When Natalie’s in mid-crying-session and her little face is all screwed up and red and her eyes are all squinched shut and her lower lip is all sticking out and pouty? As much as I dread the wails that expression promises and wish she never felt so bad that she had to get into that state, I still think it’s insanely cute in its own way. Especially the pouty lip.

Yes, yes. I know. Motherhood has rotted my brain.

She’s one month old today, by the way. Happy one month, Natalie!

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(Bear with me. Baby care is kind of my world right now, so when I get a chance to blog it’s going to be kind of baby-centered until at least I go back to work in mid-to-late September.)

Tim’s put up some new pictures since I last posted:
http://gallery.mac.com/qnarf#100035
http://gallery.mac.com/qnarf#100073

Babies reportedly spend 40-50% of their sleep time in REM sleep, which at least in adults is when we dream. I wonder what they dream about. Natalie tends to pull her arms and legs in real tight sometimes when she’s dreaming, so I wonder if her dreams are about her time in the womb. For all I know, though, she’s dreaming she’s really cold or something.

What to say about Natalie right now? She’s a beautiful baby, and of course I have no bias when it comes to that. She’s growing and maturing a little more every day. I’m still nervous about her being ready to go to daycare, but mostly just because she still doesn’t like her crib much. At this point, she’s even staying quiet in her car seat quite a bit. We just have to make the jump from car seat to crib sometime in the next three weeks. But I feel like we’ve all three got a better handle on life than we did before.

I even feel better about feeding, mostly. Why? Well… You see, pumping breast milk to have enough to send a good supply in to daycare just was not working very well. She seems to be getting enough feeding directly from the breast, but it was becoming obvious that getting breast milk to her at daycare was going to be more difficult than we had anticipated. So while I’m still going to breastfeed her when I can and while my milk supply holds out, we’re also introducing formula to supplement and that’s what she’ll have at daycare. We gave her the first bottle today and she took to it very well. While breastfeeding is the best and all that, I have to admit that the bottle is awfully nice. It takes a few minutes to prepare, but she can get her food faster and Tim can feed her. It… is kind of freeing, in a way.

I have mixed feelings about it, though. I feel bad because I feel like I’ve worked so hard to get this breastfeeding thing down, and now a little bump in the road comes along and I give up. But it’s not really such a little bump, and there are so many other challenges in life right now that don’t have such simple answers, and I only have so much energy. When a problem comes along that does have an easy out, it almost seems foolish not to take it.

Especially after the news we got on Monday, that Tim’s kidneys are failing. I’ll just let you read his blog entry for the details. But suffice to say, with this on top of everything else… less stress is good. Less stress is very good. And trying to tweak my breast milk production and fit pumping into my day, especially once I go back to work, is only going to be more stress.

But overall… It really does get better. I was skeptical at first when people told me it would. Or, rather, I believed them, but thought that it would take longer than this. But it does get better, and it doesn’t really take as long as I’d feared.

Now if we could just get her to sleep in her crib. Well, we’re working on that too.

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We’ve been skipping commercials on the TiVo less these days, mostly out of sheer distraction. I have therefore been overexposed to certain advertisements. One of them is for the mortgage company Ditech. Their new tagline appears to be “People Are Smart”.

I can’t help it. Every single time, I want to quote Men in Black back at them: “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky animals and you know it.”

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Wow. OK, we have a baby. Now what?

Well, it’s not quite that bad. We’re getting the hang of a lot of stuff, I think. It’s just that “stuff” keeps changing, you know? In some ways it seems like things are going really fast right now. Everything is a new adventure, not just for Natalie who literally has no other experiences, but also for us as we figure out this “life with a baby” thing. (You should see us with the baby bath. Oy.)

Most surprising thing that I was forewarned about and should have known, but was still caught off guard by anyway: Breastfeeding is not instinctive. It’s one of those things you would think would be, but it’s totally not, not for baby and not for mother. Once the baby’s latched on, the sucking action seems to be pretty reflexive. But getting that latch is the hard part, and it takes a good few days of practice to really get it down. Of course, these are naturally the few days when mother’s hormones are at their worst, which leads to everything seeming pretty bad even when it’s really pretty normal. I was forewarned, but it was really hard to keep things in perspective under the circumstances.

Most surprising thing about brand-new babies: For a few days at least, their immature nervous systems lead to some interesting behaviour. The off-and-on shivering kind of concerned us at the hospital until we asked a nurse and she explained. The really interesting one, though, has been her eyes. I don’t think it’s happening as much now, but sometimes when Natalie’s asleep her eyes will open just slightly and they’ll be, like, rolled back in her head with only the whites showing or something like that. Once I caught them in the process of rolling backward while also moving in opposite directions to the outside corners of her eyes. “Interesting” is really the only word I can come up with here.

I was going to add a “most surprising thing about me postpartum”, but most of the things I can think of are sort of more than I think people really want to hear about, so… Oh, wait, I’ve got one. I’m… not in pain. And haven’t been. This actually wouldn’t really surprise me, since I didn’t know what to expect, but at the hospital and when I was discharged, everyone seemed to expect me to be. The doctor who discharged me seemed skeptical when I said I didn’t feel like I needed any pain meds, and seemed to think I’d change my mind in a couple of days. (I didn’t.) The nurses kept asking how my pain was. I was advised in the wheelchair on the way out of the hospital that if I held the car seat (with Natalie in it) just right on my lap it wouldn’t hurt, the implication being that it normally would. I was kind of confused, because other than the occasional sting from the episiotomy stitches when I moved just wrong or tenderness when the nurses checked on my abdomen (which faded fast), the worst “pain” I had was really just from sitting on my butt for too long at once. And a cushion helped with that, even. I guess I got a little bit of back pain the first few days when we got home, but that seemed like it was more related to the bending and lifting and such (see: baby who likes being in arms; changing table at an uncomfortable height) than to the actual process of childbirth. By this time I feel fairly normal, actually, other than being really tired, which I’m sure has nothing to do with my completely disrupted sleep patterns and all the stress of having a new baby. So I guess that qualifies as being surprising without also being TMI.

Right now, I’m feeling a little overwhelmed, I guess. Sometimes it’s because of everything that’s involved in caring for Natalie, and how right now my life kind of revolves around doing that. That’s to be expected, I think. But also… It just seems like time is running away from me. Sometimes I feel like there’s just not enough of it, like how are we ever going to be ready for me to go back to work when I’m supposed to? We’ve made so much progress, but there’s so much left to do before our life as a family is at a point where she can go to daycare.

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Probably most people who read this blog already know why I’ve not written anything in the past few days, but it’s the sort of news that it never hurts to repeat.

There’s not been anything this week because Tim and I have been busy having a baby and adjusting to being parents. Well, we’re still working on that second part, but for the moment the baby’s sleeping, so I have a second for updates.

Natalie Rei Johnson was born at 8:22am on Monday, July 30. At birth she weighed six pounds fifteen ounces and was twenty inches long. She’s got blue eyes, for now, although of course that may change over the next few months, and a little bit of hair that’s really light in front and a couple of shades darker in back. And she’s the most beautiful little baby in the world, of course. Which her parents and grandparents have not hesitated to tell her at every opportunity.

There is so much I could say here, about Natalie herself and the whole experience of childbirth and… just everything. I’m not sure where to begin, or exactly how to express a lot of it. For now, I’ll just leave you with links to pictures:
http://web.mac.com/qnarf/iWeb/Baby/Birth.html
And the link to photos of the finished nursery that I didn’t get to post before everything started happening:
http://web.mac.com/qnarf/iWeb/Baby/Natalie’s%20Room.html

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