Flotsam
Operating Without a License.
I was delighted to see that Simone managed to eke out a TWELFTH Baby of the Week victory—I believe that’s a record. I thought the Lindbergh baby might pull in a large sympathy vote, but happily not. He’s had his fifteen minutes. I also noticed that none of you made any comments about Jennifer Grey being in the corner, probably because your senses of humor are more refined than my own.
On Tuesday, I managed to subject my defenseless spawn to the equivalent of a Scandinavian hot-and-cold bathing ritual, thereby securing my place in history as THE VERY BEST AND MOST COMPETENT PARENT EVER. I had taken Simone to the patio of a nearby restaurant, where we were joined by my brother, his roommate, and his friend the Medical Examiner. We had a little lunch and a little wine, and as we were contemplating the dessert menu some 90 minutes later, it occurred to me that I might be baking my only child. It was wickedly hot, and though we were in the shade and Simone was protected by the double canopies of her car seat and stroller, the sight of the word “brulee” made me suddenly uneasy and I asked the Medical Examiner for her medical opinion. The Medical Examiner asked whether Simone felt sweaty, and I couldn’t tell, but it seemed like maybe she did, a little, and within moments I was gathering up my things, casting a rueful glance at the place on the table where a bottle of Moscato d’Asti would shortly appear, and galloping toward home, pushing the stroller ahead of me. Simone, it should be noted, was sleeping peacefully in the shade of her carriage, but I wasn’t going to let a little thing like her appearance deter me from my panic.
Once home I stripped the baby naked and swabbed her with a cold washcloth (which she deeply resented), and then I turned on a fan, slapped the air-conditioner into high gear, and hunkered down in the chair next to the vent, feeding my daughter a bottle of cold milk.
I am discovering, as I write this, that it is difficult to type whilst hanging one’s head in shame.
Some time later I looked at Simone more closely and saw that her hands were the color of freshly-picked blueberries. My first thought, naturally, was OH MY GOD SHE’S NOT GETTING ENOUGH OXYGEN.
(I know. Like I said, BEST AND MOST COMPETENT PARENT EVER!)
Sooner or later, though, my brain cell kicked in and I realized that the blue color, along with the fact that her hands and feet could have been used to ice tea, meant that she was cold. Once again, I sprang into action, this time smacking the air conditioner off, dressing Simone in a velour sleeper, wrapping her now shivering body in a blanket, and crawling under the bedcovers with my (crying) baby clamped to my chest. Eventually she stopped mewling and fell asleep, her extremities slowly regaining their flesh tone, and I lay there wondering how long it would be before child services showed up to wrest her from my arms, perhaps turning at the door to slap me hard across the face. With a pistol.
The People’s Choice.
It never fails to amaze me, the glaringly obvious things one manages to overlook until they are pointed out by others. It honestly didn’t occur to me that I could, for instance, feed Simone pumped bottles most of the time and nurse only occasionally. Or continue with the nipple shield even though Simone is past her due date, the date by which the lactation consultants stressed that she should no longer be using it. I’m not sure where I got the idea that I had to either breastfeed nearly all feedings or give up the boob entirely; perhaps the sleep deprivation is finally catching up with me. I have ordered some Domperidone, and until it gets here I am feeding bottles of pumped or frozen milk, letting Simone nurse once in a while, just for kicks. If she gets shrieky, I do not persist.
It has made a vast difference in my productivity—whereas before I was able to get nothing done save the endless roundel of feed the baby/change the baby, now I am able to accomplish one non-baby-related item each day! You can check my math, but I am pretty sure that is an increase. My mood has improved as well (y=1/x, where y= favorable mood and x=screaming baby), so when the Domperidone arrives and I take another shot at nursing, I will be better able to handle a bit of infant resistance.
Simone has been the unfortunate recipient of some stripe of virus, and last night after quite a lot of diaper-related unpleasantness, a fever, and the saddest, wailiest baby cry, I called the pediatrician to see whether I could give Simone a jigger of infant Tylenol and was taken aback when the nurse asked me to bring my daughter into the emergency room. You know, where the sick people go. For emergencies.
At the hospital, the doctor wanted to know Simone’s medical history, and as I answered the questions he kept looking up and gaping at me in disbelief. I started to feel a little embarrassed, like I was being overdramatic, or as if he might wonder whether I had Munchausen by Proxy—two episodes of acute renal failure? How long was she on the intrajugular heparin drip? I had responded to his initial “Does she have any health problems?” with “No,” incidentally. (Ok, so I forgot about the reflux. And the oxygen).
