Mama and Papa are out of control

The cutesy nicknames for G are getting out of control. I think that happens with anyone you adore-the nicknames morph as your relationship grows. Sean and I went through many iterations for about a year, before I settled on his endearing nickname, and he on mine. So, for 9+ years, we have been had one each. It truly is a wonder than Gillian has any idea what her real name is (and she will turn her head when she hears "Gillian", so thankfully, we somehow have gotten her REAL name across). Here are a few of her multitudes of nicknames (there are many more derivatives of the ridiculous, below, but I spared you...you get the point).

Me: Gilly, Gillybean, Monkey, Boo, Monkey-butt, Monk, Monkitha, Monkuh-lunka, Mummah, Punka, Pumpkin (or Pumpkin Pie), Bebuh Gillahbuh, Bu-ba, Munkuh-lunka-punka, Punkuh-lunkitha, Punk, Chunk, Gilly-pot-pie, Tweety pie, Sweet pea, Darlin', Honey

Sean: Goo, Goo-goo, Pookie, Pooka-dooka, Bebuh Gillybean, Sweet baby, Tweety, Honey, Sweetie, Pretty (or Pretty Baby, as in "Hi, Pretty!")

Hopefully, we won't give her a complex, and maybe, we'll pick a few and stick with them. It's just terribly easy to go with the nonsense word stuff...and when singing her nonsense songs, new little names emerge. What can we say? We're just silly.

Things my 6+ month old has taught me (an incomplete list)

Well, she's really 9+ months old...and 7 months adjusted age, but I truly hate that qualification, so we'll just say she's 7 months old like we do every time someone asks.

At any rate, I was just thinking of all the many things they never tell you about babies, and thought I would enlighten you with my parental discoveries (which may or may not be the same as your parental discoveries-either way, please share...I would love to expand my list):

