Snow falling. We are quiet, too. The sky is quiet. The trees are tentative. The boy is strapped to my chest as we walk. I get to walk again. He falls asleep every time.

Most of the time we are inside. Steve wakes early, sees Rosie off to school while the baby and I pretend to sleep. Some nights sleep is scant, some nights I wake feeling like all I do is lie in bed with a tiny boy pressed against me. He doesn’t — he shouldn’t — know how to roll but he rolls toward me. He reaches his arms out their full six inches to feel if I’m there. Steve runs on the treadmill while the boy and I move in and out of sleep. When Steve opens the bedroom door, sweaty and calm and very awake, I’ve done a morning feeding and am off to take my shower. When I come out, the boy is changed, dressed, and Steve is making juice or already at work from home, the baby in his left arm, tapping away at his keyboard with his right index finger.

Then Steve goes to work — last week only for two-hour stretches, to see that I’m okay between tears with the feedings. This week he’s been gone for four-hour stretches. Four hours with the boy and the snow, sitting in our chair by the window, walking around the house with him strapped to my chest. He’s not the kind of baby who likes to be swaddled. Rosie was, still is. This boy takes a minute of grunting strapped to me before he submits to the contours of the sling.

He likes to flail his arms as he sleeps. He wakes and stretches, his back arched, his chin doubled, making grunting sounds, his face turning red in a flash. I hold him in my hands and he stretches past 180 degrees, his eyes looking upside down at the world. Just now he is stretching. If he wakes in his sling, he lets out a wail, strapped and unable to stretch. Whatever did he do inside of me, both of us so squished.

What I love is when he wakes, stretches, his face assuming one hundred or so expressions before he settles on calm awake. I love his hands, how he doesn’t really know they’re his but he’s learning, he holds onto me as he eats. I love changing his diaper, seeing him as he was born, his chicken legs kicking. At first he cried loud enough you could hear it in Ohio when we changed him, but now, sometimes, he seems to like it. He stretches out his legs, he makes cooing sounds, he stares at the fascinating wall. He stares at light. When he’s crying and life seems too hard, I tell him that it’s still better that he’s out here in the world because, look, out here he can see.

People have been asking how it’s going, and they ask if he’s a good baby. How it’s been going: of course it is wonderful, our boy is alive and we have a roof over our heads and our world has sprung open. And also of course it’s difficult, as it would be for anyone: there’s just so much to learn, and our life change is huge. Is he a good baby: of course, he tells me when he’s hungry, as he should, and he tells me when his stomach hurts and when he’s cold, and he tells me clearly and often. Is he an easy baby? I wouldn’t say so, but I’ve never had a baby before. Does he sleep through the night? No, but he’s not supposed to. These people mean well who ask these questions, but I have no idea how to answer any of them. Our life is good and beautiful and plentiful, so we are well. And also having a new baby is hard — all this work, day and night, to keep a tiny groaning human alive, and in repayment not even a smile yet. It’s a complicated and beautiful time, inside this house that looks unchanged from the outside, surrounded by snow.

February 3rd, 2010 | Category: henry | Leave a comment

If the auditory world is measured not by what is said but how loud, and if time is measured in two-hour increments (give or take an hour or fifteen minutes or a minute depending on the baby’s needs), not by whether there is light in the sky, then the substance of these weeks is measured in milk and whether or not there’s enough of it. Milk.

Like kangaroo milk, mine is pink for a reason: the boy developed early on, we’ve just learned, a bad habit of pinching with his tongue instead of lapping, digging craters at the source. So if we keep going as we have, there will be no skin left. Instead, we use our bpa-free plastic bottles and I wear the sorry silicone nipple shield, the one that looks like a thimble with an orb around it. Out of it he gets such a little amount of milk that I have no idea if he’s crying because of hunger or some other need. We are so early in learning how to read one other. Crying is a language, I’m learning that. I’m sorry, boy, that milk comes out of a piece of plastic that won’t stay in place instead of skin. I cry, too.

