Awkwardly Social

This was a busy month for us.  I feel like all I’ve been doing is chasing down the hours until bedtime hoping he’ll sleep at least until midnight and then again until 5:30.  Sometimes we’re lucky.  Sometimes I’m up with him every other hour.  Seth continues to be useless with him at night.  Useless.  Am I completely and totally resentful?  You could say that’s a yes.  Is it his fault? No.  Some days are shit shows, other days are great.  It’s like I have a real human baby, not a robot baby like I ordered.

What’s new with Moe… Let’s see.  He babbles like crazy and we’re pretty sure he says hiiiiiiii.  He says it at the right moment, and it sounds like the right word, so, I’m calling it.  Hi is his first word.  He also seems to say Yiya for Lula, he’s always looking for her and continues to think she’s hilarious.  We were at Cross Creek in Malibu today and he saw some other dogs there, he loves dogs.  A French bulldog was chasing a tennis ball and Moses was obsessed with him.  And some kind of poodle thing with short legs.  It was nerve wracking (stranger’s dogs freak me out around my baybay) and pretty cute.

He’s still slow with the eating, but he didn’t gain much weight according to his last appointment (5 ozs instead of the usual 1.5 or 2 pounds…) so we’re spending more time trying to get calories into him. I’m torn between the “he’s not hungry or interested, stop making it a battle” and the “he is going to be a malnourished skeleton baby” camps.  I don’t know.  I’m constantly thinking about it, but tonight he tried and liked spanakopita, so maybe it’s just that he isn’t into bland baby food anymore?

He is standing on his own.  Not for very long (count of 2 maybe?) and he still needs something just off the floor to push off of to get to a stand, but he is close to floor standing.  Perilously close.

He had a visit from his auntie and he was sick during the visit so that was  bit of a drag as he wasn’t his most charming self, but I think he enjoyed having his mom’s dopelganger around.  I know I did.

He had is first swim in a pool and first hotel stay (um, The Beverly Hills Hotel, poor kid has no idea it’s all downhill from here…) and the pool was a hit.

He liked the hotel too, but we just got a regular room, so at his bedtime we were kind of just sitting in the dark whispering to each other and that kind of sucked. Lesson learned.

I went back to work and Seth is home for him for the time being and it’s working out well.  I miss him during the day, but I love being around people who don’t need me to change their diaper while they scream at me and try to throw themselves off the table, so that’s nice.

Our waiter told us Moses is one of the most beautiful babies he’s ever seen.  We couldn’t agree more…

Next Thursday, a week from tomorrow, Moses will have been out as long as he was in.  My how he’s changed.

This month brought serious all out crawling.

And pulling up.

And the beginnings of tantrums.  Oh my.

He loves to eat, but only when he has something of his own he can hold and control - an apple slice, a slice of bread, a piece of melon, a spoon.

Then you can feed him and feed him until all of a sudden he just throws everything away and is done.

He is very interested in how things move.  Last night he spent an hour sliding his wiffle ball bat around the room.  It was so weird and fascinating to watch his little brain work out how the bat could be in his hand and at the same time hitting the wall.

He’s a social butterfly when he’s out.  We went jogging for the first time with him yesterday and seeing the other runners coming our direction break into smiles was hilarious, because clearly he was flirting with anyone and everyone who would look his way.

He gets pretty fussy these days when boredom strikes.  And we probably are reinforcing this terrible behavior by picking him up and redirecting him.  I have no idea what I’m doing when it comes to behavior modification of a baby.  Because, case in point, he laughs his ass off when I say, “No!” firmly and sternly after he bites me.  Laughs.  In my face.  After biting.  Or when I say, “ouch!”  Is my baby a sociopath?  Don’t tell me if he is.

Sleeping has been hit and miss.  (Is it teething?  A wonder week? A general dislike for us as parents?) And it’s making me very resentful of Seth.  One night I told him to go in and 20 minutes later, the baby was in bed with us.  I got up in a huff, took him BACK into his room and he was asleep in seconds.  Seth told me the next morning he was worried I had killed the baby.  I replied, “The only person in danger last night, was you.”

All of this is minor stuff that is made more major by the stress and upheaval going on in our lives with the in-laws house and family stuff.  Moe has developed a bit of separation anxiety with me, it only rears its head occasionally, which makes my upcoming work situation seem a little worrisome.  Hopefully in a month he’ll have eased up and going back will be fine.

I love the little bugger.  And can’t wait to see what this next month brings.

