4/52 – Unexpected Perspective

I never imagined that our nursing relationship would be as important to me as it has become. Perhaps it is because I’m not instinctively a nurturing person.  Fixing your scrapes or helping you mend your broken heart isn’t something that will come easily to me.  Breastfeeding didn’t come easily, but it’s become the way I nourish your stomach and your soul.

I’m endlessly trying to capture you nursing. With every photo I come closer to capturing what I see in my minds eye, but I haven’t nailed it yet.  It’s hard to hold up a big camera with one hand and to take a perfectly framed self-portrait!

Your Mama has explicitly indicated that she’s seen enough of my boobs in photos, so this is a fresh take on breastfeeding.  Post-nursing with a tiny droplet of milk below your lip I hold you close and tight.  I cherish our breastfeeding relationship and wish I could hold on to it forever.  But just like my newborn morphed into an infant and is now beginning to morph into a toddler, I recognize that my being your milk mommy is all too fleeting.

The Mountain

When I pictured the maternity leave I was about to embark upon a year ago, I visualized a mountain.  Six months climbing to the top of the peak, or halfway point, and then clambering back down the last six months which would end with my return to work.

During the first six months of my maternity leave, I felt like I had all the time in the world.  I had a full year ahead of me to fill with the comings and goings of life and raising a baby.  I expected that the clock would start ticking marking the end of this  glorious year when we hit the six month mark.  For some reason it didn’t.  I had a very long six months left to enjoy.

For the first six months of mat leave, I lived and thought in the present.  I didn’t want to think about tomorrow, the day after it, or next week.  I didn’t care to think about life post-mat leave.  I wanted to snuggle with my baby, nurture her, photograph her, and fully drink the baby kool-aid.  Mat leave is indulgent and decadent.  It’s given me the precious gift of time to raise my baby.

As the winter days began to get darker and shorter, and are slowly becoming longer again, my leave expiration date looms in the not so distant future.  I have 11 weeks left with my baby.  I have 11 weeks left to cram in a whole lot of enjoyment and leisure with my big kids.  I only have 11 weeks left.  11 weeks.

That’s no time at all.  Yet all the time in the world.

10 months

The Doodle is 10 months old.  Holy moly.  THE DOODLE IS 10 MONTHS OLD!!!  When the heck did that happen?

In comparison to the previous three months, this photo shoot was tame.  The Doodle was pretty content to sit in her chair and gnaw on the number affixed to the front of her shirt.  There was no leaping, lauching or trying to get away from the camera this time.  Which was a good thing as I was flying solo during this shoot.

What I’m most struck by as the Doodle turns 10 months is that my baby is slowly morphing into a toddler.  She’s a girl on the go and is in to absolutely everything.  This morning, for example, she ripped apart my entire shirt drawer and tossed the entire contents onto our bedroom floor.  I really did need to organize and purge that drawer so I wasn’t too put out, but there’s no containing this child now.  She’s always on her feet and cruising off to her next adventure.

Here’s a few outtakes from our shoot.

If you want to reminisce on how the Doodle has continued to grow month after month, here’s her photo of the  month from the last 9 months.

3/52 – Negative Space

The photography challenge lasts another week with the theme of negative space.

While I selected the photo above as my pick of the week because I think it’s a slightly better photo, if you were to ask me which one I like better I would have to say the one below. I’m a bigger fan of the subjects captured in the image below.  And, it’s because this image is rich with love.

Behind Door Number 1

Last night Otto was late coming home from work.

As the minutes on the clock began to tick past 5:00 pm, the Doodle, Mr. Mooster and I hovered in the living room, occasionally peering out the large window that overlooks our driveway, waiting for the headlights of her car to drive up the darkened street.

While we waited for Otto to make her appearance, we played.  Mostly the Doodle tried to stand up using Mr. Mooster as a balance, and Mr. Mooster tried to run away from the fur clenching grip of the baby.

Otto would be home any time now.  We were sure of it.  It was her night to cook dinner.

