A Week's Happenings

So what's been going on here for us in the past week?  Some good, some not so good, some icy icy coldness.

For starters, Violet has kept up her crazy pooping habits.  This tiny girl is going 2, 3, or 4 days between bouts of pooping.  This is quite unusual for her age and it's a bit unnerving, I must say.  She is obviously gaining weight, even without a fancy pediatric scale to tell us quantitatively how much, so I suppose there's nothing to worry about.  On the plus side, I have fewer poop-filled diapers to change and Violet has not the slightest hint of diaper rash.  Let's just say that WE KNOW when she finally has a bowel movement so she never has a chance to sit in a dirty diaper.  In less scatological and more doleful news of Violet, she has started to have crying jags in the evenings.  She started last week and they have escalated through this week, with just one evening's break here or there.  It's kind of upsetting to see her cry so much and be nearly inconsolable.  I guess that's not quite accurate because if we put her down, she wails with even more misery and force, so I suppose we are consoling her at some level.  It's forcing me to be more creative in thinking of comforting mechanisms because with Grace, I always just stuck her on a boob and she was happy; if sometimes she wasn't honestly hungry, she would do some comfort nursing and calm down.  Anyway, I've pulled out the baby/parenting books and started to think of other routines and coping mechanisms to try.  Violet's colic-style crying is confined to the evening hours so I'm sure it's nothing medically or physically wrong with her--  poor little thing is just overly tired or overly stimulated or flipping out or whatever.

In happier news, I got a smashing haircut last week.  Hooray!  One day when Grace was at school, I convinced my mom to accompany me to the salon and hold Violet while they chop chop chopped my hair off.  It's a lot shorter and lovely and chic and I'm very happy with it; I'll work on getting a picture to post.  Actually, now that my hair is shorter and not pink, I need to get new pictures for my profiles on everything from Facebook to Twitter and everything; those pictures are not quite accurate anymore.  Also last week, I started running again.  We had some beautiful days and I was feeling so squashy and lumpy and lethargic that it sounded like a lovely thing to do.  It went quite well and I managed to go running 3 times last week.  I have a lot of weight I'd like to lose so I feel pretty motivated to start in with the exercise and healthful eating and whatnot.  I don't feel comfortable putting Violet in the childcare at the YMCA for another month or so, leaving me with options of getting outside or doing something at the house.  The icy weather this week threw a bit of a wrench in my new exercise plans, but I plan to get back to it.  I have such a love/hate relationship with running.  Well, let's be honest-- it's mostly hate.  But it's one of those exercises that I want to like, and that I sometimes do like, but sometimes I turn on it and cannot stand the monotonous putting one foot in front of the other.  Having children has changed my attitude toward exercise and running and whatnot.  I remember hearing people talk about exercise as something you do for yourself, i.e. some "me" time, and mostly this has made me think that those people need to discover such things as books, movies, TV, the internet, and the like to make their "me" time actually enjoyable.  I kind of get it now, though; going running feels like getting away from the demanding job of caring for two tiny people for a little while and doing something just for me.  Let's hope this thought lasts...

The icy weather came even to Texas this week and has caused us to hole up in our house and play the hermit.  Grace's preschool was cancelled on Wednesday so we stayed in and watched the icicles melt, after staying in the house on Tuesday while the ice actually came down.  Then today we stayed home too because I didn't have any errands I particularly needed to do and it seemed too cold to go for a walk.  The end result is that Grace, Violet, and I have not left the house for 3 days.  Violet and I are fine with this, but Grace finally fell victim to cabin fever the middle of this afternoon.  She went kind of crazy, running and yelling and being insane all over the house.  Life had been quite pleasant and relaxing and comfortable with the two girls up until that point, but then Grace lost her ability to be entertained by anything in the house and succumbed to slightly claustrophobic madness. Mental note: 3 days is her limit.

Mysteries

Now that Grace is older, there are parts of her life that we are not directly present for, and her life at preschool or Sunday school is pretty opaque to us.  Sometimes we pepper her with questions, trying to elucidate what she does, but these efforts are most often met with failure.  If I ask her what she did at school after I pick her up, her pat answer is, "I played with the other kids."  If I ask her leading questions about playing outside or eating lunch or reading books, she usually responds in the affirmative but I'm never sure if she's not just humoring me.  At times, we do get tiny tidbits of information about her life away from us.   Yesterday at dinner, Rob and I were trying to extract some information about what she did at school and she told us that she had music time when she sang songs with flags.  "Flags?" we thought.  "Maybe like scarves?  They were dancing around with scarves perhaps?"  No, Grace insisted, they were flags.  "With stars and stripes."  Oh, right, THAT kind of flag.  We hypothesize that they were doing some kind of patriotic song because of the inauguration.  When we tried to figure out what song they sang, all we could get out of Grace was her warbling, "No one no one no one no one no one no!"  Such a conundrum...