It’s been a big month around here.

Moe got two new teeth.  They came in without a fuss.

We’ve successfully been able to get him to eat a few purees and he’s interested in solids, but mostly gagging and barfing when he tries them, so I’m not so interested in solids.

He is able to push himself into a seated position.  So while there is still no actual crawling, he is mobile enough to be dangerous.

Sleeping is going pretty well.  He had his first cold a week ago today, but it lasted 2 days and he was back to normal.   At least until today, and I have no idea how he knows it’s DST, but he refused all naps today, so he went to bed at 7:15 (which is really 6:15 to him) and after wailing for about 2 minutes, is out.  I’m not sure it will last.

He loves to laugh.  He loves being upside down.  He loves peek-a-boo.  He loves long walks (on the beach, at sunset…).  He loves the park.  He loves Cat Power and Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg.  He loves getting up early and getting a jump on the day.  He loves grabbing Lula’s tail.

He’s not so into being left by himself.  He doesn’t like being fed if no one is doing the entertainment simultaneously.  He does not like getting his favorite toys taken away from him (my book light, my iPhone, the wipes, the Desitin…).

We just can’t get enough of him.

I was scanning through some photos looking for a version of my haircut that I wanted to bring to my hairdresser to repeat, when I saw The Photos.  The C Section Photos.

I haven’t been able to look at them because, 1. I have a very fainty relationship with gore and descriptions of gore, and 2. I have always heard about doctors taking guts out and laying them on your stomach to get the baby and wasn’t sure if that was the case here or an urban legend and the thought of seeing my intestines on the outside, well, see #1.

But, I finally looked at them.

And they are incredible.  The first image of my baby.  You can’t see his face because my doctor’s hand looks like she’s suctioning him, but you can see the other surgeon clamping the cord.  And his little hand is reaching up.

I’m just in awe of my doctors, my broke-down body and my little baby boy.  I’m glad I finally looked.

(The below image is cropped, because you guys probably don’t want to see my guts on the outside.  JK, they weren’t on the outside, but my open wound is very visible, so I cropped it.)

What can I say about this little kid?  He’s the best.  He’s a star.  He lights up the room wherever he goes.  He stares people down with the full brilliance of his smile until even the most hardened man in a business suit crumbles to his dimples.  He’s like the baby version of Ryan Gosling.  BUT BETTER.

He is still not so crazy about purees.  Basically you have to trick him into smiling and then sneak the spoon in, which feels like a total betrayal.  So, I’ve sort of just stopped.  I am reading about Baby Led Weaning right now, and I’m thinking we’ll give it a try.  I’m not super concerned about it.  I just want to be able to bring Moe to restaurants without a lot of fuss, because we eat out A LOT.

He has started babbling and it’s so adorable and loud.  “A da da da!” “Ba ba ba!”  The only time he says, “MAAAAA” is when he’s crying before I come home from work, according to Seth.  Way to dig the knife in deeper kid.

He hasn’t started crawling yet, but there is a lot of hands and knees rocking which for some reason I find so completely adorable.  I just want to bottle his positive energy and keep it with me for all time.

He finally “grew out” of his bouncer/chair.  He is too strong to be safely left in the chair, but not smart enough to know that if he leans over to the side he will bonk his head on the floor.  So, we have sadly retired it.  It got us through a lot of days, and while I like the Stokke high chair we got, it’s just not so easy to leave him in there without a lot of fussing after he ejects all of his toys onto the floor.

He has always been tough to change, but now he’s so fast that we have almost given up the changing table entirely for the bed.  Except in cases of… well, there are wet diapers and there are DIRTY diapers and yeah, you get the point.

He loves playing musical instruments.

He loves Lula.  He loves books.  He loves pulling my hair. And he loves babies.  I have two more weeks of work (I keep getting extended) and then I’ll be able to seek out some activities that involve other babies.  I think he would really benefit from some baby interaction, frankly, he’s probably sick to death of us old folk.

We love him the moon, the stars, the universe.

We passed on our passed on swing yesterday.  I would have saved it for the next baby, but we’re talking about moving to a smaller place with less storage and it felt like the right thing to do.  And who knows if there will be a next baby (there better be a next baby…).

Here’s Moe at 10 days in the swing.

At 2 months and a day in the swing.

And yesterday, 6 months, 16 days.

We started sleep training on Friday night.  It has been… fucking awful.  For me.

