Better

The last thing I saw before I fell asleep last night was Adriana sleeping beside me. I closed my eyes and listened to her breathe, and promised myself that today I would do better.

Nothing particularly bad happened yesterday. Adriana was her normal toddler self, alternating between being a charming, happy little girl and a stubborn, willful child. As I write that the juxtaposition of those two things seems wrong: can't she be charming and willful, happy and stubborn at the same time? Anyhow, she had her normal ups and downs, but there are some days when coping with the downs is somehow beyond me. For much of the day I was impatient, telling her "no" without explanation, carrying her when she wanted to walk because I was in a hurry, offering distractions instead of getting down on the floor and playing with her myself or encouraging her to help with what I'm doing. She threw tantrums and my headache grew, and neither of us had much fun. She asked to nurse more often than usual, and I think that was good. It forced me to stop what I was doing, take the time to really focus on her, to just snuggle with her in the armchair.

As I tried to relax into sleep, I felt guilty. I know I'm not going to be a perfect mother, and that I don't need to be. Toddlers are adorable and fascinating, but they are also energetic and demanding and challenging, and I do not have an endless well of patience. That is okay. But lying there in bed in seemed so obvious to me that I could do better, so I reached over and stroked her hand with one finger and promised her silently that I would.  

Kinship

For a while now, I have done this thing when I wake up in the night and have trouble getting back to sleep: I lie in the dark and imagine what my friends are doing in various time zones around the world. Somehow I find it reassuring and relaxing. When Adriana was a newborn, things changed, though. As I groggily nursed the baby and then rocked her back to sleep after she ate, I imagined all the other mothers who were awake with their little ones. It made the middle of the night feedings less lonely.

For the past few nights, Adriana has had a fever and last night she couldn't keep down any medicine that would help. In the wee hours of the morning, I lay in bed with they hot little baby on my chest--it was the only way she would sleep. I worried about when she would start to feel better and about how I would function today with so little sleep. And then I thought of all the other mothers who were up with their feverish children, kissing the hot foreheads, stroking the damp hair back from the little face, worrying about when it would all be okay, and I started to relax.

My job just got 5,784,998 times harder

I mean, look, now I'm going to have to pay attention to the child:



After mastering walking (well, "mastering" is used fairly loosely here), she's decided the next step is climbing the furniture, apparently. Unfortunately she hasn't yet figured out how to climb down safely. Or that mama doesn't like it when she pushes all the buttons on the stereo and throws CDs on the floor.

A suburban housewife for one year

A year ago today, I woke up with nothing in particular to do. It was the first day after I'd quit my job to be a stay-at-home mom. I tried writing about the strangeness of it that day, and again a week later, judging by the dates of unfinished files in my Google Docs folder. I was exhausted at that point, so every time I wrote a sentence I needed a nap, which wasn't conducive to getting much writing done. And what was there to say? It wasn't a very exciting thing to write about:

This morning when the alarm went off, I stayed in bed. Brian got up, turned it off, and went downstairs, while the cat curled back up beside me. About half an hour later I wandered downstairs for some orange juice, just as Brian was heading back up to get ready for work. I did the Sudoku and puttered around a bit. When Brian left for work, I wandered around the house aimlessly for a little bit. I had told Brian that on my first day at home, I wasn't going to set any goals for accomplishing things. I was going to eat and sleep, and just enjoy not doing anything. Getting things done could wait until Thursday. But after I checked my email, I started a load of laundry, made the bed, wrapped some presents, and tried to clear out the slow-running bathroom sink with baking soda, vinegar, and boiling water (which totally failed, but did make cool noises).

So it wasn't particularly interesting, although no longer being required to show up for work was a relief, even if I had had an easy desk job. It was nice to not have to commute up to Glover Park from Alexandria each morning. When I got tired during the day, I could lie down and nap for an hour. I tried to get something done around the house each day, and I tried to get out for a walk every day, but other than that, my only task was growing the baby. It was strange to become "a stay-at-home mom with no kids," although apparently, according to what I wrote last year, one of my friends had noted when I described myself that way that the Bush Administration would probably just call me a stay-at-home-mom, and even give my fetus Medicaid. (I have no recollection of that conversation, but I know exactly which friend would have been the one to say that.) I ended up with three weeks off before Adriana's arrival--three weeks to rest up, to allow myself time for the quiet contemplation of the end of pregnancy, the strange turning inward that seems to happen for most women. That was a huge blessing.

Then Adriana arrived and everything changed. Moments for quiet contemplation seemed few and far between, even with our easy-going little girl. IN the early days, when I wasn't busy with her, I was too exhausted to think. But there wasn't that scary end-of-maternity leave date looming six- or twelve-weeks ahead on the horizon. I found it comforting that for the time being, my sole job was to nurture my baby.