The big kids then began to filter through the living room, one by one, asking where Otto was, quickly followed by asking what was for dinner.  My answer to both questions was a simple, “I don’t know.”

Otto hadn’t called and the minutes were passing by slowly.  She’s not usually late, and if she is, she calls.  I figured that she was stuck in traffic, and even though you can’t talk on the phone while driving, I dialed her phone number hoping she would stealthily pick up and whisper her location.

Otto’s phone rang and rang and went to voicemail.  I figured she couldn’t easily access the phone in her bag, so I called again.  The phone rang and rang and went to voicemail for the second time.  I started to get a little concerned.

The minutes slowly ticked by and tummies began to rumble.  The game of trying to stand up on the dog got old for the Doodle, so she turned her attention to trying to crawl to the gas fireplace and pull open the metal grate which hides wires and the on switch.  I followed suit playing the game of redirect and distract.

I glanced up at the clock again.  It was now twenty minutes to six.  Otto was very late and had gone dark.  I tried to call her again.  My irritation at her tardiness had turned into genuine worry.  To keep my worry at bay and conjuring up the worst possible reason for her not being in our home at this exact moment, I set myself out to tackle dinner.

Otto had constructed a weekly menu that consisted of mostly new dishes.  I read the name of the dinner aloud from the menu posted on the front of the fridge and tried to conjure up how to make it.  When that didn’t work, I opened up Otto’s computer to scour her bookmarks.  Only she uses a different browser than I do and in my agitated state I couldn’t even locate where the bookmarks were kept.  Thankfully, I could use the power of google and the highlights of links recently visited to figure out what I was supposed to feed my family.

As I began to chop the ginger, garlic and onions for the curried apple and lentil dal, I glanced at clock again.  Every few chops I would look back up to see how much time had passed as I strained to hear the sound of Otto’s key in the lock over the CBC playing in the background.

When the clock registered 6:00 pm and began to tick past that, I couldn’t help my self from mapping out contingencies.  Who would I call to watch after the kids if I had to go to the hospital?  How would I call our families to give them an update when I didn’t have a cell phone?  Would the cops call me to tell me there had been an accident?  If Otto wasn’t coming home ever again would the cops come to my house?  With every minute my thoughts got more and more morbid.  It was crushing to think of Otto never walking through our door again.

Otto was over an hour late.  She wasn’t picking up her phone.  She hadn’t called us.  I needed to get my family fed as soon as possible so that I would be free to deal with whatever crisis was about to strike.

As I began to toss the ingredients in the pot, my worry transformed from nonsensical hysterics to being founded in something that might soon be very real.  I bartered with myself and the universe.  I had a mantra.  “I don’t care whatever time it is when Otto walks through that door, I just want her to walk through it.”

The aromas of sautéed garlic and ginger floated through the air.  I tried to chop the apples as quickly as I could.  I kept on repeating my mantra over and over again.

I don’t care when Otto walks through that door, I just want her to walk through it. I don’t care when Otto walks through that door, I just want her to walk through it. I don’t care when Otto walks through that door, I just want her to walk through it.

I must have willed it so hard that it came true.  I turned around and Otto was there.

She was bracing for my anger, but I just wrapped my arms around her and kissed her hard on the lips.  I crushed her entire body with my worry, she tried to tell me about the car getting stuck on a patch of ice and how she finally got it unstuck, but I didn’t care.  All I cared is that she was safe, standing in the doorway of our home, breathing.  Then I could breathe again, too.  And remind her to call next time she was going to be late.

One Photo A Week

Back in the fall I took my very first photography course.  It was a mat leave gift that every Wednesday I’d be guaranteed to get out of the house for 3 hours all by myself to nurture a personal interest.  Despite my best intentions, I made it to 2/3 of the classes.  A few nights I wasn’t interested in the material being covered, and a few nights things were too chaotic with our kids that I felt compelled to stay home.

I like to think that I learned something from this class and that I’m a better photographer because of this investment.  In the least I now know how to use my DSLR on manual settings, and I can now pinpoint why my photographs aren’t working (not that I have yet to figure out how to fix the issues that I encounter, but I can usually work around them).

