Amusement

I have found that sleep deprivation can actually cause you to laugh at things that otherwise never would have made a dent on you. I remember the same thing happening on long summer nights in high school, but this is a whole new kind of sleep deprivation (the kind where you're almost asleep, starting to drift into a dream, and a baby suddenly snorts and tries to latch onto your thumb knuckle, as your hand was resting a little too close to his face when he decided he needed to eat).

Things that have gotten me laughing lately include:

How serious the Baby Beast looks when trying to potty.


Teething, creating a whole new face to zombies:


Dogs who know a warm spot when they see it:


No one said parenting was for sissies, but no one mentioned the kinds of things you'd laugh at when you were going on a week of 45 minute naps between feedings. Thank goodness I'm finally getting the hang of side-lying nursing, or I would have to figure out how to sleep sitting up without dumping the baby off the Boppy.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall...

I've heard that mirrors are good for babies' development so we decided to introduce Jacob to the mirror in the bathroom (as we, unfortunately, lack the open space to put on at floor-level, even in the bedroom). The results? Confusion and interest.

We've striven to let him watch himself in the mirror for a few minutes several times a day, because he is obviously getting some enjoyment out of it. And even if he isn't, we certainly are enjoying watching him watch himself.

I've decided that babies would make the best research projects. What is research, but watching something endlessly to make sense out of it? Babies are excellent for this.

And while I didn't get a photo of it, Jacob is also learning to reach out for things with his hands, to try and grab hold. The bathroom mirrors have tiny squidgy handprints on them, and somehow I don't mind.

A quiet moment

Few things are as peaceful as a quiet moment of nursing with a three-month-old infant. It's amazing how, as he falls asleep against my breast, I can forget that I haven't had a shower in the last two days and that we might be starting a battle with thrush and that I'm ready to eat the camera because I haven't perfected the art of making a sandwich one-handed yet.

Best of all? Once he's asleep, I can sneak my nipple free and pass out next to him. Showers and food are important, but sleep definitely matters more right now.

Sharing sleep

I knew from the moment I found out that I was pregnant that I would not be investing in a crib. In my head, when I hear the word "crib" it's usually followed by the world "death." That's kind of a negative connotation to carry around with you (and yes, i'm aware it's not politically correct to call it 'crib death' anymore. the recognized term is 'sudden infant death syndrome' or 'sids,' a name change that was brought about in part by crib manufacturers being uncomfortable with the phrase 'crib death').

Moreover, the idea of having my newborn away from me, even if just in a crib across the room, made me feel incredibly uncomfortable. So, I went with 'instinct,' and began researching safe co-sleeping.



I won't bore you with an exhaustive list of how-tos, because if you have an interest in co-sleeping then you are probably doing your own research, but I can recommend a couple of links to get you started. Elizabeth Pantley, author of The No-Cry Sleep Solution (which really is a fantastic book for parents' at their wits end with a baby who won't sleep and won't let them sleep) wrote one and Dr. Sears (who is basically The Maven of Attachment Parenting) has one here.

The BIG worries of parents who plan to co-sleep with their infant are:

Overlying, or rolling on top of the baby

I've successfully co-slept with a bundle of small dogs since I was about 19 years old. I started with a Chihuahua puppy who weighed in at a whopping 2lb when she first came home with me. I've never rolled onto a dog, and am in fact an exceptionally light sleeper.

Falling from the bed

Currently, the BabyBeast sleeps in a Supreme SnuggleNest between the Husbeast and I. The plastic sides and foam positioner prevent him from moving too far out of the Nest. Once he's bigger (which won't take long, at the rate he's increasing in size; i think i have miraclegro in my breastmilk) I'll move him over to my side of the bed with a toddler bed rail to prevent him from leaping to his doom. And even if he manages to roll out, our bed currently consists of a mattress and boxspring, so the fall to the carpeted floor is about 1.5ft.

I chose to co-sleep not only to make breastfeeding easier, not only to let myself rest secure that the baby was still breathing, but also because studies have shown babies don't suffer SIDS as often if they are sleeping close to their mother. Whether its because they hear her breathing, or never reach deep sleep due to her movements in the night, or some other reason, I don't know. But I DO know that I sleep better with the feeling that I'm doing absolutely everything I can to prevent my son slipping away at night.