Before we were ever married, Brian and I talked abstractly about kids ("our subjunctive children," we referred to them), and I recall him saying that he assumed that if we had children I would continue to work afterwards. I was thinking along the same lines at that point, but as we began to talk about starting a family more seriously, I realized that it was important to me to be able to stay home with our baby, and Brian agreed with me. I feel incredibly lucky that we were able to afford to give up my salary. That means it's important for us to stay a one-car family, and that it will take longer for us to get to a position where we can buy a house. Most of the people around us were very supportive of our choice, although there were a few comments that annoyed me because they made me feel defensive ("Your brain will turn to mush!") and others that made me want to jump to the defense of families where both parents work ("It's really the best thing for the baby."). For the most part I haven't felt the need to proclaim that "Of course I work!" or that "Adriana is my job!" when people ask me if I work, although when couple of (childless) friends have commented that they wished they didn't have to do anything Brian has had to listen to me bitch about them that night.

There are days when I have my doubts, days when Adriana and I are both sleep deprived and cranky, days when I wish someone else were dealing with her refusals to nap and the constant fussing. Then I think that trying to do another job on so little sleep wouldn't be fun, either, and I'd really only get to spend time with Adriana at the end of the day, which is not her finest time. There are those days. But most days we play together and I use her naps to take some time for myself or get things done around the house. She holds my finger and leads me around and around the apartment on her wobbly legs, stopping to laugh at the cat or investigate a magazine that was left on the couch, and I am completely aware of how good life is, how lucky I am.

In one of the posts I began last December, I wrote, "I spent most of my final commute home wondering if I'd made the right decision. All that time and money spent on grad school to become a stay-at-home mom? Would I go absolutely crazy in the first three months of being home alone with the baby? Should I have at least kept working right up until when the baby came?" A year later, I do feel that it was the right decision. That's a nice feeling to have.

Maybe writing this down will help me remember sooner next time

Why is it so hard for me to remember that the days where leaving the house with Adriana seem the most daunting are the days that it is most important for me to do so? This morning Adriana slept for half an hour, about an hour after I expected her to take a nap, and upon awakening went immediately back to seeming cranky. It seemed that if I was holding her she was wiggling away, but every time I put her down she was fussing for me to pick her up. At 2 this afternoon, I realized that we were both still in our pajamas, and I hadn't even brushed my teeth. Taking a fussy baby out of the house is always somehow a terrifying thought, but eventually I remember that staying in with her when she's like that is worse. So I got us both ready to go and by 2:30 we were out the door. Immediately I felt better. We walked downtown, where I picked up a few Christmas presents and got a hot chocolate, and stopped at the park to play on the swings on the way back to the house. When we got home, Adriana was getting fussy again, but I was somehow more prepared to deal with her mood.

Eleven months

I hate telling people that Adriana is eleven months old. Whenever I do they always remind me that she is nearly a year old (because, what? I might not have noticed?), and I'm not sure I'm ready for that.

I say that, and I do sort of miss Adriana being a tiny (tiny! ha!) baby, but I'm also finding that I love and will miss every stage she goes through. Right now, she is playing with us more and can communicate with us, to a certain extent, and is just a lot of fun. Which is what I say every month. I should probably just write, "My baby is growing up! So I am sad! But she is more fun to play with now and learning lots of things! Because that's what babies do!" And then I could copy and paste that every month and save us all some time.

That would be nice, but it's not what you'd expect from the woman with the 10,000-word birth story, now is it? So:

There are some days when I wonder if this is what eleven months is like, how on earth am I going to deal with a two-year-old? That's usually when Adriana is fussing to be picked up, and then fussing to get down as soon as she's up, and then arching her back and screaming when I put her back down. But then she takes a nap (we still get two a day out of her; ssshhhhhhh) and after an hour or so we are all much happier.

Right now Adriana seems to be between bouts of teething, and it's heavenly. We still aren't sleeping through the night, but I can handle waking up only once or twice. We've talked about the possibility of moving her to her own bed, or even her own room, but she does seem to sleep for longer spells when she's snuggled up with us, and I am content to have her warm, cuddly body beside me this winter. She still not a big eater, but now that there are a few things she'll eat regularly and she seems more willing to try the new things we offer, I feel okay about it. I know she's getting what she needs nutritionally from me, and that at this age "real food" just lets her experiment with different tastes and textures.

I am constantly forgetting how high she can reach. Things set near the edge of the kitchen table are easily within her reach, and I have been surprised at how far back things need to be. We have a couple of little poofs we bought in Spain that she climbs on top of to reach things on shelves that used to be safe from her little fingers; I'm in trouble when she figures out that the kitchen chairs can serve the same purpose. She is closer and closer to walking. Over Thanksgiving weekend she pushed herself to a stand for the first time without pulling up on anything. When I set her down on the floor, she stands for a second on her own, before slowly lowering herself the rest of the way to the ground. She "cruises" easily around the furniture, and when I am in the kitchen she often pulls up on my leg, and I walk around slowly as I do dishes or put away groceries so that she can "follow" me. I get a kick out of letting her hold one of my fingers while we walk, as if we are holding hands and going for a stroll. She giggles and shrieks with excitement as she takes her pigeon-toed bow-legged steps on her fat little feet. On Saturday she took her first unaided steps. Of course, she promptly fell over and has only done it twice more since.

