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.)