When playing with your child, some common sense is in order. After eating, for example, is not the best time for bouncy play.
That’s fairly logical, but there’s a derivative from this: after eating (up to, say, an hour after), avoid any play that places the child’s head directly above your head.
As a newly washed car is to a bird, so your face, with it’s stupid, wide-open-mouth smile, is to your child…
I’m constantly amazed at all the things L has to learn, and how quickly she learns them. She learned those things waving around in front of her face were hers, and then she learned to control them. She’s figured out that those growths from her lower body are hers, too, and she’s learning to control them too.
Both those examples are very concrete.
Lately she’s been getting into the abstract.
We noticed last night, for instance, that she’s figured out a major fact about the world around her: it generally stays in the same place, and it’s she that moves. She was watching K load the dishwasher, and I turn around 180 degrees. She quickly turned her head and continued watching. And it took me just a couple of seconds to realize the significance of what she’d done. I turned back around again; she turned her head again, and giggled when K kissed her cheek.
There’s a definite developmental order almost all infants follow. Sitting comes before standing. Crawling comes before walking. Babbling comes before talking. Liquids come before solids. It’s all very regimented in the child’s development.
Or so I thought.
L has been challenging that preconception, though. Now, the Girl absolutely and very resolutely does not want to sit. She wants to stand. Sort of. We’ve been burping her simply by setting her on bottom and letting the pressure that exerts on her belly (when she leans over slightly) force out all the offending air. Now, she simply extends her feet when we move her from a horizontal to vertical position, and it’s virtually impossible to get her simply to sit.
Sitting is one thing. This is quite another.
Update I somehow didn’t provide the link to the video. That’s been corrected.
For the first time in ages, K and I slept in the dark last night.
No, not the “first time in ages.” The first time in almost four months.
Since L’s birth, we’ve kept a small red light on beside the bed. You never know when the girl’s going to wake up in a pacifier panic, or spit up and need emergency cleaning, or any number of other horrid, life-threatening things.
But  last night, K thought we should do an experiment — open the blind to the window on her side of the bed and see if that provides enough light. And it did.
And so for the first time in weeks and weeks, I lay there in the dark, no red light filling the room with an oddly calm-yet-angry glow (red light is just really not all that pleasant at all), and it honestly felt as if it was the firs time in my life that I’d slept in the dark. It felt like going to bed without brushing my teeth, or coming home without hugging, kissing, and playing with the girl, or eating cereal with skim milk — it just felt unnatural.
Next step — get the girl to stay in her crib all night, even in the midst of needing a 1:00 a.m. feeding…
The Girl has been sick-ish. Lots of saline nose drops and bulb syringe work as a result. Lots of crying. And least significantly: a beautiful weekend spent inside.
L is at the age now where she’s starting to recognize things — including bulb syringes. Which means she sometimes starts before the whole process starts. Then, the degree of difficulty increases significantly as she jerks her head from side to side, crying, snorting, and being generally miserable.
And so now that we’re at the point of L’s life we were all sort of looking forward to (the time when she’s not so fragile as when she was first born), we’re looking forward to when she’s able to communicate her needs, and, more importantly, we’re able to communicate with her.
“I know this hurts, but I need to do it so you’ll be able to breathe better.”
I have a friend who once put her cat in the drier — by accident, she claims. She just closed the drier door and it started up. From the inside came howls and screeches and the odd sound of scamper, scamper, scamper thud. My friend was laughing and crying so hard, she said later, that it took her just a moment to get the door opened. Off the cat bolted, disappearing for a good long time, emotionally scarred for life.
All that is just to point out that driers can be used for things other than drying clothes.
Take calming babies, for example.
K and I had heard several couples say that the only thing that would calm their child was to put him on the drier and turn it on. Apparently the combination of motion, noise, and warmth was somehow soothing.
The other night, L in full panic mode, we decided to try it. And it worked. I put her on the pillow and blanket we’d set on the drier and she stopped instantly. It didn’t work for a long time, as evidenced by the picture: eventually she wanted her pacifier as well. But it’s good to know that, when all else fails, Maytag can save the day minute.
One two, one two — chop chop! There’s a sense of urgency to the arrival at the hospital that I’ve never experienced before. Yet, strangely calm urgency.
