Thu 14 Jun 2007
Encouraging Words?
Posted by Liza under Personal
Ok Moms and Dads, this is a call for some encouraging words.
Remember what it was like during the first week or two of your firstborn? The stress, the sleep deprivation, the worry?
Can weigh in with (short) stories for Aunt Anna, about how stressed out you were over something the baby did or didn’t do in the first 2 weeks — eating, sleeping, pooping, sneezing? — and how it totally resolved and everyone is healthy now? And got healthy fairly quickly?
Here are my very short posts from that hazy time:
http://lizawashere.com/2006/02/15/noah-pictures/ (which actually has no pictures)
http://lizawashere.com/2006/02/16/first-doctors-office-visit/
http://lizawashere.com/2006/02/17/happy-1-week-birthday/
http://lizawashere.com/2006/03/11/1-month-old/
For me, the main point of these was oh god was it hard at first, and we totally lost our minds, but Noah was healthy. And now look at him. And us. (At least arguably! 
)
One more thought, from a post when Noah was a couple of weeks old but that is otherwise irrelevant, do you think you could sleep in your chair with Max in the sling?
June 14th, 2007 at 8:19 pm
Dear Aunt Anna,
The first three months are really hard.. I’m not going to sugarcoat it for you… Sometimes Dave would come home from work and I would be in tears. Perhaps some of it was those crazy crying hormones that I had for a couple months post birth.. but really… it was hard.
It gets easier, I promise. and when you think the love you have for your son could never grow from its already huge state.. it doubles and triples in size and continues to do so.
It is hard at the beginning… it was for me. But I kept telling myself that this stage would not last forever.. and I should live and love in whatever moment my son was letting me have at any given time, because tomorrow would be different. They change and grow so fast.
Congratulations. You’ll be a wonderful mother.. and you will get through the hard days.
I didn’t write about alot of mine but here are some…
story 1
story 2
story 3
June 14th, 2007 at 11:59 pm
I like Lizzie’s thing up there, quantifying it to three months. That’s the amount of time a friend of my partner’s said it took them to acclimate to the 2nd kid. I have a notoriously bad memory for details, but generally speaking we were freaking out about EVERYTHING. The maconium poop. How often she peed & pooped. I even had a white board that I wrote everything up on. When she nursed. What the hell color the poop was. Everything was a sign about her health, which could turn at any moment! We felt sure!
Another friend simply said that what you have to do is become adept at reading your own kid, and that process takes time. You can read every baby book published, but what you really need to do is become literate in the unique language of your own baby. And language acquisition is a slow thing. You can only absorb so much at a time, no matter if you’re the most motivated learner.
That’s one thing I’ve come around to realizing. Everyone will give you advice, and everyone’s an expert — about their own child (or children). Your little one and you and your partner will develop a powerful means of understanding each other — we already have that with our 4.5 mo old boy; I know exactly what each fussy sound means, even though 3.5 months ago I didn’t. You learn, and you live.
Take a deep breath and trust that three months will seem like the blink of an eye, when you get there.
June 15th, 2007 at 5:24 am
Polly made a great point — you really are getting to know Max, and all the experts in the world can’t substitute for that.
I remember the moment Jill figured out that Noah was just hungry more often than we thought he was “supposed to” be. There was no every 3 hours for him, it was closer t 1.5 or maybe 2. Exhausting as that was, it was a huge relief when we realized why he was crying and that we could actually address what was upsetting him.
What I don’t remember is how old he was — at least 2 weeks, maybe even 4. Probably not much older than that.
June 15th, 2007 at 2:32 pm
I hope I’m not too late to the party, but yeah: the first 3 months are tough, no two ways about it. between the sore and bleeding nipples, the hormone crash, the lack of sleep, and the HUGE ups and downs…it’s just tough. But it gets so much better, and the next thing you know, the baby is 15 months old and running all over Central Park.
As Liza says above, you learn your baby. People hammered in the “feed every 3 hours” into our heads and the first 3 weeks the baby was screaming and my nipples were bleeding and I was confused and exhausted. The best $150 we spent was on a great lactation consultant who called me crazy for trying to wake the baby to feed him when it was “time.” You’ll learn his signs and you’ll just feed him them. We did read a portion of the Baby Whisperer on the different cries of a newborn, and that was somewhat helpful.
Aunt Anna, hang in there. You’re just getting to know each other!