I have to say that so far, our co-sleeping experience has been amazing. The Baby Beast sleeps well, I sleep well, even the Husbeast is sleeping well (not to worry, he never naps alone with the baby).

Personally, I can't imagine locking my baby into a cage in another room, where I can't listen to his breathing as I fall asleep and can't reach out to touch his warm stomach to make sure it's moving up and down with the rhythm of his dreaming breaths.

Is sleep sharing for everyone? Probably not. Is co-sleeping in the same bed for everyone? Definitely not. Does sleep sharing ask the parents to devote more of themselves to the baby? Definitely so. But most of all, sleep sharing is natural. It's been the way of infants and adults since mammals started roaming the earth (and, in case you fell asleep during your high school science classes, humans are, indeed, mammals).

If we were looking at apes, or lemurs, or even dogs, you'd see how there's a logical pattern to mother-infant relationships. Logically, it makes no sense to separate mother and infant. How is the baby to eat if its mother is absent? How is the baby to stay warm without maternal warmth? Who will respond to the infants cries in the night (other than a predator) if the mother isn't there?

So, how is it natural to put the baby in a room separate from its mother?

I guess it just makes sense to me to follow animals as my guide to infant rearing, for the most part. They don't have cribs, and swings, and walkers, and bouncers. They have to devote themselves wholly to the rearing of their young, and that includes while sleeping. So, sleep sharing/co-sleeping is to me just the natural thing to do.

Besides, it makes it so much easier to follow the age-old addendum, "Nap when your baby naps."

EC - an explanation

So, why bother doing EC?

Well, the diaper rash issue alone would've been a good enough reason for me to start. Seeing what was a bloody bottom turn into smooth pink skin made me a believer, even if it did leave me with several dozens different tubes of various diaper rash ointments sitting around. I wonder if Desitin, Balmex, and Aquaphor can be used in oil painting projects?

If that wasn't enough, what about the positives for the environment? We're doing a mixture of cloth diapering during the day and disposables at night (because i'm just more comfortable knowing i won't be waking up in a puddle of pee and poo courtesy of the baby [yes, we co-sleep; more on that at a later date]) but EC makes it possible to use less of both diapers.

With EC, the BabyBeast goes through fewer cloth diapers during the day (which means i don't wash diapers as often, which means i'm not using as much water and electricity) and I am using fewer disposable diapers at night (which means there are fewer going into landfills and sitting there for a few hundred years). That's a bragging right, I've heard. "My carbon footprint is less than yours!" Personally, I'm not really sure how cloth diapers and disposable diapers add to my carbon footprint, but I'm not going to pass up anything that gives me bragging rights.

If those reasons aren't good enough, what about simplifying potty learning in a couple years? I've heard so many parents lamenting how hard it is to get their toddlers and children to stop peeing in PullUps and start peeing in a potty. With EC, the BabyBeast never gets used to sitting in pee and poo in a diaper, and instead gets an early experience with using a toilet for its intended purpose (instead of thinking it's an excellent place to take a bath; i won't even get into that story, because it left an ex-boyfriend of mine scarred for months afterward when his nephew did it)

But really, it all boils down to the way I'm raising my son: naturally! Everything we do, we do based on the idea that ancient humans wouldn't have had access to... well, whatever! Cribs, diapers, bouncers... and EC follows that pattern.

Ancient people (and even modern people living in cultures where diapering is considered weird) paid attention to their babies and learned the schedules of their infants eliminations, and learned the signals their infants gave before peeing or pooing. And they learned to hold the baby away from their body to prevent being covered in infant eliminations.

I'm doing a more modern version of this; after all, ancient people didn't have BBLPs. And if I just held the BabyBeast out from my body, I'd ruin the carpets. But it is my opinion that EC is much more natural than slapping a diaper on the baby and expecting them to sit in their own waste until you either think to change them, or they fuss enough that you check their diaper.

Speaking of, I think it's time to take the BabyBeast to the potty...

Potty baby

When I first heard about Elimination Communication (or Natural Infant Hygiene) I actually laughed. It sounded completely ridiculous - watching your baby to see when they needed to potty? Putting an infant on a toilet? Babies poop in diapers; it's just an accepted fact in the US. ('wait, what?' you say. 'ec? what on earth are you talking about?' here you go, honey: an explanation of ec)

That was when I was about three or four months pregnant. As time went by, the idea kept coming back into my head, and I found myself reading Web sites and forum posts about EC with babies. It was oddly fascinating, even though a part of me kept laughing quietly and saying, "That's just weird."

