Postpartum Haze: Impressions from Day One

The feeling of his head in my hand as I waited for the last contraction to help push him out.  Angel-soft hair.  Little wiggles - he is moving! - as he works to get his shoulder free and join the world.  A strong wave of pressure, a breathless second, a loud cry, my baby is born into my own hands.

Joy!  The air comes back into my lungs, back into the room.  Labor is over, life is beginning.

Catching my breath.  Lucy is coming up the stairs, walking towards us.  Kevin at my side, kissing my head, welcoming his son.  Slippery little man in my arm, crying his little head off!

Out of the pool, onto the couch on shaky legs, surrounded by loving arms, beautiful women, ecstatic family.  Is this umbilical cord a little short?

I feel triumphant, breathless, strong, a warrior, a goddess!  To say "I did it!" seems trite and silly, but I did it!  I made this!  I birthed my baby, in my own house, on my own terms, letting my body do what it needed to do.  Birth is in voluntary, you just have to allow it to happen.  And I did.

Oh the perfection.  Sweet-smelling, gooey little baby snuggling against my chest.  The warm, safe presence of my husband beside me.

Hungry baby, latching on with no trouble, eat eat eat!

And then Lucy is with us.  What happened to my sweet baby girl?  Who took my little girl and turned her into this GIANT?  She's HUGE!  And what big TEETH she has!  Lucy, "Want MAMA MILK! MINE!"  Meltdown in the works.  Oh dear, here we go.  I am not sure I want to nurse this enormous wolf-child who somehow has replaced my daughter.  But the wolf-child insists and I am blissed out on birth and baby, so have at it kid.

Tandem nursing for the first time.  I am already stark butt naked in front of a roomful of people, why not sling a few boobs around for good measure?

The room clears out, we are alone, me, Malcolm and Kevin.  Admiring our handiwork.  My God, he is perfect.  Are those pointed ears?  Does he really have pointed ears??  My God, he is perfect.  Sweet smelling.  Soft.  Squishy.  Still covered in mayonnaise and goop, but wonderful to see, smell, kiss, cuddle.  Bliss.  Absolute bliss.

Mairi (midwife) makes eggs.  Lots and lots of eggs with cheddar cheese in them.  I devour a heaping bowl.  Then more.  Then toast and pineapple coconut water then chocolate.

I take a delightfully hot shower.  OH GOD I AM SO HAPPY TO NOT BE PREGNANT ANYMORE!  Oh God, what a smooshy, misshapen belly is left over from bring pregnant.  It looks like someone took a purple marker to a lump of sloppy bread dough.  Racing stripes.  Don't look.  There will be time for assessing the damage later.  I am scrubbed and cleaned and in my cozy red bathrobe and snuggled back on the couch to watch Kevin watching his son.  More bliss.

There is a minor amount of poking and prodding and checking and measuring done on me and my girlie parts.  It feels like there must have been an atomic bomb that went off down there.  I am glad I don't have to look at it.  No tears, just a split, just swelling, little bleeding.  Kat (midwife student) says "Seriously, Jenny, I was wondering if you lost any blood at all!  But it's in the placenta."  Oh.  Okay.   

Newborn exam.  Malcolm does not like it.  He's a big boy!  8 lbs, 14 oz!  Lucy watches.  Kat explains to Lucy what she is doing.  Lucy cares very little.  "Want to see Baby Muffin," she says, not fully understanding that Baby Malcolm IS Baby Muffin.  I am now almost certain she thought that my belly button was the baby I was growing in my belly.

Bed, blissful, beautiful, cozy, clean.  My bed.  Ah.  I cuddle up with Malcolm on my chest, skin to skin, and Kevin at my side.  We can hardly sleep for being exhausted.  We can hardly sleep from being so in love.

But sleep overtakes us and afternoon slips into evening.  He sleeps on me all evening, all night long.  I can't think of a sweeter day.  