1) There is no guarantee about anything regarding babies: not your pregnancy (just because your mom/sister/grandma had an easy pregnancy doesn't mean you will, or vice versa); not your delivery (surely you know how my grand birth plans were burning rubble by the time G was delivered); not the temperament of your baby (colic, reflux, sunny, easy?? doesn't matter what kind of baby you or your partner were); not the rate at which your baby reaches her developmental milestones (one in our group could crawl before she could sit up on her own); and surely not her inclinations (how many very girly girls came out of not-so girly moms, or vice versa??).
2) After the initial love-in, get out. Baby will survive for a few hours without you, and you most certainly will feel relieved and more bouyant every now and then with a few hours away from her. Go on dates (even if they're during naptime!). Keep the intimacy of your marriage. Make time for your partner. Otherwise your home-root starts to shrivel from neglect, and no one will thrive.
3) Very young babies are boring, but you are so in awe of them that you don't notice. Until they start doing stuff. Then you realize how boring they were before (especially if you have DVDs full of 10 minute recording sessions of the baby sleeping).
4) No, you're not crazy-tummy time sucks. For everyone. Baby will get on her stomach when she can stand it and not any sooner (I personally think the tummy time thing is overrated).
5) When you feel up to it enough (or lame or guilted enough to get off your behind) to go out with your girlfriends and leave baby at home with your partner, remember you can't drink like you use to: 1) more than likely your tolerance has bailed completely; 2) you are producing enough milk to flood a garden and need to drink a LOT more non-dehydrating fluids if you're drinking, like, oh, WATER; 3) if you don't do enough of #2, your milk production will crash and you will freak out over the next day or two; and 4) if you go out and drink like the old days, remember that you can't sleep it off like the old days, 'cause guess who will be waiting for you bright eyed and bushy tailed at 4 o'clock in the morning?
6) Baby socks generally don't stay on a very young baby's feet.
7) Super fussy babies might have reflux. Give Zantac a go if baby can't sleep well or eat well the first couple months. It changed our world (and the worlds of a few babies we know...).
8) Zipping, long-sleeved and footed onesies are a gift from God. Get at least 10 of them in every size.
9) Breastmilk poo is super runny and doesn't stink, and poo after they start eating solids is sticky or solid and doesn't smell as sweet. And yes, it is suppose to be that shade of mustard yellow (sometimes with little curds, even).
10) Blow outs happen. Particularly with disposable diapers, and in very compromising circumstances (in public, say...or all over your dress and all over baby in public).
11) Babies fart everywhere, without consideration of the propriety of the situation.
12) Cloth diapering is the way to go. Really.
13) You will never feel like you talk to the baby enough, read to her enough, teach her enough, get her out enough, or expose her to enough. If you are still functioning (as in taking a shower, brushing your hair, and feeding yourself...maybe even getting 6 hours of sleep a night) when she's 5 months old, rejoice, and forget about all the things you thought you should be doing. She will be fine. And so will you.
14) If you are unfortunate or stubborn enough to have to pump for your baby, there will be days when you feel like Elsie the Cow, and it will make you resent 1) your smirking, smart-assed partner who just has to say something sometimes when you sit down to pump and 2) your baby, for whom you want the entire earth (it's not really her fault you're a purist that thinks formula is powdered death in a can).
15) There will be some point (maybe several) where you will feel objectified by your infant. And you you will resent your fondling, impatient, sycophant baby who only loves you for your milk jugs (or so it sometimes feels).
16) Teething can last for months. And teething hurts everyone.
17) Baby likes to channel other creatures in her ever increasing vocal repetoire: a dolphin, a death monkey, a banshee, and sometimes, a babbling baby.
18) Babies babble/squeal everywhere-at home, at the grocery, in the car, and even in the middle of the homily at church in the dead quiet AT THE TOP OF THEIR LUNGS (which is cute most of the time, but still...and btw-shhsshing does nothing).
19) You can retain baby bubbles in weird places even though you are below your prepregnancy weight. Ask the little donut around my belly button.
20) You will lose a wig's worth of hair for every shower for a good six months beginning a few months after said baby is born. They tell me I won't go bald, but I am unconvinced.
21) Baby toys are overrated, and you can entertain your baby with household items just as easily (partially full pill bottles, tupperware, cell phones, etc.). In a related topic, cordless phones cause your otherwise angelic baby to act like an addicted, selfish freak. Overdub spastic breathing and "mine, Mine, MIne, MINe, MINE, MINE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
22) You should never EVER buy her (or keep) a toy that will grate on your nerves when you hear that little song for the 119th time in a single morning.
23) Even if you are a 6 foot 2 inch, 180 pound strapping man, your infant can give you a black eye weilding only a cordless phone, which she loves more than she can tell you. (see Sean, exhibit A)
24) Baby likes fake coughing. Not for any particular reason.
25) Babies make vice grips with their tiny little hands. Even if your skin is in decent shape in the "lack of sag" department, baby can always get a handful and squeeze. AND IT HURTS.
26) Of all the places G pinches me, the back of my arms (behind my biceps), my jugular, my septum and my eyelid/eye socket are the most painful.
27) Baby can get so excited about something, you think she might pass out from lack of oxygen (hyper breathing) or you might pass out from the decibel of screech she reaches during said excitement.
28) Babies are fully capable of moving at warp speeds to throw themselves like incompetant lemmings off of elevated surfaces in a split second as of 5 months old. You literally cannot turn away from them or risk the guilt of baby falling onto the hardwood floor. I know this. And inevitably they will fall, and they will get hurt, and you will feel helpless and incompetant for letting it happen.
29) Even needy cats don't want love enough to get their hair ripped out by an over-eager baby on an average day.
30) You can lead a baby to the table, but you can't make her eat. She will eat when she is good and ready and not one second before. If you try to feed her solids before she is ready, she will forever try to grab anything around her, pretending you're not there, and you will have to make her smile or laugh to get ger to eat anything. When she is really ready, even if it's at almost 7 months old (in lieu of the 4 to 6 months that is usually recommended), she will open her little mouth in anticipation of your organic, pureed delights. G was ready a week ago, at last.

And most importantly: Having a child and watching her grow is the most amazing, magical, fantastic thing on the planet. I am convinced God spaced out our youth, children, and grandchildren to remind us throughout our lives of how truly amazing life experience can be. Children remind us of how to be in awe, and I believe that is the key to staying youthful.

