Bliss of Life

We’ve hunkered down for the holidays.  Ben’s been off since he got back from L.A. on the 23rd and he doesn’t have to go back until the 5th.  A girl and a baby can get spoiled having the Pappa of the house around all day.  It’s been so fantastic.  This is the most amount of time we’ve been able to spend together as a family since Lily was born.

Having him around has allowed me to really recharge.  I’m finally rested enough to just feel tired, which is about half a solar system away from the exhausted, sleep deprived, autopilot crazy woman that I felt I had become.  Words cannot convey the difference.  Having Ben around has been part of the reason for all my recent rest, but the main reason I’m sleeping better is because I took wheat and dairy out of my diet.  Apparently, it was bothering Lily’s tummy.  She seemed fine during the day, but at night she wasn’t able to make it though a sleep cycle (babies sleep cycles are 45 minutes) without crying out in pain and needing to be bounced in the hammock or on the ball.  We kept thinking that it was teething, which she doing, but that was only a small part of the sleep disruptions.

Now that I changed my diet, Lily can sleep up to four hour stretches again without making a peep.  Lately, she’s just been sleeping three hour stretches before waking up for a feeding.  One night she slept two four hour stretches in a row.  It was glorious!

She is still waking up to play in the middle of the night but only for about 30 to 45 minutes, which I really believe is more of a developmental issue than a sleep one.  It happens a lot when babies start working on crawling and standing.

Speaking of standing… She pulled herself up to standing today from crawling.  She still doesn’t know how to get into a sitting position on her own, so up to now, every time she stood up she was either in my lap or we positioned her in front of something that she could reach and pull herself up on.  But today, while we were at Daily Juice, she crawled right over to the little Moroccan table they have in their private room and worked herself up to a standing position.  She did it twice.   It took her a few minutes to stand up the first time, but by the second time she had most of the process worked out.

It’s all over now.

This Christmas is different.  We have Lily.  And really, what other gift is there to want when you are blessed with a healthy baby. And we are so, so blessed.

But my mind and my heart remember what, or rather, who is not with us this year.  The mind can’t help itself.  Thankfully, the heart just wants to find a path through the mental maze so it can love.

We love you Alice, and we miss you.

Dad, I pray that you have found some peace.

Merry Christmas

Maybe it’s the holiday season…  (nah)

Maybe it’s the wiggly baby I have to keep an eye and a hand on while I type…  (perhaps)

Maybe it’s because I have a spacey, breastfeeding brain…  (nah)

Maybe it’s sleep deprivation…  (could be)

Maybe it’s just because I’m rusty at writing… (this is true)

But I have overlooked so many mistakes in my blog posts recently.

Today I woke up to find a fever-less, snot-free baby smiling back at me!

AND my husband was able to get the early flight home!

Now, if I can get well by tomorrow, we’ll be set for a merry Christmas.

It’s three days before Christmas.

Ben left for L.A. today.

Lily and I woke up sick.

My baby is sick.

It’s her first Christmas.

First fever and cold.

Bah humbug.

Up to now, when I take Lily out in public I’ve only received sweet oohs and aahs from onlookers.  Today, while I  at sat at a wobbly table in an over stuffed room with saltillo tile floors that bounced the sound coming from two flat screen televisions blaring both ESPN and ESPN2 at 1:30 in the afternoon, trying to wolf down my first meal of the day with a cranky Bean in my lap, all that changed. It was my fault mostly.  I just wasn’t ready to go home after our morning outing.