Stuff I Learned from Being a Mama #3

Part 1 Prenatal Stuff I learned
Part 2 Labor, Delivery, Postpartum stuff I learned

So here is the last part (for now) in my First Year Survival Guide.  Or Stuff I Learned from Being a Mama THAT NO ONE EVER FREAKING MENTIONED BEFOREHAND!  This is what I have gleaned from these last 11-odd months with a growing, changing, demanding, wonderful, funny, frustrating little being.  I know there is so much more to learn, for both of us.  But here are some been-there-done-that things I wish I had known about before being in the thick of it.

Don't read parenting books.  Seriously.  They only served to convince my sleep deprived brain that I was doing everything wrong and I was a bad mom.  Oy.  If I could go back and change one thing, I would never read a single book on parenting techniques, parenting philosophies or sleep issues.  I had sleep book overload.  They all contradict each other and even baldly write that the other books and their authors are full of crap.  Nice.  And the worst part was, nothing we ever did ever changed the fact that Lucy was a frequent night waker. Some babies are natural sleepers, some are not.  Eventually she outgrew the waking every 2-3 hours thing.  She still doesn't sleep ALL the way through, but is usually only up once. 

Letting your baby "Cry it out" is very very very hard (and should NEVER be done with a baby under 4 months old).  When I wrote this post a few weeks ago, Lucy was still waking at night.  I finally hit a wall.  I could no longer function on only 2-3 hours of uninterrupted sleep.  I had nothing left to give - to my daughter, my husband or myself.  So we shut her door and didn't go back til morning.  This was not in my original parenting plan, and it was the hardest thing I have ever done.  It took about 5 nights.  The first two were AWFUL.  2-3 hours of screaming.  I had to will myself not to go running in to comfort her.  The third night, she barely peeped at her usual wake-up times.  The fourth night, even less peeping.  The fifth night there was more screaming, but only 45 minutes.  The sixth night (and most nights since then) - 11 1/2 straight hours of sleep.  So it can work.  It is hard.  It feels cruel.  But we are all getting more sleep now, and we are all happier for it.
I also didn't realize that "sleeping through the night" for a baby means 5-6 hours.  Not my own personal definition of sleeping through, but that is what the experts all say.

Don't ask other parents of young  babies about when their baby reach such and such a milestone (er, especially sleep).  It led to me being extremely disappointed when Lucy didn't sleep through at 3 months or 13 lbs or 16 weeks or 18 lbs, or whatever everyone else said.  Your baby is your baby and will do just exactly what your baby is going to do.  I really REALLY wish I had just accepted that and not bothered asking anyone else what their baby was doing.  "Does he/she sleep through the night?" is absolutely the cruelest question you can ask a new parent.  And really, can't you just tell from how they look?  A mama with purple bags under eyes and a fresh-from-the-grave-zombie look does NOT have a baby who sleeps through the night. 
 
Don't rub it in if you do have a baby who sleep through the night.  If someone asks you that question (especially the fresh-from-the-grave-zombie-looking mama), you can say "She's a decent sleeper" or "He does okay most nights".  It's kinder that way. 
 
Everyone has their different issues.  Lucy's was (and to some extent still is) sleep.  But she wasn't colicky, she didn't have reflux, she was a good eater.  So even if Super Mom has the Amazing Mircle Sleeper, that mircle sleeper might be a screaming demon half the day where you have the angel baby who never cries. 
 
Milestones are placed at different intervals for all babies.  Focus on yours, not on anyone elses, or where the experts say a particular milestone should be.  In that same vein, some babies are just more interested in on set of skills than another.  Just the way you are intersted in yoga and your husband is interested in motorcycle racing.  Until he gets himself killed, that is.  Then he won't like anything.  Not every "missed" milestone is cause for concern.  For example, Lucy could feed herself large chunks of whatever I put in front of her by 7 1/2 months old, but was still dragging herself on her belly to get around.  My friend's baby was still exclusively eating purees at that age, but could crawl like a speed demon.  **shrug**  They do what they are gonna do at their own pace.

