Another week

Another week is in the bag, and well, I'm pretty bagged. Getting to the end of the week seems like such an accomplishment now. I'm still trying to put my finger on why it feels so much different than before. Perhaps it's because I've been 'just-one-more-day'-ing it for about 3.5 days already this week. Perhaps it's because I'm necessarily so much more in the moment now that the distance from Friday afternoon to Monday morning seems so much longer. Perhaps it's the opportunity to see my son at a point during his day when he's doing something other than wail. Perhaps it's the opportunity to get slightly more sleep and maybe get a couple precious hours to myself.

I had a scotch to celebrate achieving the week's end. It pretty much knocked me on my ass. I'm some lightweight now :)

A hockey night

After much debate, I decided to play hockey last night. I was one of two spares who had enough regular season games in to be eligible for the playoffs, but Bec typically gets most of her sleep in the evenings when I can take Quinn. Plus I was pretty tired myself. She generously urged me to go. In the end I had fun and was reasonably effective by keeping my game simple. We won 4-2 with an empty-netter. Bec fared not too bad with Quinn - while he (and she) didn't sleep a ton, at least he didn't caterwaul the whole evening like he usually does with me.

Quinn's getting more interactive. He responds to kisses with smiles sometimes, and he seems to communicate needs ever so slightly more effectively. He's usually full of smiles when I'm leaving for work, which makes it difficult to leave, but he also usually has a couple smiles when I get home from work, which makes it fun to come home. There have been several times now where he has looked tired and I have been able to rock him to sleep through a bit of wailing. He seems to sleep slightly more during the night than during the day now. He has a rash on his face that we're a little concerned about so Bec's going to a Well-Baby clinic run by the city tomorrow to get an opinion on it. There is one last midwife appointment next week where we can get an opinion on it too. Hopefully it's nothing - we're guessing maybe an allergy to dairy in Bec's diet but we're not sure yet.

I'm pretty exhausted. I've been reasonably productive at work but my focus wavered some late yesterday and late today. Almost done another week though - one day at a time.

More sleep for Bec?

This afternoon Bec picked up the TV remote and the cordless phone and sat down on the couch with Quinn. She proceeded to call me at work and then put the phone down as if it were the remote, primed for channel changing. She was very confused when the remote starting saying "Hello.....hello...hello?". We had a good laugh when we figured it all out.

Perhaps we need to get Bec some more sleep.

Smiles

They say infants imitate people. I think at one month is too early but I figured I might as well start trying during his alert times. It has made me realize I don't smile very much in the regular run of a day. I'm always preoccupied with something - something I did, something I said, something I need to do, something I need to say - and seldom in the moment. Perhaps another reason for having kids is for the mirror on one's self it provides. Having Quinn has made me examine myself, has made me slow down, and has made me want to be a better person for his sake. When walking with Quinn, squalling or otherwise, he often doesn't appreciate it when I try to do something else simultaneously, so I find myself noticing things, indoors or out, that I'd gone by a thousand times before and never noticed. I find myself smiling more, and I find people smiling back more. Even the cats appear to appreciate my toned-down tenor.

As Quinn gets older the treadmill of life will inevitably speed up as we have events all over heck and creation. I hope we can somehow convey the importance of smiles at the same time. It often seems a lesson lost amid the hubbub.

A great skate

After some debate, we decided to go for a skate on the canal today. I had been feeling flu-like and wasn't feeling great when I got up. We didn't know whether Bec was healed up enough for skating or not. I felt a little better as the morning progressed. We decided to go and take it slow and not too far and see how it went.

It was (is) a gloriously sunny day, around freezing. The canal was in great shape. We got there around 1045am before the huge main throngs of midday. We went across Dow's Lake from the pavilion and the Beaver Tails line was wayyy long and we were still feeling good so we pressed on to 5th Avenue to try the Beaver Tails hut there. The line was better there, so Bec stood in line while I loitered aimlessly with Quinn to keep him asleep. He eventually awoke and fussed. Bec took him into a change-hut to feed him while I took her place in line. He fed really well in the hut and got a suitable amount of Random Grandmother attention at the same time. I eventually procured a Beaver Tail and we ate it in the hut. He decided he wanted to feed some more so I decided to go for a skate by myself (well, with the other 10000 people on the canal by that time). I made it all the way to the NAC for a total skate of about 13km. Bec did about 7km I think. She was a little sore on the way back but all in all felt really good.

Quinn was in the car seat attached to the Muttsy stroller via a special adapter that meant we could just take him out of the car and snap him into the stroller. It worked like a charm. Easy transitions to and from the car, and the stroller was fantastic on the canal with the large inflated wheels providing almost no resistance. After looking at people with kids in sleds, sleighs, and umbrella strollers and seeing how much work that looked like, I was glad we forked out the $$$ for the Muttsy. It's awfully large but very good.

Quinn slept on the way out and was awake the whole way back but was a good as gold the whole time. He made up for it with a yangy afternoon.

The advice phenomenon

It is an amazing phenomenon. Absolutely everyone who found out we were pregnant or had a newborn *immediately* came out with a piece of parenting advice, completely unprompted and unsolicited. Everyone, no matter what their experience, offers up some 'helpful' tidbit. People who have never seen a baby in their life know somebody who knows somebody who had an aunt who hid in the basement for 17 hours while their kid was crying and the kid never did it again so it must be the right way to do it. It's really quite remarkable.