When the class finished, I found myself picking up my camera less in less.  In part it was because the darker days did not bode well for natural light photography, and in part because I just wasn’t inspired.

I’ve always wanted to tackle a project 365 where I would take a photograph a day for a year.  Only that’s way too ambitious for me.  While I might be able to accomplish taking a photograph each day, the thought of selecting one photograph, downloading and organizing it, processing it and uploading it seems like too much work.

Last year I devised a project 52 as I figured that taking one photo a week would be a much more manageable undertaking.  I took about 14 photos starting with my positive pregnancy test before I called it quits.

So when all of these bloggers started their various project 365, once-a-month and project 52s in 2012, I was going to let it slide.  I didn’t think I needed to nor wanted to jump on that carousel.

A week into the year, however, I suddenly and unexpectedly found myself inspired.  So I recharted my course again and have decided to try my lens at Paint the Moon’s project 52. I love that this photo challenge has captured the attention of amateur and professional photographers alike, that it has a whole photo editing element to it (where I really need to hone my skills), and even includes a kids challenge (and, um, most of those kids take better photos than I do and obviously know more about editing!).

As I plug my way through teaching myself Photoshop Elements and obsessively organize over 10,000 photographs that I found on my hard drive, I’ll start working on my own project 52 to be posted in my Flickr stream, and you can see the photos over there in the left sidebar and I’ll try to include a brief explanation of my theme interpretation with each one.  I missed week one, so I just pulled something I shot in December.  Here’s my contribution from week two:

2/52 – Open

Raising a baby takes a certain amount of openness in one’s heart.  You find yourself unconditionally falling in love with another human being and you need to be open to the needs of your child which may be different than those you envisioned cultivating.

We’ve been trying to launch the baby into a little bit more of her own independence by getting her to sleep for at least part of the night in her own bed.  Only after a few setbacks, she had her own plans and has made her intentions quite clear for someone without words.  While she is sometimes ready to fall asleep on her own, without being held or nursing, she will only do so in the family bed. This baby does not want a bed or room of her own.

For now we have to remain open to the idea that our sleep space will continue to be shared.

Roulette

Last night as I was lying in bed, aimlessly surfing the interwebs trying to calm my mind in preparation for sleep, I was reading a blog that led me to this blog about Stella Joy.

It was the blog chronicling the life of Stella and her two mommies and her new baby brother.  Only the blog wasn’t about chronicling Stella’s life, it was about celebrating her life as it comes to an end.  Stella has terminal cancer.  This beautiful, curly, red-haired, blue-eyed baby is only 2.5 years old.

My heart broke as I tried to imagine what it would be like to have one of my children die on me.  Then my heart stopped when I saw a picture of Stella smooshed between her two mommies.  My brain kept on shouting no, no, no, and I frantically began clicking links on the blog trying to verify the identity of these mommies.  And then it was there right in front of me.  I know them.  I know one of Stella’s mommies.

I first met Aimee back in 2005 or 2006 when she volunteered on the Board of an organization that I also sat on.  We were delighted to have her join our team as she had a great camping background and still worked in camping.  She was the director of operations at a summer camp for kids with cancer (oh, the brutal irony of that). Aimee is good number 82.  Aimee was delightful to work with, so full of energy, gave so much to this organization, and I was sad to see her not renew her two year term.

We live in different cities and over the years have lost touch.

I was devastated to learn of  this news last night, and I’m still devastated this morning.  I cannot believe that they’re going to lose their baby.  This is so uncomfortably close for me.  I’m sorry that they’re living through this hell right now.

While I know this kind of thing happens everyday, it’s just chance that it’s happening to someone in my network.  This could be my baby.  This could be your baby.

Now that I know, it’s not something I can be silent about.  I can’t just be a lurker on her blog.  But how do you write that email to someone, how do you find the right words, to tell someone you just heard about their baby’s terminal illness?  Acknowledging it is going to be hard, but not acknowledging it would be even worse.