Lily was fussy.  She had fallen asleep in the car on the way to the restaurant.  Usually, she wakes up after a 40 minute nap ready to face the day, but not on this day.  The longer we sat there the harder it became to appease her.  At the time we got our meals, the table next to us was deciding on their order, and Lily was telling me that she was tired. She wanted to nurse, and then she didn’t.  She wanted my plate, her pappa’s paper napkin, his water glass–anything we wouldn’t give her. She worked herself up to a high-pitched protest once.  A woman at the adjacent table rolled her eyes to her friend and placed her hands over her ears as she read the menu.  I tried nursing Lily in the sling and that worked for about three minutes.  Then she protested again.  I turned my head to look at the woman.  She and her friends shook their heads and had the exasperated look that some childless people like to use to say, why did they bring a baby to a restaurant.  (Actually, it’s a 24-hour diner.)  She seemed relieved when I stood up to take Lily out of the room.  I looked at her as I walked by.  She caught my gaze and smiled a big gracious smile.  I could have kept walking or even apologized for interrupting her meal.  But where was that smile when I was trying to calm my baby?  So instead I said, “Babies cry,”  and I watched the smile fall right off her face.  Then I got to feel about as mature as a ten year old.

Yesterday Bean woke up from her morning nap looking like this.

There was no taming that hair.

I wish I had video.  She is saying, “Hi” after we say it, not all the time, but she did it about three times this evening.  I hope we’ll have video soon.

Ben is skeptical that she’s really saying, hi.    He does think she’s saying something, and he has for awhile now.  A few weeks ago he told me that when he is trying to put her sleep and she’s crying and she happens to see me across the room, she makes the sound “Amma.”  I noticed her saying it tonight for the first time, and it brought me to tears.  She wanted to nurse, and I was trying to finish this entry.  Ben scooped her up when she started crying, and she looked right at me and made the sound “Amma.”  It’s pretty close to mamma, but I haven’t been trying to get to say mamma, so who knows.

Also, she had her six month check up Friday.  Never mind that she will be seven months in five days.  (It’s been that kind of month.)  We learned that both Lily’s top and bottom gums are swollen, and that it doesn’t look like any teeth are going to cut through anytime soon.  Darn!  Also, Lily has grown half an inch in nearly three months and she gained about 8 ounces.  That puts her in the 50th percentile for height and 15th percentile for weight.  Her physical growth has slowed, but obviously, Lily  has her own priorities about what she needs to grow right now.

Ben says that her hair is in the 95th percentile!

The Bean is flying through milestones so freaking fast.  Rolling?  Check.  She did that before she was 4 months old.  Crawling?  Check.  She knocked that one out of the park at 5.5 months.  Then last Wednesday she started to take steps to adjust her balance when we held her in a standing position.  Last night she pulled herself up to standing when we were in the bathtub.   I figured that it was easier for her in the tub because her body weight was lighter in the water, but then today she did it again on the play gym.  She’s not even 6. 5 months yet.  Granted, she was sitting in my lap because she is too short to reach the top of the play gym if she’s sitting on the floor.  But she did it on her own, no coaxing or coaching on our part.

And speaking of sitting…  Sitting is one milestone she could care less about.  Sitting means she isn’t moving.  Why on earth would she not want to be moving.  Sheesh!

Everything just seems to be happening so very fast.  Time felt like it ceased to exist during the last month of my pregnancy and the first three months of her life.  Now time whizzes by at lightning speed.  The hard part is that Lily so often just wants to be only and always with me.  It’s really sweet, but this me didn’t find time to each lunch, hasn’t had more than three hours of sleep the night before (they weren’t even three consecutive hours), and desperately needs coffee to make it through half the morning but won’t get any because it’s time for Lily’s nap.

Sometimes I feel like I’ve become so depleted.  As if I don’t have anything but a sleep deprived version of myself to give.  It doesn’t matter.  Tired or not, she’s moving through milestones.  I may be exhausted, but when I see this…

inching right for me at top speed.  The president of the United States and the Queen of England can’t feel as important as I do at that moment.  And I know that I’m going to look away one day, just for a second, and and she’s going to be asking to borrow the car or telling me that my hair is out of style, along with everything in my closet.  And at that moment I would love, love, love to have her want to be with me and only me for just a hour of her time.  But it doesn’t always work that way.  So I’ll count this time as a gift, a blessing.  Maybe if I hold her even closer every time she needs me it will become a pattern, and that pattern will be a seed in our relationship that can blossom along with her over the years.