Table Food = Messy

First pizza, al fresco at Uno's (we forgot a bib, so Uno's offered us a disposable apron, which was essentially a trash bag, cut to cover Harry's whole torso):

Macaroni with sweet potato mush sauce:

Blueberry pancakes:

Pasta with red sauce (I can't look at this picture without laughing):

Anniversary, Apathy, Exhaustion: Catching Up

So I have had a bunch of posts that I've meant to, well, post, but haven't had time. So, in order to catch up, I'm just going to do a bulleted list of stuff, starting with the good and moving to the less good:

• P and I celebrated our four year anniversary last week (the 20th). Four years is the fruit & flowers (traditional) or appliances (modern) anniversary. So P sent me flowers and gave me a new air conditioner for our room (we had given ours to Harry). I sent him an edible arrangement (with the anniversary sampler added on) and got him a second guitar for Guitar Hero. Very romantic :) On Saturday, my SIL babysat, and P and I enjoyed a fantastic dinner out, then went to see Harry Potter at the IMAX. It was an awesome night -- wonderful meal, great movie, better company. Happy anniversary, P!
• Harry has begun table food in earnest. We have ordered him food off the kids menu at a couple of restaurants. It has been quite messy but fun. It seems he will eat anything with tomato sauce. And he loves blueberry pancakes.
• I find myself somewhat busy at work. I've been having a lot of trouble motivating lately (see next bullet), though, which isn't good. I have a lot more to say on this, but it's not really a bullet list kind of thing.
• Lately (like, since June), I've been feeling, well, not myself. I guess that's the best way to describe it. I've been feeling tired and run down and generally apathetic. I just don't care about much of anything. Most of the time, whatever I'm doing, I'd rather be doing something else. And beyond apathy, I am definitely feeling some degree of antipathy when it comes to work. I have waves of feeling differently, but they are infrequent and unpredictable. And I have been eating too much, in a very mindless way, and not healthy food, which makes me feel more run down and generally bad about myself. I had an appointment with my doctor last week (for a physical) and brought it up with her. She did a bunch of bloodwork to rule out any physical causes, and it all came back normal. Her best guess (and mine, I suppose) is depression. She recommended an anti-depressant. But the last time I tried one (in college), I had a very bad reaction to it (severe anxiety -- severe enough to land me in health services, where they doped me up on a boatload of sedatives). So I'm reluctant.
• My tiredness/run down-ness is not being helped by the fact that Harry has gone from being a great sleeper to being a mediocre (at best) one. After sleeping through the night since 10 weeks, we have now had several weeks of wake-ups. Some wake-ups are quick, others not so much. And he pulls himself to standing and will wail on and on, so we can't really just let him cry it out, though we may try some modified form of it tonight in the hope of finding something, anything, that might help. For an example of what we've been dealing with, on Tuesday I was working until about 1am. I then couldn't sleep. I finally fell asleep at 2 or so Within 5 minutes, Harry woke up screaming. When I went in there, his elbow was stuck in the bars of the crib (his actual elbow -- his hand and body were still inside, but his elbow was outside). I unstuck it and rubbed his back for a bit. He lifted his head up (which is generally an indication that he's about to sit, then stand), so I picked him up to settle him, but he was like a sack of potatoes. I put him back down a minute later. He moved around a little and fell back to sleep. This was one of the better nights. But I then had trouble getting back to sleep. So last night I decided to go to bed early-ish (10:30 or so), since I'd only slept 3 hours the night before. But Harry didn't like that plan. He woke up at 10:45, screaming. We let it go for a few minutes, but it got worse rather than better. P went in to rock him, but Harry continued to scream/cry for an hour or more, preventing me from sleeping. He finally calmed down, but wasn't sleepy. At 12:15, I took over, and after 15 minutes he was asleep. But he woke up when I tried to leave. By that point I was too tired to deal, so I turned off the monitor so I could sleep and let P take over again. Harry didn't fall asleep until 1:15. During the time he was awake, we tried Motrin and Orajel, in case it was teething. P gave him a bottle, in case it was hunger. He had a few farts, but not enough for me to think it was gas. He's pooped a bunch lately, so it's not constipation (though the poops have been wetter than usual, but not so wet as to make me worry about a bug). P thinks it's developmental, relating to an approaching language development, since he tends to spend his settled-but-not-sleepy time "talking." (He says "duck" and "book" (and other things, but mainly those two) over and over, pointing at any number of things, most of which are neither ducks nor books.) I'm nearing a breaking point.