Anyway, Simone’s electrolytes were fine, her fever wasn’t worrisomely high, and today she seems much better. In fact, she appears to be learning how to smile—oh, she has smiled before, in her sleep and such, but suddenly this week she seems able to focus on our faces, and when I collect her from her crib in the morning, she seems happy to see me, and now, now, when I waggle Gunther the Giraffe—a favorite rattle—in front of her, she will sometimes smile, revealing a previously invisible dimple in her right cheek. Watching her suddenly discover the world and find it delightful is the best part of having a baby so far.
It has been suggested, by some, that there is something…fishy about Simone’s eleven consecutive Baby of the Week wins. (I know! I am just as surprised as you are). I would hate to see my baby’s good name tarnished, so for this round I am opening up the voting. I look forward to showing the naysayers that my daughter has earned her victories by dint of hard work—fat little cheeks and starfish fingers don’t grow themselves, you know. To prevent Simone from gaining an unfair advantage due to her notoriety, the other contestants are all famous babies in their own right.
Voting ends tomorrow morning at 9am, CST.
Nipples, Nipples Everywhere and Not a Drop to Drink.
When I was pregnant with Simone and her brother, I had two strong feelings about breastfeeding. One was that I really wanted it to work, and the second was that I would not feel guilty if it didn’t.
And then I gave birth fifteen weeks early. Providing food was one of the few concrete things I could do for my daughter, and I asked for a breast pump immediately after surgery. When I was wheeled to the NICU the next day, I proudly clutched two specimen containers each containing a teaspoon of milk. I was like the three wisemen, with the addition of a morphine pump and postpartum swelling. Myrrh schmyrrh—I come bearing colostrum! Take me to the child!
Even if you know better, it is hard not to feel guilty after ejecting a baby who weighs substantially less than your own liver. I felt that motherhood and I had gotten off on the wrong foot, and while I may have been laissez-faire about breastfeeding before Ames died, I was now determined to succeed. After all, I’d ended up with only half the babies I had expected. Surely “I’ll try” for two babies becomes “I will” with only one. Breast milk is important for preemies, both for the immunities it provides and because it reduces the risk of Necrotizing Enterocolitis. So for the next three months, I pumped, at the hospital and at home, filling my freezer with bags of milk arranged in neat rows by date.
Two months into her NICU stay, Simone was cleared to breastfeed, and once given the opportunity she lurched toward my chest and took it with gusto. Her mouth was still too small to latch effectively, so we used a nipple shield, and within a week she was taking full feedings from my very own bosom. Many premature infants have trouble learning to breastfeed, but my daughter has always been single-minded in her pursuit of food, and we became a kind of NICU sideshow that nurses and lactation consultants would travel hallways to see: the incredible nursing preemie!
And then, a month later, we brought that preemie home.
At first things were fine and then, abrubtly, they weren’t: my supply took a nosedive, and during feedings Simone began sobbing in frustration until we were both in tears, windmilling her arms and sometimes screaming until she couldn’t breathe. The nipple shield was no longer necessary, but any attempts to wean her from it were met with the rankest scorn.
I have been hesitant to post about this, because nothing brings out the “ire” in “Internet” like the subject of breastfeeding, but I just spent 70 minutes nursing, sixty of them punctuated by shrieks and deranged thrashing, mostly Simone’s. There was milk to be had—I could express it manually—but she was unimpressed, and eventually I gave her a small bottle I’d pumped this morning. She gulped it clean in ten minutes, sighing quietly between sucks, and I thought to myself: What am I doing? Why am I doing this to us?
At the risk of sounding like a woman defending her abusive husband, allow me to tell you that sometimes Simone and I have perfectly lovely feedings, wherein she nurses happily and neither cries nor hits me. But these are inevitably followed by one that traumatizes the both of us, and as much as I used to enjoy breastfeeding, now I am coming to dread it, not knowing which baby—the content, sighing model, or the version whose head spins at the mere suggestion of areola—I will get. And to be fair, Simone will occasionally scream just as loudly during a bottle feeding as she does at the breast.
