Baby Hiccups: God-Given Respite

In one of the bazillion parenting books* I read while I was pregnant, there was a section on baby hiccups.  The author made sure to be very reassuring about the fact that hiccups don't bother your baby one bit and are generally more disconcerting to parents than they are to the child.  I expected to fit into this "concerned parent" category, because when I was pregnant, fetal hiccups bugged the crap out of me.

However, now that the baby is actually here, I find that I love Hiccup Time.  We have Hiccup Time two or three times a day, and I delight in its arrival and promptly put the baby down in her swing or her crib and go do other things. I usually have about 20 minutes, because Leah is less than a month old and therefore has no concept of hiccup remedies, and encouraging an infant to hold his or her breath is generally frowned upon anyway.  Twenty minutes is enough time for me to do a couple of household tasks - dishes, start or fold a load of laundry, clean the cat box (it's amazing how I am much more willing to clean my house now that I spend so much time in it.)

You can chastise me all you want, but the reality is, I very quickly discovered that during Hiccup Time, the baby ABSOLUTELY CANNOT CRY.  I've seen her try.  Her little face screws up to protest being put down or tickled or changed and then along comes a spasm of her tiny little diaphragm, and out comes the hiccup and the screwball face just disappears.  Upon further observation, I noticed that she is surprised by the arrival of each little hiccup as though she didn't expect it, whether it's the first or the fifth or the fiftieth.  This makes me even more confident in my actions.  I now believe that not only do the hiccups keep her from crying, they're also a source of entertainment that she unwittingly provides for herself.  I'm sure her little mind is being constantly stimulated during Hiccup Time: "Woah, what was that?!"... "Whoah, what was that?!"... "Woah, what was that?!"

The look she gets with each little hiccup is a tiny glimmer of hope that she is slowly becoming smarter than the potato.  However, I will not be entirely convinced she is going to thrive in this world until she proves herself to be smarter than the cat.  Stay tuned.





*Four, one of which I did not finish because it was a week-by-week and Leah was born eight days early and one of which I am still working on.  Deep dark secret #15: I am actually a very slow reader.  Oh, and there is also a book on breastfeeding that I picked up exactly once to search the index for ", alcohol and".

A Little Neglect Helps Me Stay Sane.

At 3 and a half weeks of age, Leah is getting quite proficient at holding her head up. She can do it for five or six seconds at a time, and when she's really on a roll, she'll do it a bunch of times in a row, making her not unlike a turtle peeking out of its shell. She seems pretty impressed with herself and likes to show this trick off to visitors - and who can blame her? It's about all she's got, other than, "Hey, isn't it cool how you put food in my food-hole and you never quite know which end it's going to come back out of?"

I'm sorry, but she's boring. I feel like I spend large portions of my day (and night, as it were) waiting for her to DO SOMETHING. If you don't have kids and want an idea of what this is like, go to your kitchen and get a potato. Put it on a mostly flat surface and stare at it, making comments about its peaceful apperance until it moves.

Yeah.

Spend enough time with that potato and you'll start checking every so often to find out if it's breathing. And that is the day, if you are a normal person, that you will realize your brain is completely broken.

When I had my first Breath Check Day, my eyeballs bugged out of my head and I made myself put the baby down and go do something else. Why? Because I realized that if I did not, the higher-functioning parts of my brain were in very real danger of becoming atrophied, making me completely unable to have conversations about Real Things with people who might not want to talk endlessly about my attempts to put my daughter on A Schedule.

So now Leah spends portions of her day doing things other than Hanging With Mommy. She chills in her swing (and now that her vision is improving and I'm convinced she's not going to be cross-eyed, I run the mobile, which she thinks is the shit.) She sleeps in her car seat. This is beneficial to her because she gets stimulation from somewhere else, and it's beneficial to me because I can type with two hands. This makes me happier, so that when she fusses about being overstimulated by X activity and needs to be scooped up again, I do it without complaint...

...Usually. One of my parenting books said it was OK to let the baby cry a little before attending to her starting at 3 weeks of age, and I highlighted the fuck out of that. So now if she's crying and I'm, say, changing a load of laundry or taking out the trash or trying to come up with a synonym for "ejaculate", I don't feel bad about wrapping up that task before looking in on her.

Someday, Leah will need therapy, and this is mostly all my fault. But because completely giving myself over to her would mean I'd need therapy NOW, I consider it a fair trade. "Doc," she'll say, "My mother is the source of all my problems because when I was an infant, she used to stash me in my swing while I slept so that she could have both hands free to write porn."

And when that day comes, I will gladly accompany her to that therapy appointment and defend myself, and I will have all of my mental faculties about me when I do it.

(Just kidding about the porn thing.)

(Probably.)

I Have No Advice For You.

At the time of this writing, my daughter is two weeks old. It's 1:30 in the morning, and I'm wearing a green spit-up rag on my shoulder. The spit-up rag is clean. The rest of my shirt is covered in baby puke. However I keep the rag there because I am eternally optimistic that she will, at some point, learn to control the direction of her vomit so that it lands where it is supposed to. This is good practice for when she someday goes to college and inevitably drinks much too much at at least one really good party. I was always a good puker, and I'm hoping she inherits that trait from me.

A little background: My husband, Dan, and I have been married slightly less than six years. We have between us 14 years of post-secondary education. We are things like "intelligent" and "logical" and "witty" and "capable of holding a discussion about current events and/or politics." And yeah, I put all that stuff in quotes, because two weeks ago, we went to the hospital and came home with this:

And now we have conversations about poop. Color, consistency, frequency. I can tell you without a doubt when little miss Leah Danielle last took a shit. I cannot tell you with the same degree of certainty what day it is or when I last took a shower. Furthermore, nearly everything we thought we knew about parenting prior to the birth of our daughter was dismissed out of hand by the child immediately upon, or directly following, her arrival. Everything we thought we knew is wrong, right down to exactly what time of day normal people are awake. Intelligent? Logical? Pffft. Our brains have been reduced by cuteness and lack of sleep to a couple of atrophied mush-piles. I would wager that at times, Leah is the smartest person in this house.

I will not be handing out parenting advice, because if there's one thing I've learned, it's that every child is different and knows his or her own mind, and anything I might write that even vaguely resembles advice (eg: "For the love of God, if you value your sleep and/or freedom, do not ever do this to yourself, EVER") is going to be completely useless to 90 percent of the people who read it. If you're here, you're here to be entertained. I will try to be funny, because if there's two things I've learned, it's that every child is different AND if you don't approach parenthood with a sense of humor, it will very slowly drive you mad.

So it's like this: Hi. My name is Becky. I'm 30 years old and a new mom. I exist on a maximum of 4 hours of sleep a night, and I'm reasonably certain I should not be trusted to operate a car or a toaster on most days, and yet the universe has seen fit to entrust me and my life-partner with the care of a newborn Human Child. Because at least five people have indicated that I might possibly be funny, and because it's a distraction that keeps me from opening a Twitter account when there's nothing on TV between 3 and 4 a.m., I will document the raising of said Human Child here. I invite you to watch.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go change my shirt.