Six weeks and six days

Wow. I thought that pregnancy tiredness was bad, but this is something else. Almost impossible to describe. In fact, I probably have been as tired as this before, but never before have I had to function through the tiredness for so long without giving in to it. Let alone been completely responsible for the survival of another human being. However, the thing that nobody can really explain to you before you've had your baby is that you CAN function through the tiredness, you can find reserves of energy you never knew you had, just from looking at the helpless little person who's forcing you to get up at ridiculous hours and intervals around the clock. Although I sometimes get angry and desperate and tearful, the main emotion I feel when Alice is crying and I look at her red scrunched up screaming face is pity for her. I just want to stop her pain, at any cost.

She had her orthodontic plate fitted on Monday, and although she seemed ok with it at first, it began to bother her a bit more once we got home, especially once we tried to feed her with it in. I could understand her distress, having worn the dreaded retainer myself in my teens which is basically the same thing. With the crucial difference that we couldn't explain to her what was going on in her mouth and how best she could adapt to it. So she was having trouble negotiating the reduced space for the teat and her tongue, and would get frustrated and tired before finishing her feed. Monday night was thus utterly miserable for all of us, as I had to give her a bottle almost every hour, she was taking so little - and crying pitifully in between as she realised that the alien thing in her mouth wasn't going away. (Sadly she is too young to be consoled by the fact that Mr Cash the orthodontist had made the plate using fetching pink sparkly plastic.) To make things worse, Matt has had flu so I've been on solo baby duty since Sunday.

Fortunately, Alice now seems to have decided that getting her full quota of milk overrides all other concerns and she's damned if she's going to let a bit of plastic and wire get in the way. I'm constantly amazed how adaptable she is. Far more so than me, anyway.

(Weight as of yesterday: 8lb 4oz, nearly 4lb heavier than at birth. Rocketing up towards the 9th percentile!)

Six weeks

To celebrate Alice reaching the grand old age of six weeks, here are:

Six Things I Wish I'd Packed In My Hospital Bag:
1) more sanitary pads (oh so many more)
2) more baby clothes (babies be MESSY)
3) more towels (hospital towels are tiny and unforgivingly WHITE)
4) nice teabags (like on the Heart of Gold in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the hospital vending machine produced a liquid almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea)
5) lip balm (actually I had this but it was VITAL during labour so worth emphasising)
6) strong liquor (ok I wouldn't have been allowed it but Rescue Remedy just wasn't cutting it when it came to dulling the sheer shock of delivering a baby)

and I wish I'd left out:
1) books (couldn't concentrate)
2) carefully chosen 'birth' CDs (music last thing on mind during labour)

Six Pieces of Advice:
1) don't bother 'getting as much rest as you can before the baby arrives' - it's not like we can store up sleep like water in a camel's hump
2) don't buy any toys for the baby - he or she will be drowning in them from other people and won't appreciate them for months yet anyway
3) stock up your freezer with meals that require no further preparation, or ensure people bring you food - cooking will be the last thing you feel like doing
4) don't read baby 'bibles' etc if you can possibly stop yourself
5) go with the baby's flow at all times
6) ignore everyone else's advice, including the above :)

Six Things I Know About Alice:
1) she cries most between 7am - 10am (when I want to get washed and eat breakfast) and 7pm - 10pm (when I want to eat dinner and go to bed)
2) her favourite things to look at are bright lights and people's faces, in that order
3) she prefers hip hop and classical to indie
4) she finds her own hiccups quite entertaining
5) she will cry herself into a frenzy before admitting she's tired and just going to sleep
6) every day she will do something that makes me realise I don't know her at all

-

Five weeks and five days

Alice took her trip to the clinic at Guys totally in her stride, which is more than can be said for me I fear. She was as good as gold all the way there and while being poked and prodded by the cleft surgeon and the orthodontist, although she did squirm a bit when the latter took a mould of her mouth and who can blame her? She now has 'strapping' on her lip - a ridiculously low-tech but fiddly contraption made from sticky tape and a rubber band which will help get her muscles ready for the first operation (scheduled for April 5th). She'll also have a plate inside her mouth which will be fitted next week (so *another* trip to London.)

It all makes her 'problem' seem much more real, somehow, now the medical and surgical teams are so visibly involved. And signing the consent form for the surgery was horrible - even though it's a minor procedure I still looked at the list of possible risks and thought: how can I do this to my baby? I know it's all for the best, but part of me wishes I could keep her safe at home just the way she is, instead of having to interact with the medical establishment and the big bad world in general.