And that's all I have to say about those things for now. Advice and/or assvice on any of those topics is welcome.

Eleven Months

Dear Harry,

It seems completely unreal to me that you are eleven months old, only one month shy of a full year. More accurately, it seems unreal to me in the abstract that you are eleven months old, but, when I look at you and see the little boy you have become and think back to the baby you were, it seems very real. Because you have become a little boy.

After many months of frustration on your part, you finally figured out crawling this month. Your style is a little funny -- you use your hands, one knee and one foot. It looks funny, but you're quite quick. And within two weeks of figuring that out, you had mastered getting to sitting, pulling to standing and cruising. You love the new-found mobility and freedom. And you get into everything, seemingly drawn to the things that are least appropriate, more drawn the more we try to keep you away. You love the dog's bones, and his food, and the bottles in the wine rack. In a room full of your toys, with a dog bone tucked away in a corner, you will somehow sense the bone and make a beeline for it, getting it into your mouth before we've realized that you've taken off.

You made your first trip up to the cottage this year. We did the drive overnight in both directions to ensure that you slept, which, of course, ensured that we did not. The weather wasn't great -- rainy, overcast, cool enough that you needed footie jammies and more pants than we brought -- but we made our best of it. Daddy and Grandpa made you a beach, which makes them pretty awesome. You went out on the boat, sat in the water (though you did not like to go swimming, which makes Mommy a little sad) and played in the sand. You got to spend time with Grandma and Grandpa and Great-Grandpa, as well as your cousin B.



You also visited the place in Maine where Mommy's family has gone for 57 years. You are now the fifth generation to have been up there. I wish we could have been there for longer than a weekend. Maybe next year. Maybe by then you'll be ready to try sailing!

After eight months of being a pretty great sleeper, with all the new stuff, you started to have a harder time sleeping. It started when we were on vacation, but continued on and off when we got home, so maybe it wasn't just that you hated the borrowed pack n play. When we put you down, or when you wake up at night, you push yourself to sitting and begin to cry. With some regularity, you have begun to require rocking and/or singing in order to fall asleep, which is exhausting, especially in the middle of the night. I'm not sure if your brain and/or body is on overdrive, or if you're teething, or if we've been feeding you something that is bothering you, but I hope you go back to sleeping well soon.

You have also had a lot to say this month. You still don't have any words, or at least no words that Daddy and I can recognize, but you certainly spend a lot of time talking, often quite loudly. You are not a quiet child. I think you get this from Mommy's family. You also figured out this month that your toy crates had toys in them. It was pretty funny to watch. Of course, once you knew where we had hidden it, you immediately took that dang butterfly back out, putting it and it's tremendously annoying songs back into circulation. We had enjoyed the reprieve.


It has been truly wonderful getting to watch you grow and learn and explore this past month. Now if we could just work on the sleeping thing...

With all my love,

Mommy

Wordless Wednesday: Stop Raining -- It's Vacation and We Want To Play Outside

What A Difference Two Weeks Makes

In the past two weeks, Harry has:

• mastered crawling (though on hands, one knee and the other foot)
  
• mastered getting himself seated
  
• mastered pulling up on stuff
  
• begun cruising
• (as a result of those four items, he now requires rocking to sleep at least 75% of the time or he wails and wails until we go in and find him sitting up in his crib crying, holding his arms out to be picked back up)
• (also as a result of those four items, he now requires singing in order to have his diaper changed or he either crawls off or cries if you try to prevent the crawling through some form of baby-wrangling)
• mastered walking while holding on to hands (purposeful, quick walking as opposed to thudding, haphazard steps, which he started a while back). He is also able to sit back down and to let go with one hand to bend over and pick up a toy (or piece of lint or old food).
  