Don't forget to eat.

Put down that parenting book.  I'm not joking.  Consulting a book for a specific problem might be okay, but trying to align yourself with one philosophy or another makes it that much more difficult when something recommended by "the experts" doesn't work.  I found the best thing I could do was ask other moms in a online forum what their experiences were and if they had any tips.  Sometimes they recommended a particular book or author, but more often, they told me what they did and how it worked.  I found this to be much more practical.

Do your babyproofing way too early.  Have a friend's toddler come check it out for you.  MUCH easier than babyproofing while trying to corral a zippy little crawler.

Tracey Hogg (the self-described Baby Whisperer) is sort of crazy.  Don't take her breastfeeding advice.  Some of her scheduling ideas and her sleep advice are good, but otherwise, I would steer clear.  Plus she calls her readers "ducky".  As in "Take my advice, ducky, and you'll have a perfect baby who never cries and sleeps through the night at 2 days old. Plus you've already made a lot of mistakes, ducky, so stop being a crappy mum and do what I say."  Okay, she never said that, but she does call her readers ducky.

Join or start a mom's group for moms with babies the same age as yours.  I walked my neighborhood for months and never ran into another mom.  I know they are out there, but I would have made no mom friends witout the group I found at http://www.meetup.com/ .  I am so grateful for the women I have met.
 
Don't forget that you LOVE your partner and you were a couple before you were parents. Kevin and I have a rule when we go out together that we only talk about Lucy in the car on the way to wherever we are going. It was hard to follow at first, but it makes our time out without Lucy about us rather than about her.

The days drag.  They really do.  Sometimes I find myself wishing it were naptime.  It is hard to find time to do things outside the house, let alone join in any scheduled activities, when your baby only has a MAXIMUM of two hours of really good, happy awake time.  So I just try to remember how fast the months are flying.  Soon enough we'll have all morning to go to playdates and take yoga classes and swimming lessons and baby macrame and baby jujitsu and baby Japanese cooking classes.  Soon enough.  Right now, she's happy puttering in the house or in the yard or taking the occasional outing to the fountain in downtown Silver Spring.  It is much less stressful than trying to take a full courseload of classes with less value for her than for me.  Plus she can't even get college credit for them til she's out of diapers. 

On that note, you are not required to sign your baby up for any classes at all.  They are more for you than for her.  A reason to get out of the house.  This, of course, is enormously valuable...if it is not a huge, stressful struggle to get to them every week.  I have found that almost all baby classes, storytimes and activities are scheduled smack-dab in the middle of Lucy's morning naptime.  This makes getting her to class a juggling act I am not willing to perform.  I sort of feel like I should be out there with her everyday, taking music and yoga and mommy 'n' me classes, but I try to remember that not taking her to these things does not make me a bad parent.  Perhaps I am lazy.  Fine.  But I am not stressed and Lucy is perfectly happy.  So whatever.  Of course if DADDY wants to sign her up for a class and leave me alone in the house every week, I would be all for it!

So that's it.  Everything I know.  There are major gaps in my knowledge.  I look forward to filling them in as Lucy gets bigger and even more fun.  I love being a mom and I love having a teacher as sweet as my little girl. 

What do you know now that being a mom has taught you?  What blindsided you?  What did you see coming a mile away?  Tell me tell me tell me!

The Tiny Diner

I got one of these last week on my mom's recommendation.  She saw a young mom with her baby using one in a restaurant and thought I might be interested.  This was after witnessing Lucy's whirlwind of terror at a Chinese buffet restaurant over the fourth of July weekend.  To me, this looked like one of those things that looks cool and useful, but turns out to be a waste of money.  Initally I filed it under "another product the baby industry wants to sell me that is actually totally worthless."  I had been burned by these products before.  The Itzbeen being the most notorious example.