We get to the emergency room and the attendant grabs a wheelchair for K and I head back out to park the car. By the time I come virtually sprinting into the birthing room, K is on the bed, a nurse is getting a vast array of implements ready, and we’re all wondering when the midwife is going to arrive.
The nurse hooks up the two belts around K’s belly that measure the contractions and L’s heartbeat. She goes over some paperwork with K (“Would you refuse any particular type of medical intervention on religious grounds?” and the like) and then the midwife comes in. This is something like her 1,600th birth — she’s calm, calm, calm.
Contractions continue. Questions continue. More nurses come in and prepare a tray covered with various “sharps” — scissors, scalpels, needles, and a few things that look more Inquisitorial than medical.
Paperwork complete and sharps in place, it’s time to get K to the tub. I glance at my watch — it’s something like 6:40 am. We’ve only been there a little over forty minutes. Things are going so fast that it’s difficult for me to keep everything in perspective.
Once K’s in the, everything calms. K relaxes so much — and is so exhausted — that she actually begins falling asleep between contractions, which are coming with more frequency and lasting longer. I begin thinking, “Forget this hours in labor stuff — we’re having this baby within a few minutes.”
Close.
Through this all, K’s constant question: “When will I know to push?” The midwife, the nurses, everyone (except the only man in the room) respond with a reassuring laugh: “Oh, you’ll know.” One compared it to the feeling you get when you absolutely have to have a BM and there’s no toilet around. Nothing like a metaphor even the man can understand.
Sure enough, within a few minutes, K says, “I think I need to push.” And push she does, probably a total of less than ten times.
At 8:05, L makes her appearance, covered in cheesy Vernix caseosa, which the midwife advises K to use as lotion around her eyes. Her eyes, not L’s. “It’s the best moisturizer in nature,” she explained.
Within minutes, K’s in the bed, with L lying on her chest, and G standing around in a daze…
All my life, I’ve had an impossible, unlikely scenario in my head: driving my laboring wife to the hospital, I get pulled over by the police for speeding.
We’re about eight miles from the hospital. It’s early Saturday morning. There’ll be no traffic, so I decide we’ll forget the back routes (which are really a touch longer, but less traveled) and go the main way.
About a mile down the road, we realize K doesn’t have her wallet. We go back, get the wallet, and start again.
K is groaning and begging me to hurry; the road is deserted; I speed up and do between 65 and 70 mph on a quiet highway with a speed limit of 45 mph.
As I near the intersection with the main road in town, the highway curves gently to the right, slightly downhill.
On the left side of the street is an Ingles. In a small darkened access road to the left sits a car. I know what it is immediately.
We come to the stop light, and I look in the rear view mirror — there he sits, though his lights are not on. I decided I’ll go ahead and pull over preemptively, but when the light turns green, his lights turn on. I pull over.
Fortunately, the officer is reasonable and lets me go with a warning to drive carefully.
But no offer to escort me? Come on! That’s not how we all envision it!
K arrives home exhausted. “I just want to relax,” she says. “I have a feeling I’m going to need my strength.”
I make a quick pizza and salad for dinner, and after eating, K goes to the bedroom, not to emerge until it’s time to go to the hospital.
Worried, I set up the baby monitor we got at one of the many showers held in L’s honor and set it up. Throughout the night, K is moaning in her sleep, and often going to the bathroom. I bring her tea with lemon and honey. She sleeps a little more. I bring her more tea. She sleeps still a little more, but it’s a fitful sleep.
There’s no doubt in my mind that sometime Saturday we’ll be going to the hospital. Still no contractions, but it seems inevitable.
From birthing class, I know that it won’t be a question of Boom! and here comes the baby. Such things only occur in Hollywood. Labor takes time. Hours. Even days.
A story was told early in the class of a woman who was in labor for two weeks. Two weeks of contractions, hours apart, and slowly, probably almost imperceptibly for her, growing closer and stronger.
K’s friend spent sixteen hours in labor at the hospital. That’s not counting the time at home.
“We’ll be going to the hospital sometime in the late morning or early afternoon,” I say to myself, and sit down to prepare a short post making the announcement.
Born Saturday, December 16 at 8:05 am
Seven pounds, fifteen ounces
The most beautiful creature K and I have seen
More details later in the week