So, you take it a lot harder

There have been a few cases lately in the news that involve children being casualties of adult mental illness, immorality, amorality, or stupidity, or all of the aforementioned. Now as a parent, I am more scarred by these horror stories than I ever use to be. Take the international child porn ring that was broken up recently- over SEVEN HUNDRED disgusting excuses for human beings were arrested for buying, selling, and making that filth and over 30 children were rescued from their respective nightmares. I was physically ill thinking about what constituted the “severe sexual abuse” that these people so enjoyed watching or participating in. My heart breaks for what those children were subjected to and what their parents must be going through now…and I can’t imagine how many years of therapy their once completely innocent children will have to endure to become functional again. As I look at my precious, still pure-as-snow baby girl, I can’t imagine anyone hurting her that way, or looking at her and wanting to. It enrages me. Make no mistake-I wouldn’t hesitate taking someone out with those intentions for my child if such a situation arose. It is one of the incomprehensible things-that dark, festering ugliness-in this human life…how and why someone could choose or be reduced to indulging in it. My general thought about these people is that they are the worst kind of criminals. I don’t buy in to the “poor guys probably were abused as kids”, because there are plenty of us that were abused as kids that don’t go around robbing, beating, abusing, raping, murdering, or otherwise hurting other people (I won't get on my personal responsibility soap box, so I digress). In my mind, there is no excuse to justify the actions of these monsters. One day they will stand in judgment in front of God, but until then, I hope the karma police will take them to task.

And yet another pregnant woman who was murdered by the child’s father…a vibrant mother who had a loving family and a 9-month (gestational age) baby already completely viable outside the womb, both found dead. Or the father who somehow was only shot in the thigh while the rest of his family-his wife and three beautiful children-were fatally shot in their SUV off some remote highway. Besides being completely STUPID for thinking they would get away with it, how did murder seem like the only option for those fathers? Or this story, “HUDSON OAKS, Texas - A relative found the bodies of a 23-year-old woman and her four small daughters hanging in a closet in their mobile home Tuesday morning, all of them dead but an 8-month-old, who was taken to a hospital...” The mother hung them, all her babies…she went completely nuts, Andrea Yates style. When did life get so complicated for these people that their only choice was murdering their families? Or better yet-how did no one notice when mental illness started creeping in to the psyches of these people?

It just makes me sick and sad. How do people get to that place? How could they look at their children (or someone else’s) and wish them harm? I have only been at this for 9 months, but children are an investment, and they are hard work…and I can’t imagine snuffing out years of memories with them in a cloud of rage or incoherence, wasting months and years of the nurturing and loving, and cultivating those children.

Out there-in this beautiful and MAD world, the best we can do is to try and to shield our sweet girl from physical or emotional harm-having an ever watchful eye on her comings and goings, being vigilant when she is right in front of us, and risking being very unpopular with her when we have to make decisions that we think are in her best interest. G-we apologize in advance, but the never-ending barrage of these stories are why...

Newsflash

Folks, we have A TOOTH! Hallelujah and the three laudies-laudy, laudy, laudy!!!

Yesterday when my beloved husband took G to playgroup (which was in our backyard and hosted by Sarah and Elliot, who live 50 feet from us, but STILL, what a good husband he is!) so she could splash around in the pool with her buds, they discovered the tooth had finally crowned! And man, was crowing that tooth a lot like giving birth for our brave girl. For me, it's just relief that- 1) all that whining had an end result; 2) Gillian won't have her father's late-tooth-gettin' genes. I don't think we're out of the clear just yet. The tooth next to it is probably going to bust through in the next 4 or 5 days (if not sooner). We are armed with the teething ointment and Tylenol, so we'll all manage..maybe not comfortably, but we will.

Some other notable developmental things: G has started leaning forward when she is sitting and rocking like she wants to crawl-who knows when that will pan out, but she really wants to get stuff that is -of yet- out of her reach. She also gets mighty excited when the cat crosses her line of vision, and makes this little under her breath "thuhhh" (almost like whispering to kitty to come here) sound follows by "heh-heh-heh" (think inches from hyperventilating she is so excited), shrieking and leg jogging/bouncing (depending on whether I am holding her or if she's sitting). The cat, however, wants absolutely nothing to do with her, or her grabby, cat-dehairing, sticky little hands. It is seriously the highlight of G's day to get within two feet of the cat. Sean and I think the desire to play with the cat may single-handedly get her motivated enough to crawl. I guess we'll see. In the meantime, we have another tooth to birth. And just for the record, if there is anything cuter than a toothless grin, it's a "two lone bottom-teeth showing" grin.

