Meanwhile, I will miss you

Again, we must move. Again, while moving, we must disconnect the Internet. This means a lull in posts and a lull in my reading of your posts, as we plan to give ourselves a bit of an “information break,” if you will, and take a few weeks off before hooking things up again. Finances play a big part in this decision, to be sure, but also – we’re in no hurry. A rest will be lovely. (And when we’re finally back on, I promise not to lie this time. I really will let you know.)

Meanwhile, please enjoy (what else?) some baby photos.

(Baby + Papa = boundless entertainment)

About those chocolate chip cookies

Remember those?

Well, they were good. Damn good. But, in my opinion, not worth all the brouhaha. Like Molly and Beck, I did not spring for the fancy chocolate discs, but I did use a combo of Valhrona dark chocolate bars (chopped) and dark chocolate chips that seemed to do the trick, while the sea salt on top was definitely a nice touch and one that I shall remember for all of my cookie-baking days. Delicious.

And, okay, I didn’t let them sit the full thirty-six hours because a) the potluck I needed them for happened sooner than thirty-six hours would allow, and b) I couldn’t keep my grubby little paws out of the cookie dough, but nevertheless, they did sit for a good eighteen hours and they were tasty. Very tasty. But not, you know, amazing.

Adios, Long Nap (for now)

Ha! Ha ha! Ha…ha, ha…ha.

Ha.

That would be my slightly manic laughter as I look back on this last weekend, which shall henceforth be referred to The Weekend of Fussiness, or The Weekend of the Diaper Rash. This is particularly ironic when we all remember my recent post about Lydia’s fabulous long naps.

This Weekend laughed at me and cried, “Naps? What naps?”

Until we discovered the source of Lydia’s discomfort (the aforementioned Diaper Rash), we all suffered the discomfort of a sad baby who cried and cried and would not nap and who therefore cried and cried in a feeble, exhausted and hurting way. Oh, my. It broke my heart. And also, my lower back, because I carried and rocked and bounced her all weekend, taking frequent breaks only to apply Butt Paste to any potentially offending patch of baby skin.

Mercifully, around seven o’clock last night, our sweet old Lydia began to make her reappearance, so this morning found the two of us giggling and laughing at our reflections in the hallway mirror and now finds me posting a blog entry at last while she (at last!) naps.

The butter is softening as we speak

The first two posts I read last night (from Orangette and Beck’s Kitchen Party blog) tested and reviewed this recipe, with varying degrees of favorable results. What are the chances of that? Obviously, I need to make these cookies right now.

Play, baby!

Suddenly, she finds herself with…free time?

Recently, our daughter discovered The Long Nap.

One evening a few weeks back, when we were handing our hitherto sweet and unfussy baby back and forth like a hot potato because she would not stop crying, Mitch had a revelation. “Maybe,” he suggested, “she’s just tired.”

Ding! The light bulb switched on.

Up to that point, if Lydia was tired, she just fell asleep, but as her world grew more vivid and interesting she began to suspect, I think, that we were throwing parties without her while she slept. We tend to encourage this suspicion by whispering to each other, as we swaddle her up and tote her off to bed, to “get out the party favors ’cause the baby’s going down for a nap!” (Poor kid.)

But really, somehow we ended up with this baby who sleeps for hours and hours, disregarding the heavy construction on our street and the creaky bedroom door to sleep soundly on. Once she made the transition from fifteen minute power naps, scattered throughout the day, Lydia converted to two or three mega-naps, which leaves me standing strangely in the middle of the living room, with my shirt all buttoned up and both hands free, looking around and wondering what to do with myself.

Nap? Put away laundry? Start a conga line with the cats?

After a baby this sweet and mellow, I’m almost scared to see how the next one turns out. (That, my friends, is as close as I get right now to considering “another one.”)

Second reunion in less than a month? Yes.

This afternoon, we basked in the shade at Lake Samish, fretting over misplaced sun hats and delicate toes and burp cloths. We compared diaper brands with four other couples and discussed breastfeeding (or not), sleeping (or not), and who takes a pacifier and who won’t and who never even bothered to try. We told our birth stories, in all their gory glory.

After five months, at last, the members of our childbirth class met for an informal reunion. Funny, how our numbers had swelled by a full third, just like that. Funny, to see women we’d only known at a very late stage in their pregnancy strangely slimmed down and beaming.

When we’d last met, we gave off an air of anticipation – the next time we met, we would all be parents! We would put those breathing patterns to work and shoot those babies right out, wouldn’t we? It would be difficult, delivering, but not that difficult, right?