Friday Five

One.  This morning the Doodle was eating cheerios in her exersaucer in the kitchen and Wifey passed through the room to say goodbye on her way to work.  The Doodle kept on raising her arms to be picked up, so Wifey scooped her up, gave her a gentle quick kiss, and set her back down to continue eating her cheerios.

As Wifey turned her back to the baby and began to walk away, the Doodle raised one arm and said “Mama.”  I caught this, only Wifey missed it as she had begun to speak to me at the same time as the Doodle uttered her name.  We unsuccessfully tried to re-create the moment.  Intentional or not, it was pretty darn cute.

Two.  On my way to the car with the Doodle in my arms, I intercepted the postman walking up our driveway.  In one arm he had a small package which I knew to be some books I ordered, and in the other there was a card.  I glanced at the card as I hopped into the car.  I recognized the handwriting, but couldn’t immediately place it.

At a red light I opened the card and immediately knew who it was from.  My Wifey had sent me snail mail.  It couldn’t have arrived at a more desperately needed time in the midst of our sleep crisis.  As I read the words she gifted to me, I melted and teared up.

Wifey and I used to romance each other all of the time, but with kids, a dog, extended families, friends, work and a hectic life, it’s often something that gets pushed to the background and is sporadic if we can manage it at all.  In fact romance is more pedestrian at this stage of life as it arrives with someone spontaneously shoveling the driveway or unexpectedly cleaning the house.

But not this day.  Or once a week for the next 51 weeks.  Wifey’s project-o-love is to write me a letter each and every week for the rest of the year.  This makes me swoon.  I’m so lucky to have married this girl.

Three.  Speaking of romance, I just shoveled the driveway.  Well half of it for now, but notably the most difficult part which is the bottom after the plow has been by, which I snuck out to do as the baby napped.  This is only the second time I’ve shoveled the driveway this winter.  In part because it hasn’t been terribly snowy here, and in part because Wifey’s new job doesn’t involve any out-of-town travel, and she  has been in town to rock-paper-scissors for the sharing of this household chore.

I don’t mind shoveling the driveway.  If done correctly, as in done at a quick pace, it’s a good cardio workout.  So much so that I like to substitute a good 10 minute shovel for running 5k on the treadmill at the gym.

Four.  As a parent, I try really hard to listen to my kids or be engaged when they speak about things they are interested in.  It’s over the dinner table where these conversations organically take place.  I love to hear about their day at school, what their friends are up to and what’s new in their life.  What I don’t really care about are the transformers, video game characters or assassin’s creed ninja.  And lately this seems all that they want to talk about and make the bizarre esoteric references.  It’s actually more fascinating to observe how Bella and Bubaloo interact with one another, than to listen to the contents of their conversations.  I wonder when we’ll be unified in our interests again?

Five.  Sleep is still fleeting in our household and the big kids have stepped up to help without even being asked.

Every day after school this week, one of them has taken the Doodle to play with for upwards of an hour.  This has given me some time to nap (albeit unsuccessfully thus far), to do something around the house with that requires two hands and no Doodle wrangling, or have an uninterrupted phone conversation.

There’s nothing I love more than to hear the kids laughing and to watch them bond with one another.  Bella and Bubaloo adore their little sister, and in turn, she adores them.

Operation: Sleep

Like most parents of babies, we’ve hit a wall with sleep. We’re trapped somewhere in the never-ending cycle of perpetual sleep deprivation.

In retrospect months 0-4 were heavenly with the Doodle.  I expected to be tired.  And I was.  I woke up 2-3 times to nurse the baby each night.  She never fully woke up for those feedings.  She would just paw at me in her sleep, I’d give her milk, and fall asleep while she ate.  I slept in short chunks of constantly interrupted sleep, but I woke up functional, coherent, rational and feeling pretty well rested each morning.  The universe had graced us with a good sleeper.

Then the Doodle turned 4 months old and overnight all that was good in our nighttime world disappeared.  She was restless and frantic in her sleep.  She would flail and twitch and wake up crying.  The Doodle has never been difficult to put to sleep, she still isn’t, she just stopped staying asleep.  She was up every hour or two all night long, and when she wasn’t up to nurse, she was keeping me up with her restlessness.