G and Kitty:

Private Concert

G always gets the best seat in the house!

The Relaxing Dinner that Wasn't and Recently Pinchy

We just got home from our usual Friday-after-work-kindof-date-dinner. It was exhausting. And, almost comical...if you weren't us. It was the least pleasurable $35 I have ever spent in my whole life (well, maybe paying all those speeding tickets was less pleasurable, but you get the point). I remind you that our girl is in the midst of teething, and frankly it's our own fault to think we could sit down and comfortably unwind when she's in this state. I guess we had just hoped she would stop whining long enough to be enraptured by all the bustle of a busy restaurant with a window seat to observe everyone walking by outside. Not so! At first, it was good. She was smiley and happy to see me when I met her and her Papa at the restaurant (having gone straight from work). I was so looking forward to a nice margarita to unwind. We started with an immediate trip to the bathroom to change her pants. This she did not like. Not in a house, not with a mouse. Think "someone is stabbing me with scissors" crying when I put her on the change table. Suddenly, through all this teething business, she has started acting like we have kidnapped her, latched her to a backdoor surgical table, and intend to steal her organs to sell on the black market when we try to change her diaper. This shrieking-while-mom-is-standing right HERE crying only intensified when I stepped 2.5 feet away to wash my hands. No tears though, so that was all just for fun, a little preview of our dinner date.

We made our way back to the table where my eternal optimist of a husband had set up G's infant carrier/carseat on an upside down highchair, G squealing and laughing as if she didn't remember the theatrics she had just pulled in the bathroom. You see, we had had tremendous success with this as-now-unused seat last weekend at brunch after church, where G had literally slept most of the meal in her seat while we gleefully stuffed our faces two-handed* with Nonni and Grandaddy, and Andrea and Doug and had big kid conversations without the various mouth noises, silly faces, and constant attention we find ourselves lavishing on Little Miss G when she is awake and engaged in the meal (I realized tonight that this is really quite an onerous task-what we do every day-entertaining an infant when she becomes bored). Well, this week it didn't work. As soon as I put her in it, in hopes that lightening could in fact strike the same place twice, she proceeded to whine and snort, and cry and try to turn over in it, precariously hanging over the edge. This was already not exactly what I had hoped for.

Clearly, she was not having being out of my arms, where she writhed, squirmed, fussed, whined, pushed her legs against my stomach to make her legs perpendicular to my torso over and over and over (meanwhile, my arms are getting a workout fanning out to accommodate her vertical downward facing dog against my ribcage, which I did, Oh, at least 50 reps of in the one unfortunate hour we spent "eating"). Oh, she had her rays of sunshine, mostly in the form of laughing when we played one of our many suspenseful "gonna get you or surprise you with a funny sound or well-played jolt" games, and flirting with an 80-year-old man at the table behind me. I would sneak gulps of the lovely margarita with her over my shoulder making eyes at the older man, as I had already made the mistake of sitting her on the table in front of me, where she promptly channeled Sherman in his March to the Sea, laying waste to everything in her reach. Things that ended up on the floor: my silverware, my napkins, two of her toys that she was not interested in, a drink menu (oh, how I would have loved to peruse that a bit more), a regular menu, and a stack of coasters, and ALMOST my beloved Corona. All of this in one fell swoop of her dimpled arm. This just meant that I had to hold her suspended away from the table the entire meal. Sean cut my blackbean burger in half for me in hopes that I could eat with my right arm doing curls with her and her buckling vertical downward facing dog repetitions, which I managed alright until she kicked the whining up a notch to the point where I was sure even her 80-year old boyfriend was growing weary of her, hearing aid and all. Then I gave up on my one-handed efforts on freedom fries even, in lieu of standing and shushing and swaying our Malcontent. Sean, who had managed to down two beers and half his burger and fries felt pity and took her so that I could inhale more of my food.