I was totally wrong!  This thing is GREAT!  I bought it after Lucy's case of Coxsackie Virus made me rethink my liberal policies about what goes in her mouth.

 Here's the skinny:

It is made of what the manufacturer called "100% waterproof material".  So I don't actually know specifically what it is made of.  It feels like rubber, but there is no latex, PVC or phthalates.  It is very sturdy feeling without being too stiff to roll up compactly. 

Notice the eggs in the scoop instead of her lap

The actual surface area is just about perfect for my daughter's radius of destruction.  There is a little pocket scoop that hangs over the edge of the table and catches the inevitable dropped food before it ends up on little laps or the floor (not that it will prevent your tiny diner from tossing food on the floor when they feel like it).  It rolls up into the scoop, nice and tightly, for a compact addition to the diaper bag.  You can also roll up a bib in it so you don't forget, as well as contain any mess on the trip home. 

The suction cups stick really well to the table.  And there are A LOT of them.  Lucy did manage to pull one of them up (only one), but quickly lost interest in that game when they all didn't come flying off the table for her amusement.

It is advertised as top-rack dishwasher safe, but I haven't tried that yet.  Today was the maiden voyage.  If I end up with a melted pile of green, rubbery goo, I'll update this post accordingly.

The thing I would change would be to add some sort of rim around the edge.  Not that it would keep her from her usual food-tossing, but it would keep the mess a little better contained when she resorts to food smearing to let us know she's finished.  Even after all that work we do on baby sign language.

 Looking a little more closely at this adorable picture of Lucy, I realize that she is SOOO TIRED!  She slept late and her nap schedule got all out of whack, plus we were waiting FOREVER for our food at IHOP.  Over an hour for eggs and pancakes.  She went all giddy with relief when there was food on her plate.  She got that manic, "I am so hungry and happy there is food here that I can't control myself" look I recognize in myself when I am both hungry and tired.  She was literally laying her face on the table and shoveling the eggs into her mouth, while hugging anything that didn't fit in her hand.  It was cute...but a little alarming.

A Long Time Coming

I have been working on this baby blanket since May...of 2009.

 I started working on it on a trip I had last year to San Antonio, Galveston and a few other towns in Texas in mid-May.  A friend's baby was due July 3rd, and I thought I could finish it before the baby arrived.  I had it all planned out.  If I did two squares a day, it would take me roughly 2 weeks to finish, giving me plenty of time to do any finishing work and send it off to the mama- and daddy-to-be before the little one arrived.  Done and done! 

Except that it didn't really work out that way.

I got to this square by the end of my 5 day trip to Texas (I should have been done with 10 squares if I kept to my schedule):

Yes.  That's "B"

When I got home, we closed on our house.  Then we spent 4 days painting and cleaning said house (which was in a state of dreadful neglect when we bought it) before we headed off to my sister's wedding in North Carolina.  Rebecca's wedding was on May 30th, meaning I should have been completely finished according to my (as it turns out, completely unreasonable) schedule.  I was on this letter:

So now it is June.  We have until July 1st to be out of our old house.  Which means we have until July 1st to complete any of the major upgrades we wanted to get done on the house before we moved in.  We spent the entire month of June finishing our basement, cleaning up the yard, re-doing the front walk, painting and generally making the house pleasant and liveable.  Which means that by the time litte KG made her North Carolina debut three weeks early, I was only on:

Oops.