At first I blamed the infamous 4 month sleep regression.  Her sleep changed all of a sudden, overnight really.  It was quick and explosive.

I thought she’d settle back to a routine of some sort, but when it didn’t I blamed teething.  But when she got her first two teeth at nearly 5 months, her sleep didn’t change.

The first teeth were quickly followed by teeth three, four, five and six.  Still, her sleep didn’t change once those teeth came in.  I was sure it was because teeth seven and eight were on the verge.  I’ve been waiting two months now, and while the Doodle displays signs of teething, I don’t think they’re going to show up any time soon.

While I was waiting for the rest of her teeth to show up, her sleep was getting worse and I was becoming more of a zombie each and every day.  Not only was the Doodle restless in her sleep, but she began to pinch and claw at me.  She flailed her limbs all night long, hitting, smacking and waking me up from whatever little sleep I somehow managed to slip into.

For a while I tried to rationalize the Doodle’s sleep issues away with all kinds of explanations.  Maybe it was because of all of the development happening with crawling, pulling up and starting to cruise.  Maybe it was because of the onset of separation anxiety.  Maybe she was sensitive to dairy or allergic to the dog.  Maybe it was because she was a light sleeper and every jingle of the dog’s collar or step on the creaky wood floor was disturbing her.  Maybe she was too hot.  Maybe we ruined her by bed sharing. Maybe she wasn’t getting enough sleep in a 24-hour period.  Maybe she was getting too much sleep in a 24-hour period.

The only maybe I wasn’t willing to consider was that we had a crappy sleeper on our hands and I’d just need to roll with it.

By the middle of December, or after 4.5 months with pretty bad sleep, I was grasping at any possible explanation and trying out various solutions.  I wanted a quick and easy fix.  I want to try something and to see immediate results that indicated some sort of progress.

Right after the Doodle turned 9 months, I hit a wall.  The 9 months of Doodle sleeplessness and the previous 9 months of pregnancy had left me with no reserves in my sleep tank.  I was exhausted.  Cranky, tired, and over it.

Wifey and I made a sleep plan and implemented it with some success over the holidays.  Only it wasn’t perfect, and we kept on tweaking it nightly because I’m exhausted and impatient, and wasn’t seeing the results I wanted to.  We focused on creating new positive sleep associations and I think we overwhelmed her with too many changes at once.  Wifey was following my lead on operation sleep, but had pretty much had it, and was about to suggest crying-it-out as the holy grail of solutions.

I think our experiences of attachment with our older kids have really shaped our parenting of the baby.  We’re not cry-it-out people for a number of reasons. I can’t stand to her the Doodle cry, I think she’s telling me about her needs when she cries, and she settles quickly in my presence or with my touch as she’s easily soothed.

Even more than that, I believe that babies can be pretty neatly divided into two camps.  The baby who needs to cry to release tension to go to sleep and the baby who will cry and cry and cry and just get more agitated and excitable.  The Doodle is of the later variety.

We’ve tried to cry-it-out three times.

The first time was around 6 months of age.  I put her in her crib to sleep for the night and sat beside her singing, patting, and shushing for over an hour.  She was miserable and went from crying to hysterical screaming.  She was inconsolable.  It just affirmed that we’d made a good choice in not letting her cry it out.

Then there was another time around 7 months of age where I put her down for a nap after another exhausting night.  She had been asleep and the moment I walked out of the room she started to fuss.  So I let her fuss.  I wanted to see if she would just go back to sleep.  She cried for 40 minutes while I cried for sitting at the top of the stairs listening to her anguished cry.

The third time was last night.

After having put her back to sleep 4 times in less than 2 hours, the Doodle woke up.  Instead of rushing to her, Wifey and I agreed to let her cry for 5 minutes to see what would happen.  I got ready for bed in the bathroom that adjoins her room while I listened to the Doodle’s screams get more and more frantic.  I kept on thinking, “How do people listen to their babies scream?” or “How is this supposed to be effective?” or “How long does a baby cry on her own before it can be considered neglect?”

