, many of those wakings are before midnight), I spend around 6 hours every day helping him get to sleep. This must stop. If he can learn to fall asleep on his own, I will call it Nirvana, even if he does still need a middle-of-the-night feeding.

This inability to fall asleep on his own is a combination of his preference (what baby wouldn't want to cozy into Mommy to fall to sleep?) and my desire to be with him as much as possible. Frankly, he is irresistible when sleeping. I could sit and stare at him for hours, sleeping in my arms. But as nice at that was in the first few months of his life (and admittedly still is), it isn't very practical. I need to be able to get a few things done while he sleeps. And having to put him to sleep each time is an exercise in insanity.

Besides, I have too many hours inside my own head when sitting in a dark room, rocking my reluctant sleeper. My brain has travelled avenues of grief in those hours that I thought I had gently put behind me. Sleep deprivation + darkness + baby in my arms = too many thoughts of the baby who isn't here. Those thoughts just don't feel very healthy.

So, next week look for new photos of our road trip and tales of a Fer*berizing Mommy.

So. Tired.

BB teething + his sinus cold = I am going to die from sleep deprivation.

I fell asleep during the extraction portion of my facial today. Yes, the part where the esthetician digs blemishes out of my skin with sharp metal objects.

I intend to invite Dr. Fer*ber into our home in 10 days (after our weekend away). Good idea or not? Anyone have experience with the good Doctor? All I know is that Pant*ly isn't getting us anywhere, fast.

Talk amoungst yourselves. I'm going to sleep.