After my self-imposed deadline passed, I took a much more laid-back attitude towards getting it done...meaning I stopped working altogether for at least 3 weeks while we cleaned our old house and moved into out new house and got settled in.  So by KG's actual due date, I had progressed to here:

After we were mostly settled in, I started working again.  Slowly.  I was getting pretty pregnant myself by this point.  I was tired.  I had a house I was trying to settle into, a nursery to decorate, diapers to make, and - oh yeah!  Work.  So I took my time, now that I had missed the big event.  I got hung up for days on a space holder square:

It was actually before the "G", but the "G" looked so quick and the spacer so...not quick that I skipped the spacer, and worked the "G" first.  Perhaps it was a premonition.  I ended up having to improvise a new pattern because I screwed it up so badly and dreaded the thought of pulling all the stitches out and starting over.  You can't really tell, but this little square is out of proportion with the rest of them.  **sigh** No one's perfect.

I doodled with this for the rest of the summer, working on it in front of the TV at night, before bed, after teaching at the arts camp where I was working.  Number one on my list of bad ideas, by the way, teaching drama and yoga in August to small children while vastly pregnant.

Kevin left for the Berkshires for 2 weeks in early August.  I was left at home with my mom, who came to keep me company and make sure I was taken care of should Baby Corbett make an early appearance.  I worked on the blanket sporadically, but mostly just sat like a beached whale, wishing it were time to have the baby. 

The night I went into labor with Lucy, I was stitching this square:

I was watching TV when the contractions started.  They were pretty mild and I could still work through them.  I wasn't entirely sure I was going into labor, because my body had been a Braxton-Hicks festival for weeks.  They just seemed different.  Anyway, when I put the blanket down, shockingly enough, I didn't pick it up again for about 2 months.

After I so blatently missed KG's actual birthdate, I though HEY!  Christmas gift!!  Yeah!  So when Christmas rolled around, I was still working:

Clearly I was just not meant to give this thing away as a gift. 

I remember working the "S" when we were recording the April Fool's Day radio show at the end of March:

The piano player said "You still working on that??"  Yup.  At this point I was pretty much only bringing it to shows to work backstage in my downtime.  The same piano player said a few weeks later "I know you don't have many shows because you are still working on "S".

I decided finally that I would give this blanket to KG for her first birthday.  Surely I could manage THAT.

By KG's birthday, I am here:

SOOOOOOOO CLOSE.  Yet so very very far.

Lucy is 10 months old now.  KG celebrated her first birthday on June 23rd (I THINK - it may be the 22nd.  Or the 24th.  Grr.  I am terrible at dates).  When we were recording the JULY FOURTH radio show at the end of June, I was on:

I told LW (the piano player who was mocking me in March) that I would SURELY FINISH before the radio shows were done.  This was on June 25th and 26th.  The whole cast of the Capitol Steps has been cheering me on...and making fun of me...for over a year now...DW said to me "You can't give that away now!  That's a family heirloom!"

Last night, I put the finishing touches on the last letter:

I frayed the edges of the blanket.  I ironed out the marks left by the embroidery ring (you can tell which ones I spent the most time on by how deeply entrenched the creases around the letter are).

So that's the story of the baby afghan.  Now I am faced with the conundrum - do I keep it, hang it in Lucy's room and pretend it was never meant for anyone else?  Or do I box it up with a copy of this post and send it on to our dear friend's and their now 13-month-old daughter?

Hmmm....

The Mom Switch

I just don't feel any different.  On a basic level, I mean.  I feel like the same old Jenny, but now with a baby. Of course, I generally still feel like the same person I was when I graduated college.  A lot more stable, yes, but basically the same.  I thought that being pregnant would make me a completely different person.  When that didn't happen, I thought something would "switch on" when my daughter was born and I would be a completely different person then.  So now I am still waiting.  When do you start feeling like a mom?  Or a grownup for that matter?

I thought when I got engaged I would feel like a grownup.  Nope.  Married?  Nope.  How about buying a house?  Nope.  Actually, this process made me feel even more childlike and inept than planning a wedding.  Okay, SURELY when I found out I was pregnant, I would feel like I was an adult?  Wrong again.  So why did I expect actually giving birth to be any different?  I mean 14 year olds do it every day and they certainly aren't grownups. 