Milk pooling, dripping, leaking, staining, spilling. Liquid gold, that’s what Steve calls it, and I measure time by how long it’s been since I’ve pumped and how long the milk has been sitting in a bottle. I measure temperature by the thermometer that tells me if it’s reached warm-enough: milk out of the body is, to me, surprisingly warm. But if the boy is crying, then, tapping my foot at the stove, room-temperature milk will do, but no colder, or okay not much colder, or okay right out of the fridge. In the cost-risk analysis, I can’t bear his tears.

Milk coming out like a broken ATM machine. Like swiping the credit card at the grocery store and not seeing my favorite word in that moment: Approved. I am never more than an ounce ahead of his needs. I am teaching him already about not-enough.

Milk spilling. Last night, sitting in the living room with the boy, I hear the sound of something drop out of the fridge and Rosie is very sorry. I say a word like milk, in that it has four letters, then I say another. I am up every two hours in the night making up for the deficit, trying to wake before he does, to pump very quietly, to feed him — the most basic need.

If I’m not pumping I’m preparing to pump, I’m washing bottles I’m counting time, if I’m not counting time I’m feeding him quarter-teaspoonfuls out of a thimble that pinches open the wounds: fresh blood every time. If I’m not breathing yoga breaths over him as he eats through the silicone thimble and if I’m not pumping then I’m crying about milk. If I’m not crying about milk then I’m googling tongue-thrust and baby latch problems and occupational therapist and craniosacral therapy.

Last night, maybe it was the spicy seafood salad we had for lunch, the boy was inconsolable, except if he was drinking milk, from 6pm to 11pm. He pounded on my breasts which would not with the silicone thimble let him latch and if he couldn’t latch then he couldn’t get even a drop. The milk I had pumped before dinner I couldn’t use, I didn’t want to risk that he would feel sick any longer with whatever spiciness it might contain. I couldn’t dump it. Liquid gold. Dirty money. I gave it to the dogs.

February 2nd, 2010 | Category: henry | Leave a comment

Babies aren’t perfectly quiet, even when they sleep. I can’t figure out how to take this baby to church and not feel like I’ve sneaked in a noisy ticking time bomb. There was another baby beside us on Sunday, and together our babies disturbed the peace with tiny sounds that wouldn’t have mattered inside our house — grunts and coos and burps and farts.

When Henry lets out an explosive fart in our house — sometimes it can last five seconds, and sometimes there are several in a row, I say we can’t take him to church just yet and laugh as I picture that sound echoing in a moment of silence. But while he’s actually there in church with us, it’s not funny. Church is now organized in my mind into the parts that are loud and the parts that are quiet. I have no idea what readings occurred or which songs were song.

On our first Sunday with Henry, he fell asleep and didn’t wake for the whole service, but he grunted in his sleep at one point, the tiniest little baby grunt, and two older women whipped there heads around to see what had caused the commotion.

Last Sunday the woman with the baby beside us seemed unphased by her baby’s sounds. She had her other two young daughters with her, too, and they were no quieter — though certainly they weren’t loud. And she nursed throughout the service while I, still not graceful with nursing, had pumped, and Steve fed Henry from a plastic bottle.

NOT SIMILAC, I wanted to write in red on the bottle. STILL HAVING TROUBLE NURSING. FORGIVE ME. I have so much to learn about forgetting what others think. This baby is going to have to teach me so much about disregarding the opinions of others — as we flail our way to enlightenment in the very last pew.

February 1st, 2010 | Category: henry | Leave a comment

from Our Babies, Ourselves, p. 146

In more affluent Western industrialized nations, parents assume crying is first and foremost linked to hunger. In fact, some women in these cultures often end breast-feeding and turn to bottle-feeding because they believe excessive crying by the baby means he is not getting enough nourishment from the breast. But researchers know that early crying has a broader range of functions. It can be stopped by various methods, and food is not always the solution. In the 1960s, an era in America when parents were advised to let babies cry, Wolff ran a series of experiments to figure out just why these kids were so unhappy. He tried a pacifier to determine if oral gratification, without nourishment, would calm a screaming baby. It worked. He next tested a series of newborns with wet diapers. Wolff put clean diapers on half and put the wet diapers back on the other half. Both groups were quieted and didn’t seem to care if the diaper was wet or not. Wolff concluded that babies simply like the stimulation and physical sensation of being changed. He then questioned the idea that babies cry when they are cold, and so placed some infants in cribs heated to 88 degrees and others in cribs set 10 degrees cooler. Those in the cooler cribs cried more frequently, indicating that warmth, too, can reduce crying. Wolff investigated this notion further by layering some babies in clothes, covering others in various positions with blankets, and lightly swaddling others. Their reactions varied; some cried when covered tightly, others liked it tight. Finally Wolff tried the classic parental response to a crying baby. Using a group of crying babies who had to be artificially fed by tubes into their abdomens for medical reasons, he fed them this way until their stomachs were full and waited to see if satisfying their hunger would quiet them. Surprisingly, a full stomach did not stop these infants from wailing. Wolff also discovered that simply picking them up worked perfectly well as a cry-stopper, even if they were hungry and waiting to be fed. In general, he concluded picking up a baby, giving it a pacifier, or feeding it — not for the nutritional value but for the physical contact — worked best.