We’re doing Ferber (with some modifications made for me and my personal feelings about things, one of those things being pacifiers.  It’s bad enough kids can’t have blankets or toys or bumpers, but pacifier use in kids actually lowers SIDS risk so, there you go.  Also, I’m still doing a night feeding, because I am.  That’s why.).  The first night was tough as we expected.  There were a lot of wake ups and and I would set a stop watch app on my computer so I could see how long before I could go in.  I would look down after what I thought would surely be at least a minute and 15 seconds would have gone by.   We did 3, 5, and 10 minute intervals.  It was a long night.  And a long next day when we also did it for naps.

The second night was much improved.  I put him into bed awake.  He started to fuss, I gave him his pacifier and he rolled over and went to sleep.  Just like that.  He woke up an hour later crying, but went to sleep five minutes after that.  There were a couple other wake-ups during the night (one for the feeding), but he did so much better.

Tonight we had about 15 minutes of crying.  15 minutes when you look down and expect a minute to have gone by and it’s only 15 seconds is a long time.  I went in after 8 (I’m supposed to be up to 15 minutes waiting by now) and he was soaked with sweat.  He’s now finally asleep, but I’m not confident it will last.

The weirdest thing about sleep training is that I am incapable of talking to anyone while he’s crying.  I can only sit there and stare at the monitor and focus on the crying.  I expected to want to watch TV or talk or anything other than listen to him, but it’s all I want to do.  That and stare at the stopwatch and will the seconds to go by faster.

Well, this month sped by.

Moe met his brother and sister-in-law and he adores them.  It was so nice to have them here, they were really good with him.  I sense a baby in their very near future.

We started solids a few days before Christmas, and Moe is still on the fence.  He’s had carrots, sweet potatoes and squash and while I think he likes the spoon, he’s so not into the flavor profiles. And we started having to supplement formula. He’s had a couple of bottles of formula before, but only in my dark days of breastfeeding where I would proclaim, “I’m not doing it anymore!” and then start doing it again. He is not crazy about formula, and didn’t gain as much weight as he has in the past so he went from high sixtieth percentile/low seventieth, to 55th. The doctor wasn’t alarmed, but she wanted to make sure he’s eating enough. The next appointment is at the end of the month and I’m not convinced he’s gaining any faster.

He’s getting really good at grabbing things and pulling them towards him.  Christmas morning he grabbed one of the stockings and pulled everything off the mantle.  Everything.  The stocking holders, the lights, the ornaments, it was spectacular.

He’s also really close to being able to sit up unassisted.  He still plonks over every time he’s sitting, but it’s not quite as unplanned as it used to be.

He had his first visit to the Pacific Ocean, which he was duly impressed by.

He laughs at a lot.  Sometimes it’s a person, sometimes it’s Lula, sometimes it’s because we’re tickling him, sometimes it’s when we laugh ridiculously.  His laugh is irresistible. (The imbeded video code keeps crashing my browser, so you can go here to listen to him and Seth.)

Sleep is still an issue.  We’re going to try Ferber, starting tomorrow.  It’s time we get him back into his crib.  He’s sleeping like crap in our bed and his generally sunny disposition has suffered.

Speaking of that sunny disposition, it has been a hard month for Moe, he’s not mobile so he gets really frustrated really quickly.  He has the beginnings of separation anxiety. He’s maybe teething? There is a lot of hand jamming going on and he like to gnaw on my fingers.

We love the stuffing out of him though and as the saying goes, love is all you need.

This month went faster and slower, impossibly, than last month, I think.  I work about 45-50 hours a week and, as I’ve mentioned, I don’t get home until right before Moe is exhausted for the night and ready for bed.  It’s hard on both of us, I think.  Probably harder on me, but I think his sleep is not great in the crib at night because he needs that mom time.  (Or maybe I just need the Moe time.) (Either way, I try to have him sleep in his crib for at least 3 hours before I bring him into bed, but some nights I’m more successful than others.)

I’m struggling with what I want to do when my out date at work gets here.  (A month and a half to go!) I need to work at least 3/4s of a year to ensure my financial and mental health don’t go down the tubes.  But do I wait to find something until March?  Or do I roll right into another job?  It’s all up in the air because who knows what will be available come the end of January. Ideally, I’d get to take a month off, then have another nice little predictable job for 3 months and take the summer off, go back to work in late August, but that is kind of a crap shoot.  Someone hand me a bucket of money, would you? (A barrel would be better, but I’d take a bucket.) I want to spend time with Moe, but I don’t think I’d love being home with him full time.  I just want to be the best mom I can be, and that is a person who works outside of the home 40 weeks a year.  Make it happen Universe!