I remember the first thing I felt when I held her was not some overpowering emotion.  It was exhaustion.  I was just exhausted.  It took weeks - if not months - for me to get over the feeling that I was doing a 24-hour-a-day babysitting gig for some mysterious set of parents who would eventually (please God, SOON) come and take away their tiny, extremely demanding baby.  I thought I would just automatically be different.  Lucy is 9 months old now.  I am still waiting for the Mom Switch to turn on.  I am a MOTHER, after all.  I created life.  Shouldn't that change a person? 

Even the whole process by which my baby came into the word is shrouded in that fuzzy post-birth-hormonal-cocktailed haze.  It could easily not have happened at all.  If not for the constantly changing, sweet, funny, beautiful little girl that is sleeping in the next room, I might think I had dreamed the whole thing.  If anyone actually remembered childbirth for the way it really is for many women, we would have died out as a species long ago.  And I had a pretty easy time of it (if you don't count how long it took).  Yes, giving birth is a right of passage...but it is rarely honored as such in our culture and people don't generally have a celebration for the birth of the mother that happens at the same time as the birth of the baby.

All that aside, I know I have changed.  When I see kids in danger on TV or in the movies, it hits home in a real, visceral way.  She is in my thoughts most of the time.  My husband and I can refer to "she" or "her" out of the blue, in no context at all, and we both know who we are talking about.  My heart has expanded an infinite amount.  It has expanded so much that I wonder how it could possibly expand any further to include any more children.  I yearn for her when we are apart.  I worry about her safety, her development, her health.  I imagine her future with a smile on my face.

I guess the Mom Switch is much more subtle than I thought it was.  I expected to have a complete personality overhaul or something.  An ex-boyfriend of mine once said, "I want to be a fly on the wall when the doctors take you away after having a baby.  I want to know what they do to a woman to make them into moms."  Implying, of course, that he would recognize me after I had turned into one myself.  I suppose I took that more to heart than I ever should have.  I suppose I am still me.  Just "Mama" me.  I sometimes wonder if my mom ever looks at us and thinks "Wow, I can't believe I have KIDS!" or if the wonder of it all wears off after 30 years or so. 

So maybe the Mom Switch is really just a reshuffling of priorities as opposed to the total system reset I was waiting for.  I think of Lucy first and myself and my husband second.  That covers it, in a nutshell.  I think it might also be the switch that grows your heart to 1000 times its original size.  But I suppose even the Mom Switch can't make a perennial kid feel like a grown up.

I have to admit, though, having a real dining room set made me feel a little grown up.

Mama Yoga

You may have gleaned this from my previous postings, but Lucy is not a good sleeper.  She has her moments of great sleep, but generally speaking, I have not had a full night's sleep since she was born.  All this was tempered by the fact that she was usually a great daytime sleeper.  She's sleep for 2 hours in the morning and the another 2 in the afternoon and then sometimes 45 minutes in the early evening. 

This stopped recently.  So now she's a mediocre nighttime sleeper and a mediocre daytime sleeper.  She wakes up any where from 2-4 times a night (ouch) and she takes catnaps.  45 minute naps, 35 minute naps, sometimes an hour and 15 minute naps...but she always wakes up fussy and rubbing her eyes, making me think she needs more sleep.

So I started camping out by her crib about 10 minutes before she usually wakes up.  And I wait.  Sometimes she stirs and wiggles her fingers and goes back into a sleep without so much as a whimper.  Sometimes she jumps like someone has shocked her, rubs her eyes and starts wailing.  My goal is to pat her back to sleep before she actually wakes up.  It works like a charm.  If I can catch her before she is fully awake, it only takes a few gentle pats to get her to go back to sleep peacefully.  Usually if she makes it past 45 minutes, she'll sleep for 1.5-2 hours.  But if I miss the stirring and she actually wakes, it's game over, better luck next time.