Now don't get me wrong - I'm new at this and I love to learn and learning from others' experiences is often a valuable way to do so. But one of the things I quickly found out with all the completely divergent parenting advice is that you have to forge your own path. Fortunately I have 38 years of experience in taking strident advice in as much stride as possible (which is not to say it has always been 'in stride') and forging my own path - love you ma & pa! :). Actually they have been great through all of this, offering less advice than most complete strangers I tell we have a newborn.

If I were to offer a bit of advice to new parents it would be to do what works for you so long as it's not illegal, immoral or unsafe, and don't let any other person, book or "expert' make you feel badly about it.

See, I do it too.

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The right amount of not caring

I had a long week. It was busy at work and time-wise the balance worked OK, but energy-wise the week was a challenge. Quinn seems to be in a cycle where he's good as gold for a day, followed by two days of crankiness. Thursday and Friday were cranky days for Quinn. Thursday night was especially bad, and Bec got very little sleep. Bec & I talked at length about how to approach the crankiness in Quinn and we came up with several ideas to try from books we've been reading. We can't seem to get past the thought that we think he's trying to tell us something and we just can't figure out what it is.

Last night I was utterly exhausted, Bec was utterly exhausted, and Quinn's eyes popped open after an early evening feed. I volunteered to take him for a couple of hours and Bec went to bed. He started to get cranky again - not full time full on wailing, but wouldn't settle, and varying levels of crying. I checked everything I could think of. I put him in the snuggly and he got really mad. I tried a few things. Nothing seemed to work. Finally I decided, well if nobody's happy I might as well make one person happy - so I strapped him into the snuggly and played video games while wearing him. If he screams, he screams. He's fed, changed, the right temperature, doesn't appear to have gas, doesn't appear to be in physical pain and is attached to a primary caregiver. If he needs something else I just don't know what it is.

He was as good as gold from that point on. He fussed a few times, but I ignored it except for a bit of stroking and soft words. He slept for 3 hours like that, giving Bec a total of four much-needed hours of sleep. He slept for another three-hour stretch through the night so we're all much more rested today. Was it just a regular part of his fussiness cycle? Or was 'ignoring' the fussiness (while still wearing him and looking after his needs) the right amount of not caring for that moment? I choose to believe it was my own deft handling :) but who knows what the truth really is. The important part is we all had a good sleep.

Good eats

We've certainly eaten well over the last month. Ma Simpson has provided a steady parade of homemade healthy hits (we had a soup tonight that was awesome!) and Arnie and Caitlin have been picking up takeout and groceries. I think the good nutrition is making it sooo much easier to handle the sleep deprivation, and helping us all to grow/recover. It's important in staving off post-partum blues for Bec too.

Last night Quinn showed a definite preference for mommy. When she went to bed he immediately started crying. When he started to ramp it up I took him in to mommy and he immediately settled down. He didn't seem to want to feed, but slept for 4 hours with Bec. I tried not to take in personally. On the bright side, I got a little time to myself, and not at the expense of Bec's sleep.

Stage of the moment

I'm going to try hard to appreciate him the most that I can at every stage. It strikes me that parent/kid friction often occurs when there is a disconnect between perceived and actual stage. Parents can push kids too fast. Parents can persist in seeing their kids as they were in some favourite but bygone stage. Kids can see themselves as more advanced than they really are. Kids can distance themselves from parents. Parents can sometimes not really be aware of stage their kid is at for one reason or another. There are so many ways the wheels can fall off. I'm guessing this is one of the hardest parts of parenting over the long haul. But I get ahead of myself. He can't roll over yet. Stay in the moment. Right.

Quinn appears to want things to look at now. He looks at toys on the side of the crib. He gets so completely galvanized by some rotating doodads on a kid swing we have that Rebecca feels guilty about using it. He listens intently when I sing to him, at least briefly. The last two days he has produced what looked tantalizingly like a smile when I got home from work. Yes, I think this stage is going pretty well.

The sleep arms race

We all had a good sleep Sunday night. Bec & Quinn had a utopian day on Monday - a walk in the stroller to the neighbourhood market on a sunny day, followed by a nap on the return home. A bad sleep all around Monday night was followed by a Tuesday where Bec was ready to mark him up and sell him off. Go figure - There seems to be a direct correlation between good sleeps and good next days.

It's like a sort of sleep arms race - as we develop countermeasures to try to get some sleep, he changes his behaviour. After a few days where Bec was able to get some prolonged sleep in the early evening, now he wails through much of that time, which has been quite wearing on dad. After sleeping happily in the bassinet for several nights, now he won't seem to stay settled there. In the early going he would only sleep on Bec or I but now sometimes he seems to rather being put down. It's a constant head-scratcher. I guess in another month we can start some sleep behaviour conditioning but much of what we read states that before two months old is too early for that sort of stuff.

It's hard to believe that tomorrow he's one month old. The time has flown by. In a way, Bec wants him to stay this size forever. There are upsides and downsides to each stage I suppose. I must say I'm enjoying this early stage much more than I thought, although more sleep predictability would be nice. I've managed to be mostly functional through three days of work this week but it's a bit of a struggle. We've managed to get Bec a little more sleep but that's still a struggle too. We're going to try a different scheme tonight to try to counter the evening wailing of the past few nights.

I wonder if the wailing is just from growing. He seems longer - we measured him at 22" tonight, which is up 1.5" from birth; and also heavier - he checked in at 10lbs 13oz at this morning's midwife appointment. It's gotta hurt a body to grow that much.