She loves music, and will stand in front of the stereo bouncing in time with the music. Sometimes when a song ends, she applauds. She waves bye-bye when we say to, if she feels like it. She gives hugs to her stuffed monkey, her grandparents' dogs, other children her age, and would even hug the cat if the cat would tolerate it.

She is very much a mimic. I comb her hair after giving her a bath and then hand her the comb so she can try to comb it herself. If I give her the bottle of baby lotion to play with as I am rubbing the lotion into her skin, she tries to dab on more lotion from the closed bottle. Unless she is too busy trying to fit the bottle into her mouth---she is, after all, a baby. She watches the way we feed ourselves and tries to mimic with her own little spoon.

There was a song we used to sing at camp when I was little:
Late last night while we were all in bed
Old Lady Leary left the lantern in the shed
And when the cow kicked it over she winked her eye and said
"It's gonna be a hot time in the old town tonight."
Fire fire fire!
Water water water!
Jump, lady, jump!
Ahhhhhhhhh....splat!
Adriana likes to shriek and will copy us when we do so, so I sing the song to her and she copies me when I shriek at the end. Now when I just start singing the song she begins her shrieking. It's kind of cute. And also probably a trick I am going to regret encouraging. I should have just stuck with singing "ba ba ba" instead of "na na na" for the chorus of "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" so that she could "sing along" with me on that one. Well, live and learn.

When baby isn't feeling well

1. Realize that baby is warm
2. Take temperature
3. Administer Tylenol, feel guilty for not noticing earlier that this might be why she was fussy, fret about whether to call doctor
4. Nurse baby
5. Rock baby to sleep
6. Try to set sleeping baby down
7. Immediately regret decision as baby fusses
8. Return to rocker with baby
9. Wish you'd left your book nearby
10. Wish you had a glass of water
11. Remained pinned to rocker with feverish baby
12. Baby wakes up and cries
13. Nurse baby
14. Change baby's diaper
15. Note that temperature is coming down
16. Try to put baby down so you can put in a load of laundry/pick up toys/check e-mail
17. Change your mind as baby screams
18. Rock baby
19. Nurse baby to sleep
20. Baby wakes up and cries
21. Realize that baby is warm again
22. Return to step 2 and repeat cycle several times over next seven to eight hours
23. Notice just before your spouse returns home and you will finally have back up that baby is feeling better and no one will believe how today went

In orbit

I was moving laundry from the washer to the dryer when Adriana pulled up on my jeans and hugged me around my leg, grinning up at me.

"What's it like to be the center of her universe?" Brian asked, joking, as I loosened her grip so I could move without knocking her over, just as I do many times every day now that she has discovered that my jeans are great for pulling up on.

"A little stressful, and mostly wonderful," I told him honestly.

But after he asked, I started to think: right now, yes, I am the center of her universe, but she is also the center of mine, and I think that's exactly how it's supposed to be right now.

Nine months

For a while I thought I wasn't going to handle Adriana growing older well at all. For most of September, she no longer seemed to be the pleasant baby she had once been. She was always cranky, even when we were both well-rested, and that wasn't very often, as she was waking every hour or two all night long. I missed the easy baby she'd been a couple of months ago--the one who didn't fuss all the time and wasn't always getting into things. And then, after we had spent almost three weeks looking at the tooth just below her gums and begging it to pop through soon, we woke up one morning to discover that she had four teeth instead of three, and that we had our (mostly) happy baby back. She still is getting into everything, but that's easier to cope with when she is clearly so delighted with the world she's exploring.

She is happy, energetic, and curious, and she seems to know what she wants. Long days out and about in a carrier are no longer satisfactory for her, because she would rather get down and play. She wants to explore everything, and it's fun to watch her try to work things out: when she discovered that she couldn't open the kitchen cabinets after I taped them shut, she promptly tried opening them from the other side. Once the real cabinet latches went on and she could open the doors a crack, she spent some time tugging at the doors and staring in through the small opening. She raises her arms when she wants to be picked up, and pushes away when she wants to be put down. The pushing away can be frustrating--she rolls away from me during diaper changes (toward the wall when she's on the changing table, fortunately), but usually giving her a toy (or the tube of rash cream if that's the only thing within my reach) can keep her still long enough to snap on the fresh diaper.

She is a little shy sometimes. When we go to a new place or she sees new people, she clings to me a little bit more. It takes awhile for her to be willing to crawl around and explore, and she is quieter that she is when it is just us at home. Eventually, though, her curiosity wins out and she crawls around, getting into things and babbling to herself. She looks up intermittently to find me and smile, and then goes back to playing--unless I am not looking at her, in which case she fusses until she has my attention, and then continues on with what she was doing.