As most parents intuitively know, crying is not just a signal of hunger. Even in newborns, it communicates much more — the need for touch seems to be especially important; and clearly a crying baby is announcing its internal state and calling for some sort of change.

I love this book, it just has so much evidence inside. And I love the image of this man, Wolff, running around in the warm dark with 20 babies, sticking pacifiers in their mouths and putting their soaking wet diapers back on. I know it must have been more scientific than that, but really it feels like something out of a story, some strange story where a man is trying to get all these babies to stop crying and learns at last that they just want to be held.

January 29th, 2010 | Category: overheard | Comments (1)

(I’ve been updating my iphoto and exporting almost 7,000 photos from last year onto an external hard drive. I’ve finally had a chance to put the week’s photos up on flickr.)

January 28th, 2010 | Category: henry | Leave a comment

I didn’t know that Rosie would cry when she saw her brother for the first time. Really sob as she held him.

Feedings are every two hours, but oh that means every two hours start to start. Which means that, if he’s nursing for an hour, I have an hour to not nurse him before I nurse again. This morning I nursed him, put him in a sling, picked up some clothes, cleaned the kitchen, made oatmeal, and he asked to be nursed again before I’d had a chance to eat. And lunch didn’t happen.

I didn’t realize I’d only have one hand for most of the day. Typing is so slow. Thinking is slow when I type so slowly. Googling is slow. But yes I can read. I can read with one hand so well. I read actual books, whole books, with plots and denouements.

But it is difficult to do dishes with one hand. I pick up a lot of clothes with my feet. It is impossible to bend over the washer and scoop out clothes and put them in the dryer with one hand. Thank goodness the boy seems to like the rumbling feeling of the dryer when I place him on top of it (I am projecting here. I don’t know how to read him just yet).

The dogs have not made one false move. Today Joon gently put her head on the pillow beside the boy as he slept. She very gently licked his hand. Moby has not jumped on me as I’ve held the baby. He waits to be told to be let up on the bed if I have the baby in my arms. They are good to him and respectful. I knew they were smart dogs, but I thought their jealousy would take over and it hasn’t.

I didn’t know that nursing would feel like glass shards cutting through my nipples. Apparently this is more common for fairskinned people and redheads, and on the internets it says it will get better. Someday in the next three months, if the baby and I haven’t cried ourselves saltless by then, it will get better, I will get calloused.

I don’t even care if he’s mine biologically. When the midwife put him on my chest, I didn’t even see what he looked like. I don’t care what he looks like. I’m already over wondering who he looks like. He doesn’t look like me or Steve, he looks like himself. If the doctors had given me a decoy baby I would have been just as content. It makes me realize that adoption, if it were possible for us (it’s not, or at least without a big fight, for complicated legal reasons), it would be possible to love a child that way, too. I just thought I would look down at this new baby and see that he was my son, but I look down at him and feel connected, but mostly I see that he is very much already his own person.

I am intimidated by him. I laughed at myself when I thought this the other night — only I would be intimidated by a three-week-old baby. But I’m startled by his will. He tells me what he wants better than I think I’ve ever been able to tell anyone what I want. If he wants me to walk around, he lets me know. If he doesn’t want me to nurse him lying down, he fusses. If he’s hungry he demands food. He has so much strength to keep himself alive, it shocks me. I thought he would come to me more helpless, but he comes to me ready to coexist with all his might. I thought that if I didn’t hold his head like an egg that it might snap off, but, while he has typical newborn floppy neck, there are some muscles, it doesn’t snap off.