This month Moe took his first flight, and he was lucky enough to be able to travel first class.  (Spoiled baby is spoiled!)
He got to reconnect with my sister.

He got to meet his cousins (his only 1st cousins! I thought I had a small family, but poor Moe, he’s worse off than I was)

and his uncle,

and my sister’s in-laws, who hilariously asked Tavia if she wanted to have a boy.  They have been gunning for a boy since they found out Fiona was a girl and me having a boy has stirred the fire of their desire once again.  (They also talked about how in Indonesia, women of a certain class don’t work, there is a nanny for each child, a cook AND a housekeeper.  Tavia asked what the women did all day, and her MIL said, “I went out to lunch…”)

I took Moe to the cemetery so I could see my mom’s grave.  I talked to her, and introduced her to Moe, but it felt a little weird because if she is somewhere, she sure as hell isn’t hanging out under ground in an urn, so she totally would have already met Moe.  But symbolically I needed to do it, and yeah, it was probably the saddest thing I’ve had to do since he was born.

This month Moe has really started grabbing things.  I’ve seen him feel around his crib for his pacifier, grab it AND put it into his mouth.  Genius baby!  He also knocked over a full glass of water at El Cholo last night, so we win parents of the year.  And continuing on the grabbing things vein, Moe was in his bouncer and Lula walked by and he snatched her by the ear.  I didn’t see it happen but I whipped around when I heard Lula let out a long high pitched whine.  Thank goodness Lula isn’t a snapper.  I have learned my lesson though and watch Lula around him, I trust and love her, but she is a dog and a dog will do what a dog needs to do if a dog feels threatened or hurt.  Fact of life.

I mentioned the sleep issues above.  I just keep telling myself these things won’t last forever.

Moe went from communicating in zerberts to this high pitched shrieky kind of vocalization which is pretty adorable even when it’s in your ear at 6:30 in the morning.

He also went to his first birthday party, (Betsy Brandt from Breaking Bad was there, oh, Hollywood) and he had his first Thanksgiving, although that holiday will be lost on him until the pilgrim talk starts.  (I just had a flashback of elementary school, cold with wet leaves on the ground, learning about pilgrims with mimeographed handouts to bring home.)

I am really looking forward to Christmas this year.

In what is possibly a record for domestic help, our nanny quit.  She worked one day (Monday) called in sick Tuesday morning and after Seth told her it was fine to stay home if she wasn’t feeling well the rest of the week, she quit officially today.

Deep breaths.

She was highly recommended.  She had been with her previous family for 3 years.  But… my spidey senses were a little tweaked with her.  She seemed a little desperate.  Which, hey, I’ve been there while unemployed - completely willing to please and saying anything to get the job.  The truth is, we were paying her less than she was getting at her previous job for more work (an infant is tougher than a 3 year old) and Seth was working from home.  Seth is my husband so I love him but having him home rather than me would be hard for anyone but the most easy going person.  He is… very concerned about everything.

Anyway, back to my spidey sense, the first day (ONLY DAY) when I was showing her around the house and telling her how I do things she would ask questions and when I would answer, she’d raise her eyebrows and say, “Oh, really?”  YES, lady.  Really.  I do not have a nap schedule perfectly laid out yet.  I AM NEW AT THIS.  I, of course, actually said, yes, we need help with a nap schedule.  I was polite and apologetic, when whatever, I feel like I don’t need to apologize to a professional about my lack of being a professional.  Also, he’s 3 months old.  Not a 3 year old like she’s been nanny-ing for.  For which she’s nannied.  Whatever, you get the point without me doing good grammar.  Grammar well.

Blah d blah blah.

It didn’t help that she was starting a mere 4 days after the awful murder of two kids by their nanny (allegedly).  I think we were both a little on edge.  So when Seth went in to the nursery after she had put Moe down for a nap and saw him with a blanket over him, he was understandably concerned.  And he told the nanny that it was not how we do things.  He CLAIMS he did it politely, but his polite can sound unhinged to an untrained ear.  This is all sounding like I’m blaming Seth, and that’s because I am.  But honestly, if I’m honest with myself, I was planning on just using her for two months (while Seth’s job was going) and letting her go so we could find someone better.

So, we don’t have a nanny now.

I’m sure everything will be fine.

Right?