She pulled up once just after she turned eight months old. Brian was sitting right beside her, but I missed it, as I thought the excited voice he was using to get my attention was part of whatever game the two of them were playing. Then last Tuesday I set her on the floor after nursing her in the armchair and she grabbed the edge of the chair and pulled right back up to let me know she wasn't actually finished eating yet. It took me a moment to register what she was doing, but then I applauded her. She mimicked me and, having let go of the chair to do so, immediately fell. We keep trying to trick her into doing that again (what can I say? It was cute), but now she knows she needs to hold on, and will just clap one hand against whatever she is pulling up on. Now she pulls up at will, using my jeans so she can let me know that she would like to be picked up, or using the bookcases, so that she can clear all shelves within her reach of books and CDs.

She still isn't much for solid foods, but she seems to actually be eating some of the banana I give her (as opposed to just mashing it around), and occasionally lets me spoon feed her a few bites of cereal or pureed pears. Sleeping is going better than it was when we were awaiting the fourth tooth, but she is by no means sleeping through the night. I usually feel reasonably well rested though, since cosleeping means I don't really have to get up with her, and because Brian gets up with her in the morning when she awakes between 6:30 and 7:00 and I get to sleep in until 8.

Her very favorite thing is blowing raspberries. At this point I don't think it's physically possible for her not to blow raspberries if someone near her does it. If she is warming up to cry, sometimes I give her a Bronx cheer and she replies in kind, ending the bout of fussing. If I wake her up taking her out of her car seat she will start blowing raspberries before she has even opened her eyes. When I sing "The Marvelous Toy" to her, she wants to make the noises, too, but lacking the coordination to make the noises "zip," "bop," or "whrrr," she just blows raspberries.

Right now I really enjoy the fact that we can play together now. She loves peekaboo and games of chase. "I'm going to get you," I say, and she crawls away as fast as she can--which isn't all that fast, especially because every few feet she turns to see if I'm still chasing her and has to stop, sit, turn, and then get up and crawl again--shrieking with laughter. Or I crook my index finger and whisper "tickle bug's coming," and she giggles and wiggles as I get closer and closer before I tickle her. She laughs when I sing her the boa constrictor song and help her touch her toes, knees, belly, neck, and head. Best of all is just lying on the floor while she climbs back and forth over me. I sing to her while she clambers about. and she squeals and we are both very happy.

That's klassy with a 'k'

Or, Brian's going to be so freakin' impressed when he gets home tonight

When Adriana started to crawl, we bought cabinet latches. Brian thought he was buying adhesive ones, but it turned out the adhesive was just to help hold the latches in place so you could screw them in. Reluctant to actually screw things into the cabinets in our apartment and risk losing money when we move out, we've been meaning to check with the leasing office about this. We were able to put it off for some time, while we waited for Adriana to figure out how to open the cabinets, and then for her to realize that this was a fun activity. After chasing her away from them 44,783,293,286 times this morning (approximately), I finally went and talked to them today and was told that they "cannot grant permission to cause intentional damage to the cabinets." Punks.

There are adhesive cabinet latches available online. They're more expensive than the kind you attach with screws, but I guess I'll have to order them anyhow. But to make my life easier until they arrive, I've worked something out:







Brian thought I was kidding when I threatened to tape things shut with duct tape. Well, he's not always very observant when it comes to things I've done around the house. Maybe he won't notice?

The food thing

Adriana's transition to solid foods hasn't been easy. The first few times we gave her cereal she seemed to enjoy it. She gave avocado a try one day, but after that she wasn't much of a fan. I thought maybe it wasn't sweet enough for her, so the next food I tried was sweet potatoes, which she also turned down. Bananas were also rejected. I tried offering the food after she had nursed, before she had nursed, and in between feedings. I tried different consistencies of food, finally diluting things with breastmilk so much that I wasn't sure she could taste anything but the milk. I tried giving her pieces of things to feed herself. I tried leaving the room while Brian fed her on weekends. I switched back to cereal, but she was no longer quite as interested. A friend said that her baby loved pears, so I bought some pears and pureed them one afternoon, planning on freezing them and starting her on them the next day. But she was just sitting there playing while I was in the kitchen, so I put her in the high chair and fed her some right then.

She loved it. Or sort of loved it: she made a horrible face with every spoonful, but then she would lean forward and open her mouth to ask for more. Success!

Except the next day? She wouldn't eat the pears at all. Or the cereal. Every time the spoon would come toward her, she would shut her mouth and turn her head to the side. It was discouraging. I would try to talk with other moms about it, but nearly everyone said something to the extent of, "Oh, we started a little earlier than we probably should have, but she really seemed ready. And she loves it! She'll eat anything we put in front of her." Which was lovely for them, I'm sure, but not exactly helpful information for me. Eventually, I put solids on hold for a while. I told myself that we'd get back to them after our Labor Day weekend vacation. But when I tried then, I was again met with the sealed lips and turned head. She'll eat when she's ready, I told myself. It's not like she's going to be getting her driver's license and refusing any food but milk.