Jacob was about four weeks old when I started thinking much more seriously about trying EC with him. His diaper rash was getting alarming, even though I was using a combination of disposables and cloth diapers. We were changing him sometimes twice an hour, powdering him with corn starch, and putting Desitin on the worst spots with nearly every diaper change, and yet he was still getting rash bad enough that it bled in spots.

So, I did what I do best: research. Exhaustively. Until I can sit down and give a lecture and sound like I really do know what I'm talking about.

So, I read The Diaper-Free Baby by Christine Gross-Loh, and then I read Diaper Free: The Gentle Wisdom of Natural Infant Hygiene by Ingrid Bauer. And I looked through the TribalBaby.org Web site (linked in the first paragraph up there). And then I started holding my baby over the Cookie Bowl, as the Husbeast called it (because previously, it had always been used to make his chocolate chip cookies; seeing his son perched over it peeing may have curbed his cravings for awhile).

To my amazement, it worked. More than worked, it worked incredibly well. I could go an entire day and only use two diapers because everything else went into the Cookie Bowl (or the toilet, if the Husbeast was the one pottying the baby, because the Cookie Bowl was sacred).

Because EC was going so well, and because the Cookie Bowl was suffering unpardonable abuse, the Husbeast went ahead and purchased a top-hat potty bowl to make EC easier.



That certainly has made things considerably easier (and freed the Cookie Bowl for its intended purpose, leading me to wonder if things were better before I was able to indulge in cookies frequently) but with the baby growing increasingly large, it was getting harder and harder to tuck all the important bits into the top-hat potty bowl. I've heard that this isn't the case for most people until their babies are crawling around, which makes me wonder if the increased cookie intake is somehow translating directly through the breastmilk.

So, our newest EC-related purchase has been a BabyBjorn Little Potty. And pottying has gotten pretty darn cute.



Somehow, a fat baby perched on a toilet is incredibly cute to me. Is it shallow that I'm thinking less about how much good this is doing and more about how cute the baby looks on his BBLP?

On the positives, his diaper rash has almost completely cleared up. And he is letting us know pretty much every time he needs to poo, and about 75% of the time when he needs to pee. But the most important thing is that he is really, really cute on his BBLP.

It's the little things

The little things get you through the day when there's a newborn in your life, I find. And I mean the very little things.

The little fingers...


The little chin...


The instance of a sudden little arm-jig...


Of course, the little things also have the tendency to throw your life off. Like the shoes that fit just fine before you got pregnant, and somehow seem to've shrunk one size while they lazed away in the closet waiting for your return. I'd tell myself that it's just an excuse to go shoe shopping, but I have no intention of taking the baby out of the house until he's six weeks old. While I'm sure he's getting plenty of immunities from my breastmilk, I'm just not too keen on the idea of taking him out into the general Unwashed Masses just yet.

Besides, I have yet to figure out how to get the Moby on and the baby in the Moby without feeling like I'm either
A) wrapped by a boa constrictor OR
B) about to have a newborn slide down my belly, across my thigh and off my (still bare because i haven't gone shoe shopping) foot to land somewhere across the living room.

Yes, I have the little Moby booklet for how-to-wrap-yourself-and-still-be-able-to-breathe, but at this point it seems as if the baby is entirely too floppy to be of any help when I'm inserting him. It's like trying to do a samba with a partner who took a couple Valiums to 'take the edge off;' you know how it's supposed to look and how it's supposed to work, and yet somehow bits keep flopping out all over the place and you end up getting sweaty and flushed trying to make it all come out right. Not to mention the judges watching from the sidelines are frowning more and more each time your floppy companion's head lolls alarmingly to one side and you have to use you chin to prop it back up while trying to figure out what to do with their left arm.

I'm not even going to touch on breastfeeding in the Moby. Yes, my breasts are big, but I just don't see how I'm going to manage to lift one of them up to my collarbone to get it near enough to the baby's mouth to tickle his lips.

To delay the building scream of frustration, I'll just keep thinking of the little things... little fingers. Little toes. Little nose.