A Black Hole, But In a Good Way, Really

Since this little dude was born, it seems like my whole life and world have been sucked into an alternate dimension where the only thing in the universe is my baby and things revolving around my baby. It's funny, because I don't want to be one of those people who has a baby and then can't talk or think about anything else, but it's pretty hard to avoid, it seems. I have been posting pictures regularly, but that's mostly for friends and family who don't live close enough to see the baby in person, and they generally request more pictures, so I try to oblige. I try not to jump on Facebook and update every time he makes a funny noise or has a new color of poop, though. You're welcome.

So, here are a few things I've been thinking about lately...

Hank's more than three weeks old now, but at his two-and-a-half week checkup, Hank weighed 10 lbs 4 oz (up from his birth weight of 9 lbs 5 oz), and had grown two inches already! Big boy.

School starts in two weeks, and it's going to be rough, because all I want to do is stay home with the baby. I've scheduled my classes so that I'm only on campus an hour or two at a time in the mornings, and come home for an hour or two between each class so I can feed Hank. Brian only has one class on campus, and has wrestling in the afternoons while I'm at home, so someone will always be home with the baby. We're both full-time students, but the classes are pretty easy, so I should be able to get all my studying done without much trouble.

Right now, Hank mostly sleeps all day and night. He wakes up to eat, and then usually falls right back asleep. Once a day he'll have his "awake time", when he'll eat, and then just... be awake. He'll look around and stare at stuff, and sometimes he gets really fussy and cries, and we won't really know what he wants or why he's crying, so we just keep trying to feed him and rock him until he falls asleep again. That part's kind of stressful, because it's hard to hear your baby cry and not know how to make him feel better. He also gets hiccups a lot, which frustrates him. No one likes hiccups. We tell him to hold his breath and count to ten, but he just won't do it. So stubborn.

Sometimes I have Brian bring me food and water, because the baby will just have fallen asleep after hours of fussing, and he'll be cuddled up against me, so I won't want to move for fear of waking him. I'll have to get over this fear, though, especially in the fall and winter, because Brian will be gone for entire weekends at wrestling tournaments out of town, and if I'm unable to leave the bed for fear of waking the baby, then Brian might come home to a wife who's died from starvation. I think we can all agree that that would be unfortunate.

I seem to have overcome my fear of baby in general, and am now changing diapers and burping and doing chores while Hank's sleeping with a lot more confidence than I did a few weeks ago. I no longer descend into a blind panic every time he cries, but rather methodically run through a checklist of possible causes and attempt to logically remedy whatever is bothering him. I get cranky when I'm sleep deprived, though, so sometimes I still have to hand the baby off to Brian when I'm feeling overwhelmed, but that's definitely happening with less frequency lately. I still can't sit up though, because my stitches haven't completely healed, so I can't drive or play piano or even hold the baby in a seated position yet, but hopefully I'll be healed enough in two weeks to sit in class! Otherwise, I will be awkwardly standing in the corner of each classroom for an hour or two, and no one wants that.

I don't know if I feel like a mommy yet. I don't feel like I'm a different person, and I don't feel like anything's really changed except that there's this little man who is suddenly all-important who wasn't there three weeks ago. I'm not sure what being a mommy is supposed to feel like, I guess. He sure does fart a lot, though, and it's pretty cute, 'cuz he makes this squishy face when he does it. I guess I know I'm a mommy because I can tell the difference between a hungry face and the face he makes when he's pooping himself.




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