Then the other day I picked up some bananas. I was about to eat one the other day, when I decided to see how Adriana would do. I put her in the high chair and let her watch as I broke off a piece of the banana at ate it. Then I gave her a big piece to see what would happen. I don't know how much you could actually say she ate, but at least she was willing to play with it. And so long as feeding the baby is fun rather than stressful, I think it will be much easier for me not to worry about whether she's actually eating the food.

I think baby classes are called enrichment activities because of how much they cost

Last week Adriana and I went to The Little Gym. Some friends took their babies when they were her age, and I thought she might enjoy it. Plus, I thought it might be a good way for me to get to meet other moms of babies. I looked forward to it all week. And then we got there and...I wasn't impressed.

I wanted to like it. At first I told myself the reason that Adriana didn't seem to be enjoying it was that she was teething and that she hadn't slept well the night before. I thought about going back this week. It wasn't until I was describing the whole experience to Brian and I realized that everything I said was negative that I realized that maybe The Little Gym isn't for us, at least not right now. It was frustrating to me how quickly we moved from one activity to another: the teacher would pass out bells to ring in time to a little song that we would sing, we'd sing the eight lines or so of the song, and then it was time for the bells to be put away; Adriana hadn't gotten a real chance to explore the bells and play with them. The we'd be off to play on some bars, helping the babies pull up on them; Adriana would just be warming up to the idea and exploring this new part of the room when it was back to the big mat again. There was some sort of "free play" time, but at that point nearly all the toys were dumped out at once and I think Adriana felt overwhelmed. I sat beside her while she watched what was going on in the rest of the room, holding a ball in her lap and just staring. The teacher came over to try to encourage her to play and Adriana started to fuss and crawled onto my lap. Whenever we tried a new activity after that she would cry. Not fuss. Cry.

We have been attending a Mommy & Me yoga class every week. Adriana loves playing with the toys there and chasing around after the other babies and kids. I've been impressed with the teacher and her ability to instruct the women in the class while supervising the mobile babies and helping the newest moms find comfortable positions for nursing. It's not the most relaxing yoga class I've ever done, but it's fun to see the babies play and I do get some good stretching done. I was feeling that something like The Little Gym would give Adriana more of a chance to play with other babies (I know they aren't really playing together at this age, but she does seem to get a kick out of watching other kids and it's adorable to see them check each other out), and it was something that really was for her, not something for me that I was taking her along to. I actually felt sort of guilty for a little bit for deciding not to go back to The Little Gym. What if I really just thought the songs were stupid? What if I was just being selfish? What if by not going back I wasn't giving Adriana a chance to warm up to it? But then I remembered the crying. And I remembered that she doesn't cry at yoga (unless a toddling baby happens to land on her, and I think that's a little bit different). And that she'll learn to walk and play and all those things just fine without big red mats and bars to push on. Yesterday I watched her in yoga while I stretched. She picked up a blue plastic car and turned it over in her hands, studying it, tasting it, hitting it against a sippy cup that another child had dropped. She played with it at her own pace, then came to me and patted me briefly before she crawled off to blow raspberries on another baby's socks. Maybe she would warm up to Little Gym if I gave it another chance. Maybe in awhile we'll try again. For now we'll still with the yoga.

Three months

This gets more fun every day. Adriana is suddenly much more aware of the world around her. This has some downfalls--she's easily distracted when I'm trying to feed her when we're out and about, which makes it harder to be quite so modest--but mostly it's just incredible to watch her notice things. She reaches out to grab the toys handing from her play gym, watches the cat come down the stairs, stares intently at the other babies in our yoga class.

She's stopped minding her tummy time. Now when I put her on her belly, she pushes up and kicks and smiles. Usually. Sometimes she still is pretty sure that tummy time is a vast right wing conspiracy. After I fed her on Sunday morning she accidentally rolled from her side onto her tummy as she was dozing back off. After a few seconds she woke back up grunting angrily and giving me an accusing look.

A couple of weeks ago, she discovered her vocal chords, but can't figure out how to make them stop, as Brian put it at first. She'd been cooing a little bit from time to time, but now whenever we set her down by herself she starts with her noises. A lot of the "words" start with an "ng" sound, making us wonder if we somehow ended up with a Vietnamese baby. She also laughs. I don't remember the first time I heard a laugh, but I remember the first time she laughed for Brian. He was bending into the car to take her out of her carseat, and I don't know what he did that amused her, but she giggled and he stuck his head back out of the car to ask me "Did you hear that?" The next night she laughed at him again. It's a wonderful sound, as are her occasional squeals of happiness when I pour water over her head in the bath.

