A New Life's Beginning

You're always on the move these days, crawling here, there, and everywhere. You love to throw balls around and chase them. You're often thoroughly occupied by flipping the pages of your books.

You're a rough little dude! You seem to find it necessary to swipe things off of tabletops, rip hats off of heads (yours and others), and knock over anything neatly stacked or piled. You're constantly throwing Daddy's DVDs off the shelf and trying to pull his glasses of his face. If we're sitting or lying on the floor with you, you love to climb over us just to get to the other side.

There are tender moments too. Sometimes when you first wake up in the morning, you just want to be held for a while, and I'm happy to oblige. I love rocking you in my arms at bedtime. Sometimes, in your rare snuggly moments, you stroke my arm or my hair or gently touch my face, and my heart swells with love for my darling baby.

You make this funny coughing sound when you're excited that is also more often than not your laugh, although you also have an awesome belly laugh that totally makes my day. Lately the best way to hear that laugh is to pretend to nibble and blow raspberries on your belly. Your latest tricks are clapping and shaking your head "no," and you can do them both when I ask you to, which is so cool. I love seeing that you understand what I'm saying. We're trying to get you to wave bye-bye and give high fives, but you're not there just yet. Sometimes you get very vocal, entertaining everyone with your babbling and funny noises.

You are such a Mommy's boy these days. When I'm around, nobody else will do. If I leave the room you come crawling after me as fast as you can and cling to my legs until I pick you up. Talk about separation anxiety! Part of me enjoys all the Mommy love, but it's also a bit overwhelming. And I think it hurts Daddy's feelings sometimes!

Feeding you is always a bit of a challenge. I can count on you to finish your cereal most days, but other meals are hit and miss. Right now you love crackers, Cheerios, peas, and blueberries. We're working on getting you to use a sippy cup, but no luck yet.

You hate lying in Mommy and Daddy's bed and being rocked in the nice glider we bought just for you. Changing your diaper and getting you dressed can be extremely difficult. You get very upset when we're using the computer and won't let you bang on the keys! You hate your new stroller.

You seem to like swimming class and hanging out in the bathtub. You love bouncing games and being upside down. You smile whenever you look in the mirror or see a picture of yourself.

You're so much fun. I love watching you grow into an amazing, independent person. I can't wait to get to know the little boy you'll soon become.

Wow, three-quarters of a year already gone. My little baby is no longer so little! He's crawling like a madman and pulling up and cruising with ease. He amazes me every day.

I thought his weight gain had picked up, but unfortunately that was not the case. His doctor recommended that we increase his solids intake dramatically. I'm feeling at a loss. He'll always eat his cereal and yogurt, but lately everything else is likely to be met with lips stubbornly sealed shut. Frustrating. I'll keep trying, of course, but in the meantime I figure he can eat as much cereal as he wants if it'll keep him growing!

Oh, how I loathe 5:00 a.m.

When I get up at 5:00 a.m. my eyes water and my head aches. It's hours before I feel really awake, and the fatigue lingers all day. So it really sucks that Andrew has chosen 5:00 a.m. as his new wake-up time.

I am not a good mother at 5:00 a.m. I am irritable and impatient. I can think only of sleep and when I can get some more. "How soon can I get you to take a nap?" I think obsessively while I watch my baby play.

A 7:00 wake-up time would be ideal. I would grudgingly accept 6:00. But not 5:00. Please not 5:00.

I am a lazy person. There. I said it.

Take school, for example: I coasted along throughout my entire student career. I did well enough but I know I could have done better if I'd put a little effort into it.

- If I weren't so lazy I might have a career I was eager to get back to instead of a job I don't really care about.
- If I weren't so lazy my home would be much cleaner.
- If I weren't so lazy I wouldn't have gained weight after I had my baby.

I could go on and on, but what's the point? Oh, right. The point is that I know this about myself and I don't like this about myself, and yet — wait for it — I'm too lazy to do anything to change it.

See the problem?

I spy, with my little eye, two tiny TEETH!
(Please excuse the messy yogurt face.)

I realize that I never shared the conclusion, more or less, of my breastfeeding journey. Having shared the rest of this struggle in such detail, it's only fair to share the end of the story. I guess it was early in November that I felt like we had reached a crisis point, again, and the breastfeeding clinic had given us all the help they could offer. I got tired of Andrew's constant rejection of the breast and finally decided to bottlefeed all day.

Since then I have been pumping twice a day, getting between 10 and 15 oz of breastmilk. He gets two breastmilk bottles and two formula bottles each day, and, until recently, at least, he nursed once overnight and once first thing in the morning. The past few weeks he has been losing interest in the morning nursing session, however, and since he's been sick he's been refusing to nurse at night as well.

Sooo... I guess my breastfeeding days are over. And I think I'm going to stop pumping when my current prescription for domperidone runs out in a few weeks. I have a great deal of regret and disappointment about the way things turned out, but I have made peace with the decision to stop. I did the best I knew how to do. Maybe, if I had it to do over, I could have done better. Or maybe not.

An interesting side note to the end of my lactation is that my cycles may or may not resume, and we'll need to make some decisions about TTC#2. Since I believe it was the removal of my minor endo that allowed me to conceive Andrew, I think our best chance at conceiving again without intervention will be sooner rather than later. While I am terrified at the prospect of being responsible for two very young children, I'm sure we'd manage, just as millions of families do every single day, and I'd be beyond thrilled to get a BFP in the months to come.

Here's the winner from our belated photo shoot:



Man. Remember, just a couple of days ago, I said this: "He can sit up by himself, and he's so close to crawling and pulling up and standing. And he has a tooth!" Well, since then he progressed to proper crawling and another tooth broke through! Things are happening so quickly these days! We are so not ready for a crawler, and he's going to be walking before we know it!