The Search for a Pacific Baby
The pacifier is an innocuous looking little bit of plastic and rubber, but the British English term seems more indicative of its less-than-ideal nature: the dummy.
The pacifier is a substitute -- no one denies that. When an infant is whinny, colicky, unable to sleep, there’s nothing like the instinctual sucking motions of all infants to calm them down. Yet a baby cannot feed indefinitely, hence the pacifier -- the dummy nipple.
It’s an easy, logical answer: all the comforting sucking without the overeating. Yet, it seems akin to using the television as a babysitter. It’s an easy answer. And so, as parents, we all have to make the decision as to whether or not we’ll use one with our child.
With L, we experimented with one briefly when she was upset, rooting, and yet definitely fed. To our relief, L would suck on it for a moment, then either spit it out or allow it to be taken out.
“So a pacifier works,” we thought. A bit of a relief when you have a colicky baby.
Then I did a little reading and found that it’s not a good idea to use a pacifier with a baby who’s breastfeeding, at least until the baby is a month old and has mastered nursing (a skill both mother and daughter have had to learn, but that’s an entirely different story). The sucking motions are completely different, and using a pacifier sucking motion on while feeding results in underfeeding -- not a good idea when the baby hasn’t even returned to her birth weight yet.
And so, we put the pacifier away for good. Yet that leaves the question, how do you calm a panicky, colicky baby? We’ve found a few things that work with L -- any suggestions?
After Dinner
Lately, I’ve been the one finishing up the dinner process: the burping and, more importantly with L, the twenty or so minutes of cuddling afterwards.
She tends to do much better if one of us holds her for some time after dinner and after burping.
Not that I mind…
Mom
K's first couple of days after L's birth.
Enter: LMS, Part II :: Friday Evening
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.
Enter: LMS, Part I :: Friday Afternoon
Three o'clock, Friday -- my phone rings. As always, I jump when I see it's K calling. "Is she having contractions? Is she?"
She always reassures me that that's not why she's calling, and this time is no different. She does, however, also inform me this time that her afternoon visit at the midwife's clinic revealed that she's one centimeter dilated and ninety percent effaced.
"Ninety percent?" I say. "Our daughter could pop out any minute!" I joke.
"Ninety percent," I mutter to myself after I hang up the phone. Saturday night's plans are probably for naught; I probably won't be coming to work next week; we're going to have a daughter by weekend's conclusion.
Nothing's certain; everything's certain. I rush back inside to flesh out my lesson plans for Monday and Tuesday. My skeletal outlines will never do if someone else is leading class.
"Ninety percent," I say again.
It seems certain we'll be meeting our daughter this weekend.
Dear Thud
Dear Thud,
I know you are waiting in great expectation for the birth of your and Elf's child. Having experienced this recently myself, I thought I'd tell you to cherish something that you will lose forever once your child is born.
Sleep.
Who needs sleep?
Bare Naked Ladies
Well, you're never gonna get it.
Who needs sleep?
Tell me what's that for?
Who needs sleep?
be happy with
what you're getting--
There's a guy who's been awake
since the Second World War
It will disappear like a wisp of smoke, and you'll find yourself longing for one more chance at that last night before your child was born
It will disappear and the memory of it will instantly be so faint that you'll think you're hallucinating, that you never actually did sleep more two hours at a time.
It will disappear and be replaced at times with a roaring headache accompanied by the cause of that headache: a cry that is so piercingly shrill that it seems incapable of being produced by a human larynx.
You'll find yourself jealous of your child, sleeping at all hours, throughout the day--of course, only to wake up when any civilized person would be going to bed.
But there are advantages to being awake all the time. You see things like this.
So cheer up -- sleep deprivation is actually a blessing. True, it distills the first days into one, long, blur. But it's the most beautiful blur you'll experience.
In the meantime, get sleep. Sleep when you're not sleepy. Sleep just because you can. Sleep in the middle of the day. Set your alarm clock for 3 AM just so you can experience the wonder of turning it off and instantly going back to sleep. Sleep in chairs, on beds, in the middle of the living room floor. Wallow in sleep. Because take it from me -- the End is near!
But more importantly, so is the Beginning.
Droopily,
g
Feeding and Sleepling
L eats every two hours. And then sleeps.
I'm jealous.
Acclimation
L's been getting used to so many new things. The most obvious are the temperature changes she endures -- a far cry from the constant warmth in which she spent her first nine months. Hunger is another novelty for her. She doesn't like it one bit, and tends to get infuriated if not satiated.
Light is another.
The first times she really opened her eyes (about fourteen hours after she was born) was in total darkness. Slowly she's been daring to open her eyes in brighter and brighter light.
And finally, after a bath, this:
More at our Flickr slide show
Three Days Old
Covered in cheese, she came into the world in a mix of blood, water, and mystery. That is to say, she is elemental, and sublime.
She poops dark chocolate, chokes herself with spit, and shivers violently when she's cold, which doesn't take much.
Her cry when she's hungry is different than her cry when she's mad, which is different from her cry when she's cold.
Her language is rich with grunts, squeaks, moans, trills, howls, and a thousand thousand variations of all those things.
She wakes easily and falls asleep easily.
It often takes little to get her crying, and sometimes even less to get her to stop. But crying stretches her lungs and provides definitive proof that she is still breathing.
She smells of pinkness and warmth and contentedness, a fragrance more stunning than the most expensive perfumes. Her face is more perfect than anything Vermeer conceived and her cry makes Bach seem juvenile. Her eyes, still mostly closed, offer mystery and promise when a slit appears and a flash of iris shows itself.
She is most content when bundled tightly and free movement only makes her feel lost and cold. A tight swaddle stops crying instantly, and a loosening of her protective wraps brings a screech.
She is as light as a bundle of rags and heavier than all the world.
A gift, a responsibility, a privilege, a promise, a thesaurus of all the warm and wondrous words in all languages.
Pink Thing
"You make me want to laugh, you make me want to cry." Granted, Andy was singing about a baby boy, but for the most part, it works.
Lena Maria
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
We’re off…
It’s to the hospital with us!!
“A New Way Forward”
Geoff Nunberg, at Language Log, describes Bush's new slogan "A new way forward" thusly: "it sounds like a tagline an ad agency would come up with for a railroad trying to emerge from Chapter 11."
Short, and worth a read.
This Side of Tradition
Being pregnant -- nay, expecting -- in the Christmas season is about the most wonderful gift I can imagine.
Yesterday evening, K and I put on a CD of peaceful Polish carols, turned off all the lights, and sat in the glow of the Christmas tree, talking about the future.
A pregnant Christmas, like the first Christmas, is a Christmas of promise. It's the thought of a whole series of Christmases stretching into the future, including toddlers, children, teens, adults, grandchildren -- it's sitting at the beginning of a new tradition. As the generations repeat, so too Christmas, each one following the previous, each different, each connected.
That's perhaps one of the nicest things about Christmas. It's a tradition that invites new traditions. It's a tradition about birth, about humility, about peace, and those are things that are eternal and yet ever-new. They're things that surprise us and comfort us, like a good Christmas.