Recently she's stopped sleeping quite so well: instead of getting up once with her every night, it's usually twice. But she goes right back to sleep, and then so do I. And she's become better at nursing without much help from me, so I don't have to sit up and pull the boppy onto my lap in order for us to get comfortable. For a while I was blaming some of the lack of sleep on teething--she is drooling, her cheeks are red, she is constantly chewing on her hands, and our normally happy baby is incredibly fussy some evenings. I called Brian's mom one night to ask when her kids at gotten teeth. When she told me she thought it had been around three months, I decided that must be what was happening and, after thanking her and Brian for those genes, adjusted to the idea of waking up every hour or two at night. Of course, that night, Adriana only awoke once.

Several people have asked me if I miss my old job. And in some ways I do miss it. I enjoyed the work I was doing and the people I was working with. I know that the next couple of years will be an interesting time in health policy. Last week, Adriana turned 12 weeks old and I realized that under FMLA my maternity leave, if I'd taken it, would be up and I would be heading back to work. I knew that I would miss Adriana a lot more than I miss my job, and that given the way we do things in this country, it will always be an interesting time in health policy. I'll go back at some point--paid employment is a good thing--but for now I am content to make taking care of Adriana my job.

I can't be the only one to find the acronym 'NIP' funny

I am not as uncomfortable nursing in public as I thought I would be. I knew I would do it, of course, but I thought I would be self-consious. In fact, I've found that I'm not uncomfortable at all at this point. ("I guess I'm just that kind of girl," I told Brian today as I settled down to feed the baby in the grass at Farragut Square at lunchtime.)

The first time I had to nurse in public was at Kaiser, when we took the baby in for her first visit with the pediatrician. I nursed in the exam room while we were waiting for the doctor and I thought Adriana was full, but when we went down to the lab so I could have some bloodwork done, she started fussing to be fed again. The waiting room was small and full, with no corner to hide in, and since we were only just getting the hang of latching, I wasn't sure I could be very discreet. I bounced the baby and hoped she could wait. Finally, Brian went to ask the receptionist how much longer I would be waiting, figuring that we could go find a place to nurse if we were going to be waiting much longer. We were assured it would be just a couple more minutes, but Adriana was getting more vocal about her hunger, and I decided I'd rather have people see me nurse than be the woman with the screaming baby. As I struggled to unfasten my nursing bra without lifting up my shirt (learning quickly that turtleneck sweaters are not appropriate for new nursers to wear in public), I noticed that there was a man standing beside me, looking down at me. He was just looking at the baby, I'm sure, while he was waiting his turn in line, but his presence made me fumble more. Before I could get the hook undone, my name was called, and I handed the baby to Brian, hoping he could keep her gone while I was in the back. Once I was done, we found a quiet corner near the pharmacy where I could feed the baby while facing away from everyone else.

Since then, it hasn't been a problem. In the beginning, I needed a boppy to get into a good position to nurse, but was able to improvise with the diaper bag, my jacket, or the sling. Now, I've nursed the baby in various bookstores, by the receptionist's desk at my former office, the birth center, a La Leche League meeting, a babywearing meeting (okay, perhaps those last three aren't surprising in the least), Whole Foods, a yoga studio, a restaurant at brunch with friends (holding baby with one hand, mimosa with the other), the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum (just feet from the Wright brothers' plane!), and in Farragut Square. For the most part I think I've been pretty discreet, although sometimes I see someone looking at at me and I start to wonder. One day I sat in the cafe at Barnes and Noble to feed Adriana. I got her latched on and looked up to see a man a couple of tables away staring at me. I knew that with the angle of the tables and where the baby was, he hadn't seen anything, and I don't think I would have cared if he had. I looked back down at the baby, but when I glanced up again, I saw that he was still looking my way. I made eye contact with him and smiled. He looked away. I kept checking to see if he was going to stare again, but he never even glanced in our direction. I was disappointed: I thought it would be funny to wink at him if I caught him looking again.

Brian asked me at one point whether there were laws in Virginia and the District to protect breastfeeding. I remembered that a year or two ago there was a bit of a stir when a woman was asked not to nurse her baby in a Starbucks in Maryland, which violated both Maryland law and Starbucks corporate policy. La Leche League has a good list of breastfeeding laws on their website. I was happy to see that Virginia does protect women's right to breastfeed in public, and that they even exempt breastfeeding women from jury duty. The District isn't so great: there are no breastfeeding laws in DC. But federal law does protect women breastfeeding on federal property--including museums, so we were totally cool at Air and Space last weekend.

I complained about the lack of laws in DC to a friend, who pointed out that there may not be any laws on the books because it hadn't been necessary: women breastfeeding in public generally aren't asked not to do it. I thought he had a point. And I don't know if he was just unobservant, or if I am really becoming more discreet, but he had no idea I was feeding the baby at the table at brunch that day.

Two months

People have been telling me since Adriana was born that I should appreciate this time because "it all goes so fast." I already know they are right. I will her to slow down, to stop growing so fast. But then I am eager for a chance to weigh her the next time we visit the pediatrician* to see how much she has grown and get excited thinking about the things we will be able to do as she gets older.