This all was Unsatisfying. If I'm going to eat the equivalent of a pound of vegetable oil and transfats I WANT TO ENJOY IT. By this time, my fries were vaguely warm, but mostly not, but ate them I did. Meanwhile, G made friends with a 3 year old girl behind Sean (so fickle she had already forgotten about her 80-year-old-deaf-boyfriend). This made her laugh and squeal with delight, and flirt with the girl's father, and reach out for the girl. Then Not. The whining and fussing magnified. I asked for the check. Sean took off to go outside, anywhere, to stop annoying the surrounding patrons at the restaurant with our teething, miserable (albeit, seriously cute, but not enough to get a pass for her behavior) baby. I horked down the rest of my cold fries, inhaled the last of my beer, packed up the rest of our gear (which we brought enough of to entertain a normal baby for weeks but not a teething baby for 5 minutes), and off I went. Nauseous from inhaling my food and beer/margarita cocktail, my cold fries, and my burger. My arms were weak from the unplanned calisthenics during the meal (but, man, I noticed they are toned these days!). We were both tired and unsatisfied. We decided that going out in public without the ability to immediately escape during teething hell is a terrible idea...so we learned something. One thing I know for sure is that if anyone in the restaurant who observed our very challenged dinner was a childless couple on the fence about having a baby, they may have seriously considered a vasectomy.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that G has recently (within the past two weeks) discovered the joys of pinching. During our dinner games tonight, I was riddled with very painful pinches when she grabbed my eye socket, jugular, my dewlap (this is a real thing, and not that I necessarily have the exact definition of this, but I LOVE this word for under-the-chin-on-the-neck skin), my nostrils, my lip, my ear, and the back of my arm skin. She likes to pinch and pull. Did you know how a tiny little baby can waste you with a well-placed pinch with tiny little vice-like fingers?? And the BEST is when she pinches and twists my milk blister when she nurses-that is kindof like rubbing an exposed nerve with sandpaper.

The some-what encouraging news seems to be that I really think I feel a bump on the ridge of her gums on the front left side. The toothbuds have been visible for months, but have not seemed to be emerging really. Maybe I am feeling what I want to feel when I touch her gums. Who knows. She has gone on a solid food strike, and is like a goat-chewing on clothing or blankets, or any material she can get her pinchy little hands on.

What I wondered more than once tonight, is what aliens stole my content baby and replaced her with this pained, miserable, little monster baby? And how long will she be gone? And how much Tylenol can you feed one baby?

*You childless folks don't realize how you will miss eating two-handed when you have your very own baby; consider yourself warned. Bask in your two-handedness while you have it!

Counting our blessings

Saturday was the "First Annual Advocate Illinois Masonic NICU Reunion". NICU is the affectionate nickname for the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. I suppose that other than coming up with a acronym that makes life easier when referring to something with so many syllables, "NICU" seems like a cute nickname; something to make light of something that is often so not light. The thought of bringing Gillian back there struck some kind of fear in me, like somehow we would get resuspended in the odd and fluid never ending day-nights like those that ran together for two months in the beginning. It also makes you face something you had so neatly packaged away in an unassuming mental storage space, so as to not have to remember how absolutely terrifying the whole thing was. It is pretty amazing the way we protect ourselves from our experiences.

Anyway, in spite of all those splintery feelings, I decided we should drop by. If nothing else, I wanted Gillian's doctors and nurses to see how healthy and well she is. I can imagine that it keeps them going to see babies that go on to be just perfect in spite of a super early start (in our case), or a very rough on-time start (in lots of other cases), as it were.

It was emotional to go back there with Sean and his parents-the same people I started the whole crazy trip with almost 9 months ago. There was a festive tent set up in the courtyard, with live music and hot dogs, and cupcakes-a typical outdoor summer party scene. There were lots of happy people everywhere with lots of beautiful happy babies, and toddlers, and children. Many of whom had walked the same walk we had. A closer look: intense conversations going on between the neonatologists and nurses who were there and tearful mothers and fathers clinging to their precious babies, no doubt thanking them for saving the life of their child; No doubt standing there with the same lump in their throat I had. The hugs they gave those doctors and nurses were different than the ones you give other people-there was some deep gratitude in them with a tinge of desperate appreciation and love. These doctors and nurses were responsible for the decisions that saved our children. These remarkable people kept them alive and growing until they could go home. Some of those babies were there a lot longer than mine..some for 5 or 6 months, but they all went home eventually. That is a testament to their dedication and their ability as practitioners...but with these patients, there is a whole lot of heart that makes the difference too. We, the parents, were all bonded..as we passed by, we all gave eachother these knowing glances, some deep acknowledgement that said "how are you, sister (or brother)?"... or "we made it, and our children made it, and this is true joy, isn't it?". That sentiment was thick, hanging in the air there...the hurt and painful memories that we had all let get covered up by the joy of our healthy, beautiful babies.

