And maybe you should sleep...

I know, I know. You're probably thinking that I've dropped off the face of the planet, or been killed in some freak avalanche. At times I would agree with you. You know, the whole in-another-world thing, or feeling buried by lots of snow and completely unable to move. But I'm feeling less and less like that and life is (dare I say it?) starting to feel normal again. But not completely normal, just, normal with a baby. I'm not quite there yet, but I'm told it takes 5-6 weeks, and we're at 4 tomorrow, so I've got time.

I'm starting to figure out what to expect from my day, and how much I can reasonably hope to accomplish. I'm figuring out how to take naps and I even took my first shower with no-one else home the other day. I'm happy to say that Eli slept through the whole thing and I wasn't too traumatized by the experience to never want to try again.

Here's a problem I've encountered though: I want to do too many things. That may sound like a no-brainer statement, but before I had Elijah I didn't want to do anything. And I mean ANYthing. Movies were boring. Reading had lost its appeal. Piano was a chore, cross-stitching was a pain, socializing was for cheerful people, and cooking was right out. The only thing I felt like doing was housework, because it made me feel like I had some control and that things were ready-ish for the advent of babydom.

Now that Elijah's here, my desire to do things other than have a baby has returned, mostly because my ability to do them has decreased. I was so bored before he came, and now I'm once more grateful for the time I have to myself to do whatever I want. It's probably because I only get a couple hours like that in a day.

So NOW I'm having a really hard time managing to do all of the things I was capable of doing in a day before being a mommy. I want to read my new book, I want to work on my Christmas stocking cross-stitches, not to mention the three new patterns I have to work on, I want to make Matthew dinner (isn't that funny? I WANT to do it!) I want to attempt newborn photos of Eli, I want to write in my journal, I want to learn a new song on the piano, I want to do laundry, write thank-you cards, watch movies, see friends, learn to sew, learn to thread my new sewing machine (which I haven't touched since the day I bought it...the day before Eli was born), and, last but not least, I want to write a blog post every now and then.

But when you only have 2 hours in a day of time to yourself, there are obviously many things that get cut from that list of things to do.

Honestly, it's been pretty easy to cut out frequent blog posts, especially when I dedicate all sorts of time to a post that gets interrupted by a hungry baby, and then never finished, making me feel like my me-time was wasted and could have been spent doing something that makes me feel better than a job undone. Like sleeping. How frustrating when I don't even manage to get a post up, and could have spent that time sleeping or showering.

So I'm sorry, I really really am, but blogging has (unsurprisingly) been put on a bit of a back-burner lately. I'm still reading blogs, though, and checking in here for comments (but being horrible at responding to them...I put a lot of time into my comments, and they are often like blog posts in and of themselves!)

AAAH even as I read this it is to the sounds of Matthew trying to soothe Elijah when I should probably stop being a negligent mother and feed him already. Not that I'm starving him, he ate an hour ago, but still.

And there are so many things I want to post on! Tomorrow's task will be dedicated to thanking MMC for the blog award she gave me (THANKS!) and paying it forward. I think it deserves its own post, so if I don't get it up tomorrow, keep checking in. I WILL write that post.

For now, I'm going to stick with an update that will most likely be brief (to my standards...haha) but if Eli manages to get his tired self to sleep with the help of his soother and daddy, then it'll be a teeny bit longer.

So. Having a newborn is all kinds of fun! Elijah is getting cuter and cuter and cuter! He's filling out, getting chubby cheeks, and displaying a bit of a personality.

He started smiling at us a week ago, and cooing too, which I was thrilled about to begin with but all the more so when my midwife was impressed by it. Apparently babies don't normally coo until 4-6 weeks, and my clever boy started at 3.

He really likes his diaper being changed, and is most likely to coo and smile at us then as he pins his arms down, throws out his chest, and squirms delightedly. He also loves baths and just sits there kicking his legs in the water. He cries when he has to get out, but that's probably because of the cold.