*Actually, we were just there today. She's up to 12 pounds, 6 ounces, and is 24 inches long. No wonder she's outgrowing her clothes so quickly.

It's only been two months. It seems like forever, and it seems like only a minute. She seems so grown up compared to just a few weeks ago, but I know in another couple of months I will look back and laugh at the very idea. She is so small and delicate, but so much bigger and stronger than she was in January. I am still a clueless new mother, but I am feeling more confident and happier every day.

It feels like ages since I emailed my best friend, begging her, "Please tell me this gets easier." She promised me it would, and she was right. I no longer look helplessly at this little baby, wondering what I ought to do with her, or if she's crying, what on earth is the matter. Okay, that's not entirely true. There are days when Brian comes home to find us both in tears, because Adriana has been fussing all day and I have no idea what to do for her anymore. But those days are the exception rather than the rule. We are developing a routine (but not a schedule), and I am beginning to recognize her cries, and to anticipate her needs (not that she has a great many needs to choose from--food, clean diaper, nap, snuggle--one of those will usually work).

Every day Adriana is more of a real person, her own personality, not just a blank slate of a baby. Her smiles are getting more and more frequent, and longer lasting, so they can actually be captured on camera. They also seem to be truly directed at us, not just random twitches of her facial muscles: one night I was sitting in bed trying to nurse her to sleep, while Brian read to me. She kept pulling away from my breast to give him big gummy grins. When he stopped talking, I could get her to latch again, but whenever she heard his voice she would be happily distracted.

She doesn't cry when we bathe her anymore, and even seems to enjoy the time in the tub. She usually still shrieks when we take her out of the nice warm water, though. And she would really rather I didn't dress her in anything that had to be pulled over her head. Unfortunately for her, the footy pajamas that don't require any over-the-head action don't last very long around here, as they are less forgiving of her rapidly increasing length.

She stays awake for longer periods of time, and we can even manage to play a bit. But she (thankfully) is learning not to stay awake for long periods of time at night. Instead of walking with her and rocking her for an hour or more after she eats, with most night wakings I can snuggle her back down to sleep after we nurse.

Snuggling with her while we sleep may be my favorite part of this whole thing. I was always in favor of cosleeping in theory, but in practice it made me nervous at first. We got the Arm's Reach Cosleeper, so we could have her near us at night, without the worries of cosleeping (blankets accidentally pulled over her face, me rolling on top of her). But I kept falling asleep holding her after night feedings, and after Brian got up in the morning, I would often let her sleep beside me in bed after nursing. Then one morning, before Brian and I were ready to wake up, she started to squirm and fuss in her cosleeper. I pulled her into the bed beside me, pushing the blankets down to my waist, and figured I would feed her in a just a couple of minutes. Instead, I dozed back off with her in the crook of my arm, and woke an hour later to discover her still sound asleep beside me. And really, who's going to argue with a snuggly baby who will sleep for five hours at a time? (Well, I would have the first week or two of her life, since I was sure she wasn't getting enough to eat.) She starts out each night in the cosleeper, but after she wakes up to eat (and sometimes before, if she just gets noisy and squirmy on her own), I keep her close against me in bed.

And that's really what I want to remember from this time: how perfect it feels to lie in bed with Adriana's head tucked under my chin, Brian warm against my back, and Cecilia nestled against our legs--my cozy, happy family.

Out on the town

Yesterday I had my first successful solo outing with Adriana. (Actually, the first time wasn't completely unsuccessful. I was just too nervous to even go into Target to buy one thing without panicking.) I packed Adriana and the stroller into the car and headed to the mall, where I had scheduled an appointment at the salon to have my brows done. The only crisis was a small one: once I was in the parking garage, I couldn't figure out to unfold the stroller, even though I'd practiced before we'd left the house. Reasoning that not using the stroller, which is just a frame that holds thecarseat, meant that I didn't have to worry about whether I got the carseat back into the car properly at the end of the trip, I tucked Adriana into her pouch and went on my way. She lay quietly on my chest while Jasmine did my brows, and slept while I visited a couple of other stores in the mall. When she started to stir, about an hour after I'd figured she would want to eat, I headed to the mothers lounge inNordstrom . By the time I got there she was asleep again, but I needed to adjust her in the pouch anyhow and I thought that would wake her up. No luck: she slept solidly when I took her out and put her back in. An hour later, as I was waiting in line at the bookstore, she woke up angry that it had been four hours since her last meal. Deciding that carrying a screaming infant all the way back toNordstrom was more frightening that trying to nurse in public, I found an armchair in the store and fed her there. The man in the chair beside mine looked up and nodded at me, but went back to his book, and I think I managed to be pretty discreet (although Adriana is a noisy eater and I am not yet a graceful nurser, so even if you couldn't see any skin, it was quiet obvious what we were doing). Who needs a mothers lounge?

