Miss M is three months old. It's so weird--it feels like she's been with us forever. I can't imagine what I did with all of that free time I had back before she was born. I surely did not use it to clean out my basement, closets, etc. What a fool I was. I am finding it impossible to get anything done. Why prepare to move (which I HATE doing, by the way), when I can snuggle with an impossibly cute baby? An impossibly cute baby who coincidentally, likes to scream when you put her down, but will snuggle contentedly for hours.
My trusty calendar tells me I have something in the neighborhood of 8-9 weekends to get my life straightened out before our potential move for the new job. That would be somewhere in the neighborhood of 18 days, max. Plus, I am only working four days a week right now, so that theoretically gives me another day (but see above). That's not a lot of time to sort through a decade of stuff. Ugh.
Miss M. continues to manhandle her pacifier. One day soon she will actually get it into her mouth. I can't think of any huge developments this week. She continues to be a joy.
Going back to work has been fine. It hasn't been as hard as everyone warned me it would be. I think that if she were in daycare, I would be losing my mind, but she's with T. or me or family. We are lucky. I don't worry about her when I'm not here. As hard as it is to not be here for every little moment like I was on maternity leave, it's also quite lovely to talk to adults during the day. The main hassle is pumping. It's a pain to stop what I'm doing and pump, and it's an even bigger pain to have to wash all of the parts multiple times a day. My solution was to order a pile of additional parts, so I can just dump them in the dishwasher at night. I'm paranoid about keeping my milk supply up, now that I'm back at work. It's going to take some attention. The biggest challenge is that Miss M. is either hitting a growth spurt, or digging the bottles, because she's drinking more than I'm pumping right now, and I'm experiencing a bottle deficit. I have very little left in the freezer, because she dipped into my stash last week. I need to work on trying to stockpile some more, but it's harder than I imagined it would be.
Oh, and then there was the trip to MIL's this weekend. For my baby shower, SIL had convinced a friend to buy me a crib bedding set (which I didn't need, because I had already picked out and purchased my own bedding). I couldn't return the gift, so I gave it to MIL to use on the crib she said wanted at her house. It's quite a pretty bedding set, although not what I had in mind. I was going to buy a crib for MIL's house so that it would be something I felt was safe, but MIL beat me to it, unfortunately. MIL told me that she got a like-new crib from a friend whose grandchild had quickly outgrown it. I relied too heavily on trusting the friends she got the crib from, thinking the parents of said grandchild must have approved the crib. I nearly had a heart attack when I saw it: Jenny Lind style with double drop sides, a crib mattress much softer than anything that I've seen for sale, giant thick cushy bumper pads, a pile of quilts and blankets hanging off and stacked in the crib, and all sorts of dangerous gaps in the crib rails just begging for an arm or leg to get stuck, twisted, injured, etc. In other words, the thing was a deathtrap. It was beautiful, but a total nightmare from a practical standpoint.
I've learned to pick my battles with MIL, and I've tired of hearing how different things were in her day, and that her kids all survived. Lacking another place for Miss M to sleep last night, I removed all of the bumper pads and blankets and quilts, and then replaced them this morning before she could see that I had done that. I swore T. to secrecy. Miss M. isn't rolling from back to front yet, so I figured we were reasonably safe despite the relative softness of the mattress. Since she doesn't move around too much, I also figured that the gaps between the spindles wouldn't pose a hazard last night. If we move, Miss M. won't be spending much time there, so I will worry about crossing this bridge again the next time we have to enter this particular forest.
4 comments:
Yikes! That crib almost scares me and I haven't even seen it.
Going back to work was a strange thing for me. I loved the fact that Skeeter was my only responsibility but I did miss my friends and the social aspect of working. I guess if you're looking for a silver lining, I love that gummy smile even more after not seeing it all day.
Aren't growth percentiles weird? Part of me wishes they didn't even tell me. I guess the worrying never ends.
At whole foods there is a supplement called "more mother's milk plus" (or something like that) and it really made my supply skyrocket! You take 1 pill a couple times a day and I guarantee you will wake up noticing a difference after 1 day :) When I went back to work after both kiddos my supply dropped. But if you work at it, you can increase it!
It was because of a crib like that that Claire and I began our co-sleeping journey!
As for increasing milk supply, this is what the LC's told me to do, and it really worked. It's called power pumping. Pump for 10 minutes, rest for 10. Do this for an hour one time a day for a week or so. The goal isn't to get a stash (which I did) but to signal to your body to produce more. I have over 300 oz in the freezer, so it obviously worked! It's a lot of effort, but I felt it was worth it.
Her kids may have all survived but the overall child mortality rate was shocking.
To increase my supply I pumped after every feed and kept to a strict 3 hour pumping schedule in the day, 4 hours at night. I ended up with a freezer full of milk which is great now I've had to wean because I've got around 60 feeds worth to supplament.
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