I saw many of the folks who were involved in G's care, but two were particularly important for me to see, Dr. Fox and G's primary nurse, Myung. It was our neonatologist, Dr. Fox, who sprinted off with Gillian seconds after they removed her from me and briefly held her up, saying "Here's your baby, Mom". After getting G intubated she came in to the recovery room and told us some details that I couldn't grasp in my drug-induced head fuzz. She was Gillian's main doctor the entire stay. At first I didn't care for her style-she was curt and matter-of-fact, and not particularly good at communicating with terrified parents (definitely not warm and fuzzy, and I wanted reassurance). But then, Gillian got the blood infection. Dr. Fox, who had been so protective and so conservative (often to the point of frustration for me, especially with how slowly she was building up Gillian's feedings, which in my mind delayed weight gain, which delayed coming home) with G's care, was like a hawk and jumped on the infection right away-not even waiting for the labs to tell us what kind of infection it was. She knew that early treatment could be the difference between life and death. And that was it for me-this capable doctor saved Gillian when she got critically sick with a blood infection, needing a couple of transfusions. I never questioned her again, because it was clear that she was slow and safe for a reason. And I decided I didn't need someone to sugarcoat the details of Gillian's progress or condition on a given day. Being realistic with my expectations was emotionally better in the long run. Dr. Fox was pleased to see us doing so well, and all I could muster was "thank you for giving me my girl-for saving her life", and giving her one of those hugs that said much more than I could say.

I was especially happy to see my other favorite-Myung-the best nurse on the planet. She was my friend, and my shrink, and my confidante. She taught be how to change G's diaper when she was less than three pounds and I was afraid I might break her, made me hold the feeding tube when we fed her, and even had me bathe her toward the end so I would know how...she made me take ownership of her ("she is your baby, you have to start acting like it!"). She and the lactation consultant held my hand the first few times we tried nursing, and were our cheerleaders to continue. In my estimation, I spent somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 hours a week kangarooing with Gillian while hanging out with Myung. For some reason, seeing her made me particularly emotional. She was so thrilled with how well Gillian was and how much better I looked (she was the only person during the whole ordeal to say to me "You look terrible. Go home and get some sleep. You're no good for the baby if you are run down and sick.") It was so wonderful to see her again, and to show her our healthy, happy girl. She loves her patients, and it shows with the way she touches them. I think she touches them the way she thinks we would want her to-like they were her own babies. I love that woman, and I never worried about G when she was on duty with her. We hugged and chatted through tears, and promised to keep in touch. I will take G back there some Saturday when she is a year old to visit Myung.

There was an incubator on display there...where Gillian spent her first 6 weeks of life (before the transition to the open air big girl bed); a glass box where I reached my sanitized hands and forearms through the armholes to hold her hands or stroke her head when she was sleeping. There was a tiny stethescope, with an end the size of a dime for the littlest patient...and the wee pee diapers for babies 1 lb to 2.5 lbs, the ones Gillian wore at first. I stood there and let myself feel what I needed to looking at those artifacts..the tiny purple pacifier they gave her for comfort before she could nurse, the little knit Cubs hat that every baby in the NICU got...the telltale blue, pink, and white blanket that they fashioned into an oval around her in the incubator to make her feel like she was still in my womb.