• been to his second foreign country -- he has now been to more non-U.S. countries than his aunt and uncle combined
• pulled his first all-nighter (well, up from 11:30 on -- he did sleep 3.5 hours to start the night)
• begun nursing strike number 2 (which I am now fairly confident is stemming from the return of my monthly cycle. Each strike has begun in the week and a half leading up to a (one-day) period, with the last one ending the day the period began/occurred. If that's the case again, I can live with it. My supply seems to nosedive during that week+ (or I stop responding to the pump) and it takes ages to get a letdown then, so I think he's impatient. At least the biting is less bad this time. Mainly he just gives up. Though he gave me the worst bite yet last week, bad enough that I ached for days afterward.)
• been on his first boat ride
• gone swimming in a lake
• learned how to throw tennis balls for the dog
• taken his first bath in the big tub
• begun waving

I am exhausted. (The fact that the aforementioned all-nighter was two nights ago, and last night we drove all night on our way back from vacation so as to avoid ten hours in the car with him awake is partly to blame for that.)

This unwilling-to-go-down-easily-or-have-a-diaper-change thing ends at some point, right?

Wordless Wednesday: Happy 7th Birthday, Buddy

Boobs Are Back to Work

As noted in my most recent letter to Harry, the nursing strike appears to be over, at least for now. It ended as quickly and as inexplicably as it began. One day, ten/eleven/twelve/thirteen days in (I wasn't counting in the beginning, not realizing it would last so damn long), I offered before his first nap, and he nursed rather than biting.

The night before, at the suggestion of a lactation consultant, we did a dream feed, and he gladly took a boob in his sleep. That was the only real change that occurred right then. But, for the sake of anyone who may stumble upon this, here is a list of what we tried, none of which seemed to make much of a difference:

• Cutting back on solids, especially at dinner-time
• Cutting back on daycare bottles, in the hope that he'd be hungrier at home
• Switch back to slow flow bottle nipples to reduce the likelihood of bottle preference continuing
• Paced bottle feeding (at home -- I didn't ask his daycare provider to do it)
• Not having me give a bottle (i.e. bottle only comes from Daddy or Miss M; if you want Mommy and milk, you have to nurse -- we had only just switched to this, so this might have helped too)
• Offering the bottle first to satiate some of his hunger, then switch to the breast (this resulted in a lot of biting, except one time when he nursed)
• Trying every imaginable position
• Changing up the times of his nursing sessions, including while sleepy and while just waking (from naps -- the one nursing session he had kept was when he woke in the morning)
• Fenugreek to increase supply
• Breast compressions to speed up flow
• Increased skin to skin time
• Only nursing with the window open (this may have helped, as he still is more apt to bite if the window is closed -- at some point I realized that his morning nursing was always with the window open but the rest of the day/evening it was often closed)

We had long ago eliminated nursing anywhere other than his room, in the glider, with no distractions. The only recommendations we didn't try were nursing in the bath (I probably eventually would have gone there too) and co-sleeping.

I have no idea how to express how much this experience sucked. To quote the email I wrote on one of the last days of the strike: "I'm honestly just feeling completely worn out, exhausted and rejected. Since I went back to work after being home with him for 6 months, I was able to get over some of the guilt of being away from him all day by coming home and having this time that was just for us. But now instead of finding me comforting he bites me and today has begun to cry when I hold him. It's just painful, physically (from the biting) and emotionally. Here I am, an overeducated lawyer at a big law firm, and I cry myself to sleep at night because I feel (irrationally, I know) like my son doesn't need or love me any more. I just want there to be a solution, a way to get back to where we used to be, but I'm starting to realize there just may not be one, and I just feel so sad."

I'm glad this chapter appears to be over, at least for now. Inevitably, of course, he will now decide he wants to nurse longer than I want to, like, say, until college, bringing on a different set of guilt and stress issues entirely. But we'll deal with that when/if we get there.