The tricky part about all of this is not waking her up in my attempt to make sure she doesn't wake up.  A sleep cycle in an infant is 40 minutes long.  Around 30 minutes, they start to come up out of their deep sleep, crest the wake of barely waking around 40 minutes and - if you are lucky - sink slowly down into another deep sleep around 45 minutes.  Some babies can't make the transition from one sleep cycle to another, thus waking up around 40-45 minutes into their nap.  Often, this is Lucy.  So I have to quietly open the door to her room and wait quietly by her crib for her to stir, then quietly pat her down, then quietly leave when she is back asleep. 

Easy right?

WRONG!  The door squeaks.  It has been painted over so many times that it sort of lightly sticks to the frame, so that also makes a noise when you open the door.  The crib will move ever so lightly if you bump it in the wrong place.  The floor boards squeak.  My GOD do the floor boards sqeak!  I have to do a little jig to avoid the squeaky ones on the way to the crib and back out the door after the naptime intervention is done.  I have to put weight on one foot ever so slightly, testing the squeak of the floor before putting my full weight on it.  Then do the same with the other foot.  Then soooooooo slowly lean on the edge of the crib without moving it.  Or I can stand stark still in the middle of her room on the one spot I KNOW has no squeaky boards and do a mad dash to the crib side if she starts to wake up, often bumping the crib in my rush to keep her from waking.

Once I have found a quiet position at the edge of her crib, I have to wait.  I usually wait for 15 minutes, from 30 minutes into her nap to 45 minutes.  After I while I want to move.  My back starts to ache or my elbow hurts or the bottoms of my feet start to get really hot (don't even ask.  I have no idea why this happens).  So I start the cribside boogie.  Arching my back, wiggling my hips, rolling my neck.  I do every stretch I can think of that doesn't actually require me to move my feet or my arms. 

Then it occurs to me that this is my yoga.  Not just the stretching, but the waiting, the patting, the watching.  I breathe.  I am in my body, exactly where it is.  I stretch a little.  I watch my daughter sleep.  I love the idea that she thinks I watch over her every moment of her slumber.  Of course this is not true, but I love the idea that she might think this.  Whenever she starts to wake and can't go back to sleep, I am there for her with a gentle hand, a gentle pat.  She is so sweet while she sleeps. She smiles randomly, sucks her phantom pacifier, sighs deeply.  I breathe peace to my sleeping baby.  I practice patience as the clocks ticks the minutes off - minutes I could be using for any number of things for myself.  This is Life Yoga and I love it.  This is Karma Yoga (giving of yourself freely to others).  This is Mama Yoga.  What a blessing.

Baby Fingers

Lucy has been waking up less frequently at night.  She went from waking 4-5 times between 7pm and 7am, to waking just once around 2 am.  Sometimes twice, depending on whether or not she decides to poop out three days worth of food around 5 am.  This is a WONDERFUL development...but...

...I must say, one of these days I will miss snuggling with her in the quiet darkness of extremely early morning. 

Last night, she work up at 2:15am, after sleeping for a solid 7 hours (!!).  I stumbled half-asleep into her room (my sweet, slumbering husband barely stirring) and gathered her in my arms.  We sat in the rocker and nursed.  I took one little hand in mine, playing with her fingers, and her other hand was gently tickling my waist.  Her fingers were so chilly I almost jumped when she touched my skin.  She always goes for skin-to-skin contact during her night-time feedings.  She'll reach up and put her hand on my face, or on my breast as we nurse, or wrap her sweet little fingers around my thumb.  Sometimes her other hand will touch my waist or burrow deep up under my arm (I am shockingly ticklish - this is a hard one to deal with) - anywhere she can feel the warmth of Mama close by.  It is a powerful joy I cannot even come close to describing, mostly because of it's complete and utter lack of "specialness".

So nothing special happened last night, except that I was nursing my long-desired, often dreamt-of, precious baby girl in the wee hours of the morning. 

Perfect.