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!)