Some of the screaming is caused by how contrary she is when hungry, but her anger at breastfeeding, I suspect, stems from both my low supply and the fact that after a month of three pediatrician-mandated bottles a day, she has cottoned on to the fact that with a bottle, the work to food ratio is much lower. I am not saying that bottles are evil, mind you. I like bottles. I doubt I would be adjusting to life with a baby so swimmingly were it not possible for Scott to handle the occasional feeding, so bottles are here to stay.
It is common to experience a decrease in supply around the three to four month mark, and mine coincided with the reappearance of my old nemesis, Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome. One symptom was an upward creeping of the numbers on the scale, numbers which had remained steady since the return of my Lady Cycle eight weeks postpartum. The impetus for my recent return to the world of Points(tm) was more than my desire to lose weight, it was also conversations with a nurse and lactation consultant, both of whom suggested that skipping breakfast and subsisting on tea and pasta might be affecting my milk production, and both of whom thought the WeightWatchers plan for nursing mothers was an excellent one. And things have improved since two weeks ago. But they haven’t improved enough. I’ve considered exclusively pumping, because I can pump, prepare a bottle, and administer it in less time than it takes me to nurse. But I don’t know if I’m ready to give up on breastfeeding.
And then there’s the guilt. One of the lactation consultant’s suggestions was that I pump after every nursing session and then pump whenever Simone gets a bottle.
Woman, I thought to myself as I gaped at her, you have got to be kidding.
As it is, I have less than 90 minutes between feedings in which to go to the bathroom, eat, and write—forget the things I have let slip through the cracks, like bill-paying, laundry, and personal hygiene. You are high if you think I am going to pump after every breastfeeding session and then ruin my only four-hour stretch of sleep by waking when Scott gives Simone the midnight bottle. I get the distinct impression from breastfeeding advocates that they think I ought to lock myself in a room with only my baby, a hand-whittled nursing stool, and a tube of organic lanolin, not emerging until I have established exclusive, nipple-shield-free breastfeeding, but I am finding that as much as I want this to work, I am only willing to do so much. I take fenugreek. I pump twice a day, and I nurse for four or five feedings, each over an hour long. It’s not the path of least resistance, but it is the path of less resistance, and part of me feels like I should be trying harder. But the other part of me just wants less screaming and more time playing Crazy Arms, you know?
I should mention that as I type this Simone is sleeping against my chest in her sling looking cute as a goat. Which makes me think “Aww, never mind, it’s not so bad!” but I AM POSTING ANYWAY because I know this is infant trickery on her part, much like the way she is silent and angelic as soon as a childless guest enters the house in order to encourage the perpetuation of her tiny species. I’m on to you, baby.
Dear Simone,
I find it hard to believe, but Sunday you were four months old. Your due date, the day on which your developmental clock officially began ticking, was only three weeks ago. When strangers see you, they invariably comment upon your size: “Oh!” they exclaim, “A brand new baby!”
I am never sure how to respond. What, this old thing? We’ve had her for ages.
You like to dance. It’s a lazy sort of dancing that doesn’t involve any movement on your part; instead you curl on my chest while I bob around and sing. I recently made us a playlist (what the kids used to call a “mix tape”) with a little bit of everything on it—some Petula Clark, some Stevie Wonder. Mr. Wonder was premature himself, you know. Preemies can get down just as well as anyone else. Maybe better.
You like having the bottoms of your feet rubbed. You like it when your father or I play the very sophisticated game “Crazy Arms,” in which we waggle your arms about in an educational fashion. Other things you like include milk, Madame Penguin, and nudity (your own).
Before we brought you home from the hospital, I looked at swings. I had heard that babies are fond of them, but when I saw how big they were, and mentally placed one in our small apartment, I decided it was an unnecessary extravagance. Besides, I was pretty sure I would never want to put you down. Probably I would just hold you all day and evening, in my arms or in your sling. I would be like a calm, naturally maternal native woman, only with nicer shoes.
I do love to hold you, and you do love your sling, falling asleep as if it has been soaked in chloroform. But sometimes I need to use the stove, a no-no with a baby on oxygen. Sometimes I need to pick up around the house, and all that bustling and bending is hard while wheeling a tank and wearing an infant with poor head control. And sometimes I need to do something extravagant, just for Milk Lady. Like pee.