Alice in her new facial attire:

Five weeks and three days

Tough night and day with Alice. She's been feeding at totally random intervals, some as short as an hour, and my failure to anticipate this makes me feel like a horrible mother as I faff about getting the feeds ready while she screams inconsolably. She's had a few quite peaceful naps but when she's awake she's crying; there's no in between where she's awake and happy.

Didn't help that when I got to the checkout in Sainsbury's with her in the baby carrier this morning the cashier said 'doesn't your baby need a hat?' Instead of telling her to mind her own business I just pointed out that she had a hat, it was in the basket and I would be putting it on when we got outside. Undeterred, she then moved on to speculate that the suit Alice was wearing wasn't warm enough. I wonder if people realise the damage they do with comments like this. I knew that Alice was perfectly cosy and managed to stay calm by telling myself (and the cashier) this repeatedly, but it would take a very confident mother to shrug off other people's opinions altogether. And I don't think I'm that very confident mother...

Tomorrow we have to to take the train up to Guys in London so Alice can be assessed before her lip surgery in April. It's the longest/furthest trip we've done with her - I just pray she isn't in the same frame of mind as today, because I don't fancy dealing with all this in public and in a totally strange environment.

Five weeks and two days

Ok, I need to amend what I wrote five days ago, I think. I just started reading What Mothers Do by Naomi Stadlen, which in its very first chapter addresses the issue of there being nothing to say about looking after babies:

a mother who has little to relate usually assumes that this is because there really is very little worth telling ... Our language can be very clear and precise about anything practical. A person who has 'tidied up' has both the word and a tidy area to show for it. It is much harder to find a word that describes the giving-up-things mode of attention a mother is giving to her baby.

At first I thought it was just coincidence that made me reach for that particular book (which I borrowed from the library before Alice was even born). But I wonder whether subconsciously I was uncomfortable about the 'motherhood is boring' trope that I'd flippantly evoked in the last post, and wanted something to counter my own words. Because deep down I know that what I do for Alice is NOT trivial and menial. It's just that it's hard to externalise the things that now feel important, because the language of the public world doesn't fit the achievements of the domestic one.

In other words, there might not be a conspiracy of silence as such, but a silence is imposed anyway through not having the right words.

One month and one day

Alice was a month old yesterday, still feeding brilliantly and gaining weight which is about all she's supposed to achieve at the moment. She also spends more time awake, can focus on our faces for longer, and may have started awarding her first proper smiles (although wind is still a possibility).

I'm now beginning to understand why both celebrities and literary types have the urge to churn out baby books, but also why there are very few epic works about caring for newborns. One the one hand I do want to talk about her endlessly, and could no doubt fill pages about her biscuity baby smell, the changing shape of her eyes, the amount her hair has grown, the way she stretches her arms... but on the other hand there is pretty much nothing transcendent or miraculous or poetic about the daily tasks which fill up the majority of my hours. Maybe there's not some misogynist conspiracy of silence about motherhood after all; it's just that there isn't anything worth saying about the two fundamentals - feeding one end and wiping the other. However loving and amazed and transformed you feel towards the object of these attentions, it's still basically just feeding and wiping, feeding and wiping, feeding and wiping. And nobody needs to read about that.

(Having said that, my god, it's astonishing how many foodstuffs suddenly become anathema when you're exposed to a variegated menu of baby shit all day: peanut butter, hummous, mustard... all deeply unappetising until further notice.)

Photos

Photos of Alice are here.

Two weeks and four days

Well, Alice is now 18 days old, and since her dad went back to work it definitely feels like the 'babymoon' is over. I'm still smitten with her, but not so much with night feeds (especially when she's going through a phase of eating every two hours) or with the endless, mindless round of preparing formula and washing, sterilising, warming and cooling bottles and accessories.

I thought I was prepared for the consequences of her cleft, but now I realise that I was subconsciously expecting it to be like mine - a narrow cleft on one side of her lip, not the wide gap going through both lip and palate that she actually has. Aesthetically it didn't take long to get used to and she looks absolutely beautiful anyway, but I must admit to being deeply disappointed that I can't breastfeed her normally. I am expressing milk but we have to top her up with formula, something I never thought I would have to do. The ridiculous palaver of bottle-feeding doesn't help - I can't just stick her on a boob when she seems hungry, so it's a constant struggle to stay one step ahead with preparing feeds.

But she feeds very well (if a bit messily) from her squeezy bottle and at this point her cleft really doesn't make her different from any other baby, just more time-consuming. I don't know what the future will bring though, except that I'm already dreading the day we go for her lip surgery and her adorable face changes forever - even though I know I'll love her new smile just as much.