I knew it would be exhausting, but what surprised me is the exhaustion from all sides. I’m still recovering from labor — it takes six weeks to stop losing blood, and my intestines and other internal components that left- or right-aligned for a bit have to shift back to center — and still feeling frail and creaky is exhausting. The pain of nursing is demoralizing. The intent attention on one small being is a meditation on a fixed point all day, everyday, and his life depends on it. Waking up every two hours to nurse or change diapers or console is disruptive, even if the nighttime feedings are already often my favorite time of day. And everything is so new, the learning curve is so steep, each everyday detail takes attention as if I were learning to walk again: how to get toothpaste on the toothbrush while holding a baby, how to go to the bathroom while holding a baby, how to sleep beside a baby, how to time dinner so the baby doesn’t wake hungry right when we sit down to eat. And yet if I were to explain this time, these first three weeks and nine minutes, I wouldn’t say it’s exhausting. We’re alive and enraptured. Very alive, and constantly cuddling.

The bounty of love from others. The food and gifts and cards and emails and visits. I had no idea people care so much and know me so well–and know just what to do. Despite feeling a bit cooped up for the winter, I feel very much not alone.

January 27th, 2010 | Category: henry | Comments (1)

January 26th, 2010 | Category: overheard | Leave a comment

from Our Babies, Ourselves by Meredith F. Small (pp 8-12)

Unlike apes, who hang from the trees with long arms and walk along the ground balancing their weight on the surface of their knuckles, individuals in the human line stood up on their back legs. … [H]umans, and our ancestors, have used bipedal walking as the primary form of locomotion. That switch to bipedalism eventually brought us the pain of childbirth.

…

The sacrum, the lower back, is wider and thicker and it angles into the pelvic opening to help support the internal organs in a creature with a shifted center of gravity. And so, right in the middle of what should be a clear hole for infants to pass through, there is a point of the sacrum coming radically close the the pubic bones of the front of the pelvis–a detour sign for emerging babies that arose when humans stood up on two legs.

…

And so the infant enters the birth canal at a side angle, twists to accommodate the midsection, flexes the head down to bypass the squeeze at the sacrum, and ends up coming out face down. Since the outlet faces more backward than downward, the baby also has to bend a bit and thus comes out at an angle facing the mother’s back. The shoulders follow a similar path, dipping and twisting; but since the head is then already out, this requires the execution of a head-body twist…

January 26th, 2010 | Category: book | Comments (1)

I am a body to the baby, with fluids and hormones and arms.

At night his eyes don’t close unless mine are closed next to him. My breath is slower. The breast pump is beside us, and when it’s on I hear his breath change–race–to match it.

I am a body with food inside. He is a strong suckler–the doctors are amazed by the strength of his mouth around their latex-covered finger. I have been stunned by his strength, left bloody and cracked and crying by his strength. The pain is extraordinary. I see his mouth coming at me and my brain hurts. I cradle him so gently and coo and dig my toes into the floor. I practice yoga breaths until I am a windy day on his forehead. And rainy, crying.

The lactation specialist tells me to feed him my milk from a bottle (nipple confusion! nipple confusion!) for three days to give myself a chance to heal, dried blood on his face. A weekend of grief, certain that my boy will love plastic more than flesh because of this rough start. Hormones are everything. And sleep, too. I kneel on the kitchen floor and cry. I cry in bed listening to the milk machine, which hurts me, too. Two ounces at a time. Once the milk was pink but now it’s cream.

I air out my flesh at night but last night my body cried, milk all over the fitted sheet, one towel and then another between me and the baby. I folded and folded the towel to keep him dry, the milk came out warm but in our drafty house the bed feels cold so fast. Milk all over, but none would go in the bottle, none in the boy’s mouth. We wake exhausted and hungry, one ounce ahead and then one ounce behind his wants, and his wants are his needs.

Body and spirit. He’ll know I’m tense because my milk won’t let down. I breathe. Still cracked. I stare at his face and think of milk waterfalls and painless milk and milk baths and milk boy skin. Soon boy we will be back to skin to skin.

January 25th, 2010 | Category: henry | Comments (1)