scrawls.

scrawls

still cheaper than therapy*

10.10.07

one week.

you're getting better at having your eyes point in the same direction. You can hold your head up long enough to switch sides if you are lying on your belly. You regularly sleep for three hours in a row, including at night, which is something of a miracle on its own. When you came out you had itty bitty chicken legs, wrinkly fingers, skinny arms. Now you have baby fat - you've put on nearly a pound already. (This is what demand feeding gets me.) You don't like the texture of the stroller, but will sleep in it happily if we put a blanket down first. You like sitting like a frog, legs folded up, on our chests, daddy's and mine. And you are so soft and snuggly.

In the hospital the nurses and midwives and lactation consultants and social workers all said you were beautiful. Other mamas, too. You still have to have vitamin D drops, though - i think we live too far north, now. They gave you a real bath and told us not to repeat it until your umbilical cord had fallen off - it's hanging on by just a few centimeters now instead of the whole black lumpy thing. So this may be soon. You didn't mind the bath terribly. The heel prick blood test, that, you minded. And the hearing test where you were supposed to be sleeping. We're still deciding what color your eyes are: in daylight they are slate blue. With lightbulbs they are brown. Fluorescents make them gray.

i'm still tired. Sore. Swollen. Bleeding. I have four stitches in a Very Sensitive Area from the episiotomy and the doctors say they expect them to dissolve and fall out at some point in your first month. Together we are learning breastfeeding, and i am sleeping on a towel. Not that that's enough to contain the twin fire-hose moons, but if we can do the sheets not quite every day, it's a little less laundry and a hell of a lot more room on the drying rack. I think the milk comes out too fast for you - you pull off and stick out your tongue and cough and i worry - but you can spend that much more time sleeping and growing, because clearly something is working like it's supposed to with you gaining weight like you are. There was another pediatrician checkup yesterday and he said you were very healthy, your lungs with the little milky cough, your dry peeling snake skin, your black blocky navel, and he'd see you at the end of a month, too. So our next checkups are on the same day.

I walked all over the eighteenth district yesterday to get you a birth certificate - ten languages, now, to say how real you are, but all European languages: German, French, English, Spanish, Greek, Italian, Dutch, two Scandinavian languages, and Czech. They called these "the ten world languages" in the magistrat's office. Again, "they" being full of shit: i thought this would include Russian, Chinese, Arabic. But we walked and walked, me with you in the stroller. We practiced breastfeeding in the magistrat's office - twice! - once in the hall downstairs and once upstairs in the waiting room. But today i am tired and procrastinating hitting the drugstore just two blocks away for more hand soap.

i'm being very careful about falling in love with you. I don't know why or quite how this is working. I am pointedly not expecting too much of myself, because i am afraid of postpartum depression, being isolated in a foreign country. I wait for M to come home and hand you off and take a long, hot shower, with the added benefits of you love your daddy and of being nice to the rocks of engorgement, though that's starting to pass, now. M went all googly-eyed over you immediately but to me you are still something of a mystery: how did I do that? In the hospital i had books, two decks of cards, electronic Sudoku, but instead i stared at you for hours. You slept. How did i do that?

Labels: baby, mamadom, milestones

scrawled @ 14:23