After telling our stories – interrupting each other constantly with cries of “Me too! Only I didn’t…” or “But I did…” – I was struck by how we all seemed, well, seasoned by the upheaval of the last few months, how the anticipation had burst in one sticky moment and we all found ourselves up to our elbows in the work of caring for a newborn. Ah, the crash course of learning to latch properly and change diapers and soothe the unsoothable and swaddle one-handed and figure out every day who this tiny person is.

Having made it through the woods of the first month, we all emerged from our cocoons only to find that we’d sprouted wings of a lasting, if meek and brand new, kind. Now we can laugh about spit up, sit side by side on a park bench and nurse and buckle the kids into the car seats at the end of the day without wrestling with the straps too much.

Five months ago, this date seemed so far off, on the other side of a seemingly insurmountable wall. But we did it. We had our babies, we made it here. At last.

(Interesting side note: over half of us delivered by cesarean. What the heck is up with that?)

Two months today

On provision

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this last year – aside from the fact that my belly can, in certain circumstances, double as a coffee table and that bras do, in fact, come in size F – it is that God always provides for us. Whether our needs are tangible or not, he has a beautiful way of handing us exactly what we need precisely when we need it most. Apartments, jobs, medical insurance, a healthy birth – all of these have been granted to us in the past year, even when they’d seemed unlikely, when they looked nothing like we’d expected.

He has never failed to come through for us.

Last Wednesday, a set of circumstances culminated in the disheartening news that we needed to move out of our apartment as quickly as possible. We had no leads on a new place, no idea where to start looking, and with a brand new baby we felt that we had quite enough on our plates without having to worry about packing and moving, thank you.

But.

I got off the phone with Mitch, having broken the bad news to him, and set off with Lydia in the stroller. Every week, she and I take a long, sunny, late afternoon walk to one of the neighborhoods where I grew up, passing by old trees and historic houses, to pick up our summer share from a local farm. As I walked, I mulled all this over, praying under my breath and heaving great, tired sighs.

In all my walk I saw just one “For Rent” sign. The sign had nothing on it but a phone number, and though the neighborhood alone put it quite outside our budget, I dialed the number anyway, just because I felt I ought to try.

Yesterday, I got the news that we’re moving in next month. The old market, converted into a funky house, is beautiful and perfect for us: two bedrooms, big windows, an enormous kitchen (by my stunted standards, of course), space for the cats, a small yard.

It arrived perfectly when we needed it. And it is strangely inside our budget.

Praise God.

If I were to begin this post

with a phrase like “I’ve noticed something about parenting,” you seasoned parents out there would probably roll your eyes and mutter about how eight weeks has sure made me quite the expert and why don’t we all wait a few years until potty training and then see what I “notice” about parenting, and probably I would chuckle along with you at my own expense. I know exactly how little authority I have on anything these days.

But I have noticed something, and it is this: for every ten folks who stop by to visit the little one and say sweet things about her curls and her rolls and her smile, there is one who turns to me and launches into a barrage of questions. Now, I don’t mind answering questions, I really don’t, but with these folks it’s clear that the questioner stands staunchly on one side of the fence or the other and that there is, of course, a right answer.

This feels uncomfortably like I’m being interviewed, as though I’m being asked to prove my qualifications for raising my daughter. I find this sort of amusing because I’ve never felt less qualified for anything in my life.

The questions tend to run along the lines of breast vs. bottle, thumb vs. pacifier, cloth vs. disposable (or, as we happily discovered, flushable), crib vs. co-sleeping, to sling or not to sling, etc. When I put her down, do I let her fuss until she falls asleep, or do I trip over myself to run in and pick her up? Do I feed her whenever she’s hungry, or do I stick to a schedule? (One look at those dimples and rolls and you’ll know exactly where I stand on that.)

Some of these decisions we’ve made with prayer and careful consideration and study. Some of them, we’ve stumbled upon in a curious mix of accident and intuition, while other choices we’ve just made because, well, they needed to be made. Some of them simply didn’t seem as though they could be any other way.

I am stubbornly determined to enjoy these first months with my daughter and in those first few weeks I worried from time to time that I wasn’t choosing what was best for her but what satisfied me instead. I worried about this until I realized that enjoying these first months with her is precisely the right thing for her and lucky me that it is so satisfying. Holding her close, responding to her cries – these are all ways of telling her that I love her, that I am glad she is here. As she grows older, I’ll simply find different ways of telling her the same thing.