Ten Months

My dear sweetpea,

I'll admit it. This month was tough. I think all the not-crawling finally got to you, and you made sure daddy and I knew it any way you could. There was a lot of biting, and a nursing strike that I was sure was early weaning, and yelling. Lots and lots of yelling.

I found myself very frustrated a lot of the time, frazzled in a way I hadn't really felt since you were born. But every time I wanted to get angry with you, I remembered that you were probably more frustrated than I was. There are just so many things that you want to be able to do and seem convinced that you should be able to do, but you can't quite master them. And you don't even have words to explain how frustrating that is. I kept thinking back to when I spent the summer in France and all of a sudden found myself overwhelmed with homesickness in a way I totally didn't expect. My host sister thought I'd feel better if we went to an American movie with French subtitles, so we went to see Mrs. Doubtfire. But when we got there, it turned out to be Mme. Doubtfire, and the jokes just didn't translate properly into poorly-dubbed French and were delivered by someone other than Robin Williams. It wasn't funny at all, and I didn't feel less alone. And I cried, because that moment so perfectly captured everything I had been feeling. And I HAD words, in two languages, but just couldn't find any in either language that could really express my sense of disjuncture. So I'm impressed that you don't cry, that you only yell in frustration. It must be so hard to feel so much and be so unable to do anything about it.

Thankfully, after ten days the nursing strike now appears to be over (though I'm afraid to put it in writing for fear of jinxing it), and "gentle" seems to be working in conjunction with holding your hand tightly to deal with the hitting, but there's still no crawling, so there's still a lot of yelling and some biting for good measure. I am hoping this is not a brief window into what you will be like at 2, as you seem to be very strong-willed.

Good thing for you that you are also very cute.

This month also marked a few other firsts, including your first trip to the zoo. Daddy and I took you there with Papa. We saw some cool animals, but a lot of exhibits were closed. I'm sure we'll go back soon, though.



At your last doctor's appointment, we discovered that you actually had grown a lot, moving from the 18th to the 62nd percentile in weight and from the 75th to the 85th in length. I guess it wasn't our imagination. Also, Dr E gave you the okay to start on new foods (i.e. foods that are not fruits, vegetables and cereal). You now eat black beans and kidney beans, yogurt, cheese, bread, bagels, waffles, pancakes, scrambled egg yolks, tofu and many other tasty treats, including a couple of new vegetables. The best? Cheese. Followed by black beans and yogurt. The worst? Tofu, broccoli and cauliflower. You are pretty positive that none of these is food -- if you eat it by accident, you pull it back out and make a lovely face. This from the same boy that will eat wood chips. You have a strange palate. Also, you have decided that you are completely done with being fed and insist on self-feeding. This is messy. But it's nice that you have an area in which to assert your independence.

Speaking of you and feeding, you also learned how to give the dog a treat, though you did think it was for you at first:

I must admit, I worry a little about your lack of crawling, even though Dr E said not to and even though I always swore I would not be that type of mom. I know some babies aren't into it and go straight to walking. That would be fine with me. I worry mainly, though, because you are into it, you just can't figure it out. For three months now (maybe more?), you have been so desperate to crawl, pushing on hands and knees, rocking and . . . scooting backwards. You have become more desperate but don't seem any closer to forward movement. I hope you master it soon, for everyone's sake, even though Daddy and I really don't want to childproof. I can't wait to see the look of accomplishment on your face when you finally put it together.

Through it all, sweetpea, through the yelling and the biting and the nursing strike and the hitting, I love you with all my heart. I always will.

Love,

Mommy

A Long Goodbye

Shifting gears entirely to another subject that leaves me feeling a little stressed and lacking in control, it looks like my father will not be selling the house I lived in during the latter part of my childhood and moving to another state afterall. As much as this is the way I would have preferred things to end up, the circumstances under which this change in plans has arisen are fully suck-tastic.