Don't think I don't know I have been given a tremendous gift. My daughter, my miraculous baby, is full of light. Sometimes I think she might explode with it. She was sent to me this way to teach me so many things. Just a few: how to stop and be in a moment, and savor it; what is the meat and potatoes in life, and what is fluff; how much stronger I am than I ever even considered I could be; how desperately I wanted this child; how much bigger and redder and deeper my heart could become...and every day there is some new magic. Our girl is worth every single second of that tortured period of our lives. Every time I hear her laugh, or watch her dance, or hear her squeal with delight, I am further from my storage space filled with NICU memories. I know that I should never forget those days-they are the measuring stick for our trials and our joy. It makes me endlessly peaceful to consider the "everyday angels" who, right now, are making life and death decisions for these special needs babies, who are holding the hands of parents who are afraid their babies might die (as they did with me when G was so sick), who are gently feeding, and bathing, and clothing these tiny resilient little souls twenty-four hours a day, and who get to tell the happy news that the baby can finally go home (the magic words you long for every single day). These people are giving us the chance to be parents, in spite of our inadequate bodies that expelled them too soon. For all these things, I am counting our blessings.

(These photos, below, show Dr. Fox and Myung and Gillian the day she came home (all 4 lbs of her)).

Teething hell

I write to you from the depths of teething hell. Yes, we did start this discourse a good while ago...maybe even two months ago. But, as you may or may not recall, pre-teething is an amorphous designation that may suspend you in some weird form of "waiting for it all to end" misery for an unspecified period of time (some would say it lasts years while all the baby teeth come in, and is punctuated by weeks of no symptoms). G had all the classic symptoms in April-drooling, fussiness, low grade fever, chewing on anything and everything, where pressure on the gums was tremendously helpful. Our non-regular doctor even said, spying her little tooth buds under her gums, "they'll be in in a week or two, I'd say" (our regular doctor was called out to deliver a baby, but G may well of tricked him just as well). Well, they're not in. And the symptoms, which were hot and heavy for a week or so, vanished into thin air by mid-April.

Now, the symptoms are back. This week has been rough for all of us. G has been whining...and I don't mean just whining, I mean WHINING (from dawn till dusk, absolutely nonstop except when she's distracted enough to squeal or laugh, which isn't often enough, in our opinion). Sleep even seems to be a bit disrupted for our Homer-Simpson-like sleeper...she is waking up about 2 hours earlier than usual to eat. Clearly, this is not convenient for me, because I am the one who feeds her and I am the one that has to get up for work at 5. It would be nice if she was waking up at 5 too, like the good old days, because I really never go back to sleep after I get up to feed her (unless it's a weekend day), particularly with the "at-breast-lolly-gagging",which unfortunately has become the norm. And she is falling back to sleep while nursing less and less and staying up to coo and squeal more.

So, even with Tylenol, gum rubbing, frozen washcloth, cold teething toys, even with all of these she is uncomfortable and generally miserable. I am a bit concerned because her Grandaddy's family (Papa side) all get and lose their baby teeth freakishly late (I mean, like losing baby teeth into their 30s and 40s). All I can hope for is that she actually cuts some teeth soon to make all this feel worth it. For her and for us...

That's not to say it's all gloom and doom. She definitely still has her moments, teething or none. For example, she has started dancing:

Hemorrhaging Hair

Ok, so maybe it's not exactly correct to call losing copious amounts of hair hemorrhaging (with hem being a Latin root for blood and all), but it fits. Consider the above photo of the hair that came out of my head while washing my hair this morning (it does not include the ones that fell out during brushing). I have been losing that much hair every time I wash my hair for about 3 weeks, and realize it is related to hormones normalizing after G's birth. However, that doesn't allay my fears about going bald during the sloughing off.

This is one of the things (the many, many things) they don't tell you about pregnancy-higher levels of estrogen during pregnancy make your hair fall out slower than usual, so lots of pregnant women end up with thicker, more lustrous locks than prior to getting pregnant (the numbers, if you care, are that you normally lose about 100 hairs a day). The problem is that about three months after you have the baby (why I am delayed by five months is a mystery to me), you will likely develop a condition called telogen effluvium, a fancy medical term for hemorrhaging hair. For up to six months, you can lose 500 hairs a day. Luckily, one website had a bit of encouragement for me:

"Within another six months or so, you should return to a pre-pregnancy rate of hair loss, but you may find that the texture of your hair is never exactly the same. It may be wavier or straighter or more dry or oily than it was before pregnancy. This is probably due to the hormonal upheaval you've just been through."

Great! Fantastic!!-just six more months of rabid hair loss. Umm..if I continue to lose this much hair every day, I'll look like Mr. Clean in 6 months. The bright side? Of course there is always that. There are tons of wig choices out there. Just ask Britney.