Then there was a loud thunk.

The Doodle had thrown herself out of the pack n’ play and fell three feet to the floor.  She landed head first.

The baby was so frightened, or angry, that neither of her mommies came to her aid that she managed to get from her stomach to a kneeling position to standing so that she could leap out of her bed to find someone to comfort her.  All while she was wailing hysterically.

I got to the Doodle first and scooped her up in my arms.  We calmed her down together.  When the crying finally subsided we thoroughly checked her for injuries and applied some frozen peas to her quickly growing goose egg.  Other than being shaken from her tumble, the Doodle was fine.

We on the other hand are pretty horrified that we let our exhaustion get the best of us.  Not only did we go down a parenting road philosophically that we weren’t comfortable with, we also didn’t listen to our guts and lower the baby’s bed and placed her in a position of danger.

We’ve tossed out the cry-it-out manual and are going to continue on with our original operation sleep plan.  We’d like to get the baby down for the first 3-4 hours on her own in the pack n’ play and then she can restfully sleep for the rest of the night with a limited number of night wakings in the family bed.

The Bunny and the Orange

We’ve been working on improving the Doodle’s sleep, which is an entirely different and much longer post, but so far it’s been working pretty well.  Until yesterday when she was out of sorts both in waking and in sleep.  I think she’s teething.  But then again I’ve blamed the last four months of her erratic sleeping behaviours on the promise of new teeth shortly breaking through the gum line.  We’re still at six teeth and holding.

When the baby is in the light stage of her sleep cycle, Mr. Mooster is such a big distraction.  He’s on the bed, off the bed, dropping his ball, occasionally alerting us to some danger with a bark, all the while his collar jingles and jangles.  If we close the bedroom door, he just sits in front of it and whines, which is far worse for the sleeping baby than all of the above.

Only in the last few days, Mr. Mooster has uncovered a new threat to our household.  A bunny.  It’s a lovely bunny indeed that’s moved into our hedges.  I have no problem with this new creature building a home in our backyard.  I figure that the bunny and the dog will work it out.

What I don’t appreciate is that the bunny taunts the dog.

Around 10:00 pm each evening the bunny has begun to plop herself in the middle of our front lawn right in front of the very large window that Mr. Mooster perches himself in to watch the world.  While the bunny quietly sits there, Mr. Mooster is frantic and barking his doggie face off.  This in turn unsettles the Doodle.  We then have a crying baby to contend with, as well as one teenager who gets irked that all of the commotion is preventing him from getting to sleep.  The other teenager stays up later than us all and couldn’t care less about any sound.

Last night I was desperately trying to keep the Doodle asleep to avoid ruining this new sleep routine when the bunny and the dog started up.  Wifey sprinted down the stairs, I heard the front door open and close, and then it was quiet again.  She returned to bed along with the dog.

Wifey crawled back into bed and looked at me,  “I threw an orange at it.”

I didn’t say anything with words, just my face.  A very quizzical expression is what I imagine I sported.

“I grabbed one of those clementines and lobbed it at the bunny.  It’s snowing and cold out and I wanted to throw something out there that I wouldn’t have to retrieve.  Wasn’t that smart?”

I remained silent for a second processing this turn of events.  I looked at her and carefully spoke trying to remove as much incredulity as I possible could, “You hit the bunny with a clementine?”

“No! I didn’t hit the bunny,” she responded.  “You know I can’t throw for beans and I have no aim.  As soon as the orange released from my hand and it started whizzing through the air the bunny took off.  It didn’t go anywhere remotely near the bunny.  But I don’t have to go out and get it!  Maybe the bunny will eat it, or the squirrels, but there’s no more bunny and no more barking dog.  Pretty good, huh?”

I was happy that the situation was resolved.  No more bunny, no more barking dog, and thankfully a still sleeping baby.  All because my Wifey threw a clementine out the front door.