6 month triumph (not the band)

6 months baby yeah! I so mega did it and I am so impressed with myself. Honestly, 2 months ago, 3 months ago, I didn't know if I would make it breastfeeding all the way to 6 months, but as of today, I have officially done it. In your face milk supply and various other obstacles! From here on in, any extra time I do is icing on the breast milk cake. "Ew!", you say. Don't knock it till you've tried it.

So that milestone is reached. Realistically, I have another 6 to go, but I don't think they'll be as challenging.

Sleep however... well, ladies and gentlebens, that's a whole other kettle of stinky, stinky fish. Man oh man does L ever not sleep good. I mean up every hour, all night, every night.

When you are that sleep deprived and frustrated and despairing, it would be lying to say that, even if just for a moment, the thought of packaging up the baby to send to Santa Claus to be raised as a toy making elf doesn't start to seem like an inevitability if something doesn't give. Of course neither T or I would ever, ever do that, or anything even close, but a primal part of our brains, that is gunning for our own survival does suggest the option to us at 4am after 13 attempts to get L to sleep only to have him wake the second we put him down each time. In short, dude is not good at sleeping. Don't think we haven't tried every scientific, unscientific or downright kooky solution we've come across. I can only pray (another result of a sleepless brain) that he will grow out of this very very soon.

Were you wondering if having a baby would cramp your style at all? Hah! Heck yes it will. It will double-dog cramp your friggin style. And then some. I dream of the day when I can have a long shower, or watch a tv show, or go see a movie. Drawing or sewing seem like a very distant mist on the horizon across the ocean on another planet.

L, you are lucky you are so cute and smart and squishy and warm and good smelling! If babies weren't so appealing, we'd all drop them off at the nearest church doorstep by the 1st month!

I'm so shocked Monsterteeth! Babies are God's gift from the whispers of angels! Raising a baby is a joyful privilege from baby jesus!!

Yes, but it also sucks a whole lot at least half of the time and will challenge your inner strength and energy reserves like a marathon in a war...(note: some people actually do all 3. Some people have babies while moving across countries during a war. My Oma for example. This humbles me and blows my mind. Humans do what we must do I guess.)

It's hard to remember that, when you are exhausted, staring bleary eyed at the little human that kept you up all night. All you want to do is sleep, but he wants you to hold him and play and keep him happy and feed him and stop him from crying and you wonder how you are ever going to get through another day, but you do and you go to bed and you know you won't sleep more than an hour at a time again that night, so you resign yourself to it and you get through it and in between those tough hours, night and day, your baby flashes a smile or giggles or just smells really good and you remember that it really is amazing and awesome that he was born and is there in front of you growing and being a little tiny person.

As my other grandmother, (who did a year and a half long no sleep marathon with her first child all on her own) reminded me, I am lucky to have the help of my own grandparents. They have been seeing our raggedy ass mugs( T and I) and L's perfect, cherub cheeked, alabaster mug nearly every day lately. All hail my parents for the degree of relief they provide. I highly recommend buying your self some good parents if you haven't already got some!

It is due to their aid that I am able to type this right now. I'm even going to watch a movie! I am so stoked! It's like Christmas!

L, you are 6 months old today. You make us tired, but you are the most beautiful, charming baby so we forgive you. Happy 6 monthiversary little dude.

Who you calling space trash?

You know when you can't fall asleep at night because you are thinking: What if I have to hurl myself through a wall of fire while holding my son...will I be able to protect him? Will my hair burn off? If I have to drop him out the window in a pulley made of sheets while I am on fire, will I be able to do it?

Oh, you don't think such things?

Last night it was space trash. I started worrying about all the space trash in orbit and wondering what happens if it gets knocked out of orbit and goes hurtling to the far reaches of the universe, upsetting the delicate balance of all things with a horrible chain reaction of mass destruction?

2 nights ago, it was the CERN large hadron collider in Switzerland. I mean, should people be accelerating particles like that?

It used to be only things related to Leon that would keep me awake. I have a graphic imagination and there are many horrifying scenarios of misfortunes and accidents to be keeping a lady up at night.

Now, it would seem, my brain is opting for some more obtuse examples of worrisome tableaux, if you will.

That, paralleled with a dear son nursing every hour and a half through the night, makes for a rather tense, bleary eyed woman of the world. I mean, really, do I need to be worrying about what Swiss scientists are doing with their sub-atomic particles? It's like being in an airplane and convincing yourself that unless you continue to use your own personal sheer will power to keep the plane in the air, the whole damn thing will nosedive in a fiery, horrible crash ( I do this by the way). Meanwhile, other, more sensible people are on planes getting liquored up and reading vanity fair and snoring and drooling on the stranger seated beside them.

It doesn't end there. My dreams taunt me also. I dream about hateful airplane rides all the time. They are always very scary, always exaggerated in the amount of take offs and landings required and always involve lots of banking and diving and swerving and listing and all those other flight related words. I wake up with my fists clenched and my teeth grinding. Again, the more well balanced gentry would be using bedtime to relax.

Sigh. I really do tire of the endless capacity of my brain to find things to worry about in explicit detail. Here I am at my parents, after a night of not sleeping. The idea is they entertain L, while his ragged mother gets some sleep, but no! I'm hunched over this keyboard instead, because I was just laying in bed awake, writing this blog entry in my head anyway and would have kept repeating it over and over until it was written.

"Release me!", in the great words of the even greater named Englebert Humperdink. His parents were obviously the relaxed sort to not be worrying about giving their son such a name. Release me brain, and let me sleep again.

The unholy and the lulling.

I had a dream where I was wandering around a house, looking for the baby I had to nurse. Someone opened a door to a basement and there, at the bottom of the steps, in the creepy dark, was Gary Busey, waiting. Talk about unholy! The dream ended at that point. No way was I going to nurse Gary Busey, even if he did do a good job at playing Buddy Holly.



I wonder if any Buddy Holly songs make good lullabies. I don't know many traditional lullabies, so I just sing contemporary songs that sound relaxing. My favourite one right now is "Space Oddity". Go ahead. Try it. Sing it quietly to yourself. Makes a great lullaby doesn't it? I bet Buddy Holly's "Everyday" would make a good one too.
"Oh Yoko" works good too.







What would you sing?