My solution was to plop you in your vibrating chair. However you were not amenable to this plan, and in the mornings while I raced around the kitchen getting your medicines and both of our breakfasts ready, you would cry accusingly at me from your purring throne. Always, always you want to be held, an understandable preference to be sure, but there are limits, baby. And so I sent your father out yesterday with stern instructions not to return without a swing, and yesterday afternoon we put you in it and turned it on.
A single ray of sun slanted though the hole that had suddenly appeared in the ceiling above us, and somewhere, I could hear the gentle strains of a harp. You adore this swing, and right now while I type you are asleep in it, swaying gently next to me. Sometimes I just stare at you, unable to believe you are really here, and really mine. When I pluck you from your crib in the morning, I feel overwhelmed by my luck, and your sweetness.
Everyone says the time goes fast with children, and while I always assumed the years would skid by, I was surprised at how damnably short the hours are as well. There is never enough space in a day for all the things I want to do with you, and mostly I just manage the basics, and tell myself that tomorrow we will do more. But I never catch up, and you are already outgrowing your first clothes.
In a way it was easier before your due date. It was bonus time! You weren’t supposed to be here, yet. But now it’s official, the sand is pouring through the hourglass, and even your swing reminds me as it sways back and forth: tick, tock, tick, tock.
Every minute I spend with you is a good one, and there will never be enough of them.
Love,
Your Mama
Watchword.
I am sitting here typing items into the WeightWatchers point calculator and emitting the occasional squeak or howl of indignation. To our neighbors I would imagine it sounds as though I have tossed a couple of vocal pygmy marmosets into a blender for an evening snack. Which I would never do, of course—not merely out of compassion, but also because DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY POINTS ARE IN A PYGMY MARMOSET?
Yes. I am back on WeightWatchers, and the first few days are just as brutal as I remembered, even with the extra points they give me for breastfeeding. And that reminds me—what do you do if you are only breastfeeding five times a day? They gave me 10 extra points, which is a full half of my pre-nursing points allowance. Not that I am complaining, mind you (I still have trouble fitting in the necessities, like wine), but there is no point in being a little miserable and not losing weight when I could either become thinner by being a bit more forlorn or, alternatively, stay fat and happy.
Which isn’t entirely accurate, because if I were happy at this weight I wouldn’t have had a godforsaken salad as part of my dinner this evening. I don’t like being embarrassed when I catch a glimpse of myself in a store mirror, or cringing at pictures of me holding my daughter. And of course it is about more than weight—I felt much healthier the last time I tried this whole exercise and sensible eating gig, and I think if I am going to be nursing and wrangling an infant on little sleep, I ought to take better care of my body. However dispiriting the first few days of Weight Watchers have been, they have effectively increased my consumption of fruits and vegetables 100% 500% from “the occasional garnish” to “five servings a day.”
It is hard, though, especially when you are watching a certain baby—I won’t name names—loll on your lap in a satisfied stupor, milk dripping into the folds of her neck. Breastmilk has 20 calories per ounce, so according to my calculations, this baby (female, 7 pounds, under 5’1”, mostly sedentary) must be exceeding her daily target. Of course concentric rolls of thigh look better on her than they would on me.
Rolls. Now I am thinking about rolls. Dinner rolls shining with butter.
It may be time for bed.
Retournee.
You may have noticed that I took a wee hiatus. My dear mother was visiting from Switzerland–not to see me, you understand, but rather to hold a certain baby for the first time. She brought a metric ton of baby clothes purchased on her recent vacation in France. She can just drive there for the weekend, you know. To France. The only place I can drive for the weekend is Iowa, or Wisconsin, or maybe a Dakota. There are insufficient wine caves in the Dakotas.
Anyway, she came bearing tiny sweaters and sundresses and I must say, French babies must be exceptionally well-dressed, because these baby clothes were much more attractive than anything I have seen stateside. But then I suppose French babies spend a lot of time in chic cafes smoking miniaturized Gauloises, so they need a more sophisticated wardrobe than their American contemporaries.
It was a lovely week. I went out to eat, in restaurants. My mother brought me little glasses of champagne while I fed Simone. Milk Lady got to take a bath and Nani got to hold the baby.
I mentioned to my mother that I know of a nice couple looking for an au pair–no pay, more of an internship–but she was uninterested. And so Switzerland gets her back, which hardly seems fair. They had their chance, and they HIT HER WITH A CAR.
I got a present too. Guess what it was?
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