Vogueing for the camera
Hormones. Loving the hormones.
The other night I went to bed early and I just lay there and cried for a good hour. (PRO TIP: This type, and length of crying will ruin your white pillowcases and make you look like a feral zombie-person the next morning with eyelids swollen to thrice their natural size.)
Adam was quite alarmed when he found me sobbing in the dark, using a pair of my disposable mesh underpants as kleenex, and I struggled between gasps for air to reassure him, to explain why I was crying. But I couldn’t really, I didn’t know why, I just felt these waves of emotion crushing me and all I could do was open the floodgates and wait for the crush to subside. Wait for the swells to die down.
I think part of it was tiredness – I’d been riding a bit of a high since Olive was born, and although we are getting a good amount of sleep each night in terms of total hours, it’s been broken up into 2-3 hour stretches and even less the night before when she was cluster feeding (which basically means she was hungry every hour and a half or so).
I’ve been finding it difficult to nap. If one more person tells me to “sleep when the baby sleeps” I might have to bludgeon them to death, because it’s quite difficult to – in the span of a few days- release the internal to-do list, the instinct to be efficient and productive, to ignore that lengthy roll call of expectations you hold for yourself as a person.
Showering, getting dressed, making yourself look less like a feral zombie-person, trying to make a dent in the dog-hair tumbleweeds coating your floor and cataloging each minute variance in expressions shifting across my daughter’s face – all of these take priority over napping and I’m still struggling to change that. I lie down to sleep and my eyes refuse to close, I can’t turn my brain off.
Part II to cry-fest ‘12 was that after five days or so of my incision feeling awesome, it suddenly didn’t. Anytime I was upright it ached, throbbed, I was maxed out on the amount of painkillers I could take and spent the day shuffling around in pain, swallowed by google searches to see if this sudden onset of pain meant that I was suffering from spontaneous internal combustion, or that the incision would suddenly split open spilling my guts everywhere. (In case you were wondering, the general consensus was that I was overdoing it and needed to just rest. I did and things are now back to being on an even keel.)
And finally, the remaining part of the equation was hormones crashing – yeah hormones! (Anything I can’t explain I blame on hormones- it’s a permanent get out of jail free card. Why are my pants pulled up to my bellybutton? Hormones. Why did I eat the last half of the cheesecake I promised Adam I would save for him? Hormones man, fucking hormones!)
Somehow the crying was good though, afterwards I felt happily drained, emptied, ready to be filled up again. It was the essence of catharsis. Olive jumped on board and picked an excellent night to start sleeping in 4 hour stretches (something she’s done every night since KNOCK ON WOOD this continues because it is simply awesome and Adam and I may have obnoxiously high-fived after we slept in until 10am this morning.)
My baby sister Mawney visited for a day and a bit, and with her visit, Olive has now met half of the crazy aunts and uncles on my side of the family (my sister Claire was the first sibling to hold her, visiting us in the hospital, and Liam visited a few days ago).
Seeing my siblings hold her, meet her, get to know her little face and feet and the way she squeaks like a screen door – this was something I’ve been looking forward to for months. It brings a lump to my throat to see them hold her, to know what a huge role they will play in her life, how much love will be exchanged back and forth. People have been asking me how many kids I want to have, and these brothers and sister of mine, these crazy individuals are the reason I answer “as many as I can”.
If we had the money, the time; over-population be damned I’d have a half-dozen little Olives.
And here is the part where this blog turns into a mommy-blog – I’m about to share a poop story. But it’s an awesome poop stories because Olive is the one pooping and she is the best baby ever – in my completely unbiased opinion.
Her latest thing is to soil herself as soon as the air touches her bottom – preferably as soon as we’ve removed one diaper but before we’ve replaced it with another. She’s an open-air pooper, my daughter, and who can argue with that? It seems nice, breezy. Last night we drove down to the city to drop Mawney off at the ferry and we went for dinner before going home. I fed Olive in the car (as Adam anxiously screamed “Cover yourself! That homeless man is looking at your nipple!”) and changed her before we went in, and sure enough, as we rigged up the changing pad in Adam’s lap and took off her diaper, BAM, she started pooping.
As we sat there scrambling to deal with the situation – me trying to make myself decent again, dirty diaper in one hand and wipe in the other, Adam laughing at Olive grunting and pooping in his lap and trying to grab another diaper – guys we really are parents.
Really and truly.
(I promise that this will be the first and last poop story.)
(Maybe)
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