The riddle that Rob and I spend the most energy trying to solve is the enigma of puppets at Sunday school.  This past autumn Grace moved up from the nursery at church to the preschool area there; she seemed perfectly content about her new class but didn't really tell us anything about it.  We would ask and again, her standard answer was always, "I played with the other kids."  After multiple weeks there, one of our friends from church who has a daughter in the same class as Grace mentioned that she was really rushing that morning to get her little one to Sunday school in time for puppets.  "Puppets?" we asked blankly.  "They do puppets?"  It seemed like something that would have merited a mention, but such was not the case.  Now we always ask Grace about the puppets, but still we know next to nothing.  We ask her what the puppets do-- do they sing? do they tell stories?  And we ask what they are-- an animal? a person?  Grace sometimes answers vaguely in the affirmative but most often she says, "Shhhhhhhh.  We can't talk when we go to puppets."  We really don't know anything about the puppets except that Grace is very aware that you are not to talk.  She did tell us one time that there were boys who WERE talking but that they had to stop.  So now I mainly picture puppets involving a sort-of scary Brad Pitt telling the 2- and 3-year-olds that the first rule of puppets is you do not talk about puppets.

Decline and Fall of Me

One day near the end of Robert's paternity leave, I turned to him and said, "You know-- I don't feel that tired.  I think I'm doing really well."  Famous last words, right?  The two weeks since he went back to work have seen me not quite so chipper as my energy and good spirits have ebbed a bit.  Rob worked that first weekend so it was 12 days in a row of just me with the two lovely girls.  I am fortunate that he was able to come home every evening in time for bedtime routines, that friends have been bringing us meals several times a week, and that my mom was able to help out with some shopping.  Still, this past weekend found me calling people the wrong names and not quite able to string words into sentences and desperate for naps.  I'm a little surprised that I'm so tired because Violet is sleeping quite well for her age, going almost 5 hours overnight between nursing sessions, and is easy to return to sleep when she does wake up to eat.  I guess the tiredness isn't all about waking up to nurse, but also about the demanding daytime hours and just still healing from childbirth.

I am not about to tumble over any postpartum precipices or anything-- just more tired and stretched thin than I was two weeks ago.  It's somewhat discouraging to feel worse and worse as the days pass, but this past weekend with Rob home did a lot to halt my decline and surely soon life will get easier and things will start to turn up.  I remember the six-week mark being a big milestone with Grace when things started to feel a lot easier; that's only two weeks away!  Surely I can manage until then, staying even-keeled and content and just a bit worn out.

This morning I rubbed olive oil all over Violet's head and eyebrows in an effort to banish the cradle cap. She doesn't have a terrible case of it or anything; it's not even bad enough to really show up in pictures.  However, I have olive oil so I thought, "Eh, why not?" The general idea is to rub some olive oil on the flaky bits, let it sit to soften things up for 30 minutes or so, use a fine-tooth comb (like what comes in those baby toiletry kits) to loosen and brush out the flakiness, then give the baby a bath and shampoo out the olive oil and everything. I have to say that the process was quite dramatic in its effects when I started in with the comb.  A TON of gunk came off her, although I think I'll have to do it a few more times to really clear up the bit of seborrhea she's got. And as an added bonus she smelled like a delicious salad for a while. She is delicous, you must admit:

Geekery

Stolen from my grad school friend Amanda

Wavering

I am wavering in my resolve to not buy any clothes right now. I mentioned previously that I bought a pair of jeans about 4 weeks postpartum with Grace and how I later viewed it as a mistake purchase since I only wore them for a month before I could pull them off without undoing the button and zipper. Well, now I am full of uncertainty because from my current perspective it does not seem like such a dreadful thing that I had SOMETHING to wear for that month. Right now it is yoga pants or knit skirts for me; warmer days are fine because I look halfway decent in the skirts. On colder days, though, I pull out the yoga pants yet again and YET AGAIN look like I should be heading to the gym. Sigh... My maternity pants and skirts won't stay up and none of my regular clothes will zip or button. I just might cave and go buy some kind of inexpensive pants that I can wear for the next month when it's too cold for my skirts.

Our two little ones have fallen under the influence of a little cold.  What a dreary and annoying and messy thing a minor cold is...  The blue bulb syringe and I have spent some quality time together, and I can now share with you that it works much better on almost-3-year-old nostrils than wee tiny 3-week-old nostrils.  Fortunately no one has a fever or is too miserable and Violet is not so stuffed up to have trouble nursing; I just get to deal with lots of Kleenex and runny noses and snot.

In other bodily function news, Violet has not pooped since midday on Friday.  This would be freaking me out a lot more if this were my first baby; I had a few friends with babies right around Grace's age who would sometimes go multiple days between bowel movements.  Apparently it isn't too out of the ordinary for some breastfed babies to do this.  It does concern us a little bit, though, because it's more normal for a 3-month-old than a 3-week-old.  Tomorrow I'm going to break down and call the pediatrician for reassurance, with Rob's blessing.  Dealing with pediatricians is always somewhat complicated when you are married to one; on the whole, it's made me realize what they are trained for and what they're not trained for.  (Let's just say I won't be asking my child's pediatrician for advice on breastfeeding problems or sleep anytime soon.)  It is always good to have a neutral party to bounce ideas off of, though, so I'll call tomorrow to hopefully get reassured that this is within the normal range of pooping situations.

Violet's face has started bursting into those first fleeting sleep smiles pretty frequently these days.  It's so lovely to see her face break into a dimpled smile as she finishes nursing and her eyes flutter closed in sleep. It has made me realize that it will be just a few weeks before she is smiling for real, and this realization has in turn made me contemplate how soon Violet will be alert and awake and ready to play and interactive and a fuller version of the person she will eventually be.  It's magical and transfixing.