But I'm glad I went into the lounge that first time anyhow. It gave me a chance to sip the cold drink that I bought on my way in, and to talk with another young mom who was there. Her son was seven months old, and it was nice to chat with someone who was relatively new at this mom business but still more experienced than I am. Throughout the trip I discovered that Adriana is a better conversation piece than Zorro (although I haven't tried that on the Metro). Whenever I went into a store the salespeople would talk to me about her, several people stopped to ask me about the carrier I was using, and other moms would gush over her hair and her size (they all thought she was so tiny, until they knew that she was only a month old). I, however, refrained from chasing after a woman I saw heading into the Gap with a stroller identical to mine to ask her how the hell to open the damn thing.

One month

Adriana Ruth is one month old. It's amazing to me how much she has changed in the past four weeks. Although I know that most people would just look at her and see a helpless infant, I keep noticing how much she has grown since we first laid eyes on her.

Only a parent would marvel at her accomplishments I suppose: at how she can hold her head up a little bit longer every day; at how she can now focus on us and follow us with her eyes; at how she can (sometimes) get her hand to her mouth. She has outgrown her newborn-sized clothes (including the outfit she came home from the hospital in) and is on her way out of some of the 0-3 month-sized sleepers in certain brands. She spends a little more time awake and alert.

Some days this is so hard, harder than I imagined it would be. I think she is developing some sort of routine, and then she changes it. Or she cries, and I don't know why. I try everything in my small bag of tricks: nursing, changing, swaddling, walking. I get worried about how we will ever manage and wonder what on earth I was thinking. But then there are times when everything works. She cries, and is comforted when I pick her up. She wakes up to nurse as Brian is leaving for work, and when she finishes, she and I snuggle back down into the bed to sleep for another hour. She fusses and I pop her into the sling and dance around the house to Paul Simon as she makes funny baby faces up at me.

There was one evening a few days after we came home from the hospital when I nursed her and then handed her to Brian to rock. I walked into the next room and watched the sky get dark as I cried, completely sure that I was never going to bond with the baby. In spite of the overwhelming love I felt when I looked at her, I thought there was something missing, because I didn't know what to do with the baby besides feed her and change her and hope she would fall asleep. I have to confess that I still have those moods on occasion, moods that leave me in helpless tears, but they are fewer and further between. I find that mostly she just needs me to feed her and change her and snuggle her, and I am capable of all of those things.

And the love just gets more overwhelming.

Dilemma

I don't watch much television.

Because I don't have a television to watch. I get a huge kick out of saying "I don't watch much TV," when someone asks me if I've seen a particular show. "Oh, I don't either. There are just a few shows that I'm into," people respond quickly. Apparently most people think I must be morally opposed. But it's not that.

When Brian and I moved in together after college, it didn't really occur to us to get a television at first. Neither of us had watched a lot of television while we were in school, so there weren't shows we missed. I could listen to Giants games on the radio. Brian didn't seem to miss watching Lakers games. It wasn't some "kill your TV" kind of attitude; I simply didn't feel the need. I suppose the fact that we were living in Santa Cruz at the time didn't hurt either. We knew lots of people that didn't bother with TV, and people didn't seem to think it was weird that we didn't have one. Or maybe they just didn't say anything.

When we moved to Washington and I started grad school, if I admitted I didn't have a TV people thought it was weird. People here are more likely to ask why we don't have a TV set, and while I was in school, I would say, "Because I would just watch it when I'm supposed to be studying." It's true, too. When I travel for work, one of the first things I do when I get into my hotel room in the evening is turn on the TV. Maybe it's only because I like the noise to fill up the empty room, but I'm afraid that's what I'd do at home too. Most of the time I can't find much I'm interested in (although there's always an episode of Friends or Seinfeld on one station or another), but it doesn't take long before I'm totally sucked in.

Most of the time I still don't miss having easy access to television. During big sports events like the World Series or March Madness, we can walk down the street to the brewery to watch the games. Having gone to school for public policy, I have plenty of friends who were having groups of friends over to watch the debates in 2004. We joined Netflix and can watch movies on our computer.

This week I started wondering about our decision, though. It never occurred to me that when we had kids we might get a television. It's not something we talked about. But then I read about Grace Davis's suggestion to write about the books, music, movies, and television shows we want to share with our kids in honor of the 37th anniversary of Sesame Street. Instead of thinking of my favorite books (A Wrinkle in Time! The Little House books! Ramona!) or of the fantastic children's music I've added to my Amazon.com wish list, I immediately thought, "We have to get a TV so Sticky can watch Mr. Rogers." Because as much as the Sesame Street theme song makes me smile and in spite of my love of Big Bird, I have my fondest childhood TV memories of watching Mr. Rogers. Can I deny Sticky the happy routine of watching Mr. Rogers change into sneakers and cardigan (always hoping it's the red cardigan today)? The Trolley-Trolley music? The reassuring voice addressing him directly?

We may end up revisiting our decision. Perhaps Brian can create some sort of TV set that only gets Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers. But maybe that's not necessary. Looks like Netflix has several Mr. Rogers DVDs to choose from.