I always thought his now-wife was a tiny bit flaky, which struck me as a bit odd for a fairly high-powered professional, but I figured it was just a quirk of her personality. Apparently, this "quirk" grew increasingly worrisome and had been a subject of many unpleasant discussions between her and my dad over the past year-plus. He insisted she seemed flakier; she insisted he was being an ass. Possibly to placate him or possibly because she could no longer deny what he was insisting was a problem, she went to a neurologist. After much testing, multiple opinions, etc., she has been told that there is a 95% chance that she has early-onset Alzheimers. And there's really nothing good about that.

Let me begin by saying that the situation for her and for her (adult) kids is a nightmare. I can't imagine having to face it and am a bit ashamed of how glad I am that it's not my dad facing this horrendous diagnosis at such a (relatively) young age.

But it's not exactly awesome for my dad either, and I doubt anyone else is thinking about him and what this means for him right now. I feel like no matter what my dad does, it's the wrong thing to do. If he moves, he gives up the life he has where he lives now for, what, a couple of years, maybe more if they're lucky, with his wife before she no longer remembers who he is and goes to live in a nursing home? And then he's stuck there. She promised to help him ease the transition, introducing him to people and helping him establish himself socially, but is that realistic now? Or he stays where he is and rips a woman whose mind is already losing touch out of the one familiar setting it has. Or they stay where they are, living apart.

The current plan seems to be to continue to try to sell her house but not his, spending three weeks a month there, and one week in an apartment they'll rent near where she lives now so she can remain in contact with the people and places she knows. Is that really for better or for worse? It seems so incredibly selfish for him to do anything but move, but that sacrifice just seems astronomical now, with no real upside. He's was in his 60s when they met -- this isn't exactly the Notebook.

The reality is that he sensed something amiss months before they got married and talked to her about it numerous times, but she just kept saying that it was who she was. (He has since learned that she spoke to at least one of her oldest and dearest friends and voiced her own concerns during that same period, which I think really upsets my dad. I'd feel better saying he is upset because he feels sad that she didn't trust him but really he feels betrayed, feeling like she lied to him.) Part of me wonders if all his heel-dragging over the move (because, seriously, they got married 11 months ago and still don't live in the same state) was subconsciously related to his gut sense that something was wrong (ignoring the fact that the state of the economy hasn't exactly made it easy to contemplate selling either, much less both, of their houses, as they planned to move to a new shared place). There would be much less guilt and indecision if the move had already been made.

This may be the first time in my life when something bad was happening in my dad's life that didn't really affect me. I don't even know what to say to him. I can't even figure out how to think about the situation. I keep trying to step outside myself for a bit and think about what I'd want my dad to do if I were one of her kids, or if I were her, and I honestly don't know and I'm secretly and shamefully glad I don't have to.

Down with PWD

I was about to ask whether there was such a thing as post-weaning depression, as I suspect I am en route to suffering it if not already there, when I decided to google first. Without quotes, I got 136,000 hits. Even with, 889 (though a not-insignificant percentage seemed to be about animals). Apparently, though not as oft-discussed or as common as PPD, PWD is in fact a real thing, or at least a thing that women other than myself feel like they might have, might be, or might soon experience. See here, and here, and here, and here (though that one is about toddlers, and Harry is clearly not a toddler). Apparently, it is worst when the weaning is abrupt and not initiated by mom. (CHECK) It is often characterized by mood swings, fight-picking, incessant and uncontrollable crying, and a desire not to get out of bed. (CHECK) It has both a physiological/hormonal component and an emotional one. (CHECK) As I read, it was hard not to feel like I was reading about myself.

While what I really would like is someone to fix it, to find a way to get Harry back to the breast (do you hear me, universe? I AM NOT READY FOR MY SON TO ABRUPTLY WEAN -- FIX THIS. DO YOU HEAR ME? NOT. READY.), knowing I'm not alone helps. Or at least it doesn't hurt. So thanks to those who came before me who put something out there on this -- PWD, early weaning, prolonged nursing strikes that resulted ultimately in weaning -- (including you, Nicky). Seriously, thanks.

*ETC(larify) that the thanks is for talking not only about PWD but also about nursing strikes and pre-mature weaning and the conomitant feelings that don't quite rise to the level of PWD too.