He likes sleeping in his rocking chair that vibrates, and he sleeps the longest and most soundly in it. I hate to admit it, but we've totally resorted to letting him sleep in it at night just to maintain our sanity. I have a play-yard that I try to get him to sleep in but to no avail. That rocker has pretty much saved me these last few nights. Take last night, for instance. He "slept" in the play-yard beside me from 11 to 2:30. I say "slept" because he fussed almost the entire time. I got two 1/2 hour naps in there where I managed to slip into slumber because he was quiet for that small period of time. the rest of the time he slept noisily, which involved grunting and squealing every so often for minutes at a time, then staying quiet for a while, then needing his soother, then spitting it out and being fine, then grunting some more. And all of this with his eyes shut, so mostly I just let him grunt, but that doesn't mean I slept at all, even it that's what he was doing. So then I fed him at 2:30-3, and put him in the rocker for the remainder of the night, and he slept soundly until 6:40, no fuss, no nothing. Just sweet, blissful sleep. So today at Babies 'R' Us I bought a book on healthy sleep for babies, adding one more thing to my list of things to do. :D

Oh, and just to prove my point, I just had to stop writing this to feed Eli for the 4th time in 3 1/2 hours. Tears very nearly ensued, I felt sure this post would once again only make it to the draft folder, I felt frustrated and quite sure that life was working against me. But Matthew promised to look after Elijah once I had satisfied his (meaning Elijah's) demanding appetite, and here I am, trying once more to finish the impossible-to-finish-update-post! Take that universe.

Not that I have long though...my battery is about to die.

Hmm...what else?

My recovery is going well, though I don't feel 100% yet. I squated the other day and hurt for a few days afterwards, and I feel like my muscles are kindof shot still. Oh, and Kegel exercises are not just for keeping your pee in after the baby is born. Seriously, if I knew how much those muscles would hurt every time I go to the bathroom, I'd have been doing exercises a lot sooner. People try to remind me of what a traumatic thing my body experienced by delivering Eli, but it's not sinking in. I personally think that being pregnant would have been a bigger thing for my body than labour and delivery, but that's not the impression I'm getting from other people. I guess people do die in childbirth, so I see what they mean. Let's just be glad I didn't die!

Oh, now I'm being dramatic. I'm doing better than just not being dead, I'm just not 100% and I really thought I would be by, like, 2 weeks post-partum, not to mention 4. I'm concerned that I won't be better by 6 weeks when the midwives discharge me. Who will I call with my problems then? Also, this area where there was stitches before is hurting again and stinging, so I'm worried something opened back up. **sigh** I guess I don't deal well with the stinging pain of stitches. I'm more of a bone-pain kinda girl.

Oh, here's something good and progressive! So you might have noticed in earlier pictures of Elijah that there was a sizeable bump on his head. This was caused either by being engaged crooked for a long time, or by hitting my cervix crooked throughout labour each time I had a contraction. Either way, it's fluid from blood vessels under the surface of the skin, against the skull. It's not a big deal mostly, it should go away, but it's still something worth seeing a pediatrician about. So see a pediatrician we did. Since then (last week) it's gone down remarkably in size and is almost gone, but if it doesn't go away entirely soon then the fluid will harden and turn into bone, I guess from the calcium that is in blood. It'll leave a bump on his skull which they'd then have to file down if it's too big. So I'm glad that it's almost gone. I'll do a comparison shot another day.

The pediatrician also noticed Eli's bum dimple. See, Elijah was born with a sacral dimple, which in most cases is just cute and looks like a second little bum hole. Weird, but no problem. Then there are the very few cases where it is indicative of something more serious, like a minor case of spina bifida. So begin freak-out. We're going for an ultrasound of the area to make sure it's not. I was pretty upset about this until I realized that it's likely not that, and that even if it is it's the least severe kind, which a lot of people don't even realize they have because it affects them not at all. Eli is strong and healthy, has that cute standing/walking instinct that babies have, kicks his legs lots, AND you can see the bottom of the hole, so it's probably no big deal. But still. I mean, really, how much do you really want to think about such things? So bummer. No pun intended.

And I think I'm going to have to cut this short right here. Partly because I can't think of anything else to write about, and partly because the Our Lady Peace song I'm listening to just said, "And maybe you should sleep..." and then I realized how tired I am and that my battery is about to die, and my son is sleeping and I'm wasting good rest time. PHEW. How was that for a run-on sentence? And there's the OLP line again suggesting that I sleep. I'm going to listen.

And I'm going to try to post some more tomorrow, so check in!