Moses at three

I didn’t do myself any favours by writing this birthday post for Moses last year; I feel I’ve set the bar too high even for my normal self, let alone my hormonal, extremely tired, should-really-spend-my-limited-baby-free-time-eating-or-showering-rather-than-writing-blog-posts self. This year, from age two to age three, has been a year of laughs and frustration, tantrums and delight. And tantrums. Did I mention tantrums? It’s been a year that has taken the last of the baby out of my little boy.

Mo: You’re gorgeous, Mummy.

Mum: You’re gorgeous, my darling!

Mo: No, you’re gorgeous!

Mum: No, you’re gorgeous!

Dad: Am I gorgeous?

Mo: No.

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Mo’s still a star at sports, currently excelling at French cricket and basketball bouncing. He’s obsessed with diggers, tip trucks, bulldozers, motor graders, and anything else made by CAT. He could spend hours just looking at the search results for ‘cranes’ on Google images. He loves the book The Waterhole by Graeme Base, which we read every night at the moment, searching for new hidden animals. His favourite song is My Ukelele by Jay Laga’aia; we recently went through a phase of dancing to this song each night after dinner – Mo would pull out a box to use as a stage, and, facing the glass door (in which he could see his reflection), he’d dance his little uninhibited heart out. His My Ukelele dance is a combination of the haka, the hula, and the genes he inherited from his father. Over time he has become more experimental and now throws in a break dance move every now and then. Fortunately, he seems to enjoy it when I laugh while watching him.

I thought it was only frazzled mothers who muddled up names, but Moses does the same thing. On Mondays and Tuesdays he comes home from family day care and calls us Kerry (followed by, “Oops – silly me!”). Most other days of the week we’re Dum and Mad, or Dam and Mud; he does this so regularly now he’s stopped acknowledging he’s mixed up our names, and we’ve started responding to anything that seems to be directed at us.

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Mo: There was some snot, so I ate it.

Three weeks ago today, after months of talking and reading and preparation, Moses became a big brother. He only just made it back from a friend’s house in time to see Hazel being born, having been sent away after he chose a particularly intense contraction during which to whack me on the bottom and cry, “Tip!” Since then he has been a doting fan of his little sister’s, covering her face in slobbery kisses and pressing his cheek against hers and talking to her in a sing-song voice: “Hello, little gorgeous baby! I’m your big brother! You’re lovely! You’re my best friend!” 

So far he’s coped admirably with the changes that come with sharing parents/a house with a newborn. He’s a phlegmatic little dude who’s always adjusted quickly and easily to new things; I, on the other hand, have not yet learned to stress less about how quickly and easily he’ll adjust to new things.

Me: You have a good sleep, buddy.

Mo: I will. You have a good sleep, too.

Me: I hope I will, but Hazel wakes me up a lot.

Mo: If she wakes up, you just sing to her.

Me: Okay.

Mo: You sing, “Pla-liya, pla-liya, pla pla pla pla pla.” Like that.

Me: Okay. Thanks for the tip.

Mo: That’s alright.

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Now that Hazel’s here (and her sex has therefore been confirmed), I can say without worrying: 

This kid is my favourite little boy in the whole wide world.

Happy birthday, Mo. xo

Remembering

The first week of Hazel’s life, in 1000 words:

During my pregnancy I joked about the fact that I couldn’t remember anything about how to care for a newborn. As it turns out, I seriously don’t remember anything about how to care for a newborn. I feel just as clueless as I did with Moses, although I’m certainly less anxious about my cluelessness this time around. Some things are slowly coming back to me as the days go by – I keep having “Oh, YEAH!” moments, like, Oh, YEAH: I’d forgotten I was really bad at catching spew (throw me a phone, on the other hand…). I don’t think this is completely my fault; although Hazel is sweet and precious and not at all sinister, she does seem to wait until the one moment I’m looking away to aim a spew in the direction she’s figured out will hit the highest number of garments as it cascades floor-ward. Every time. Moses was exactly the same. I remember that, now.

(And, though I know she’s not really out to get me, I can spend half an hour trying to wake her up because she needs to eat, eat, eat and put on some weight – cooing at her and unwrapping her and covering her face with kisses and tickling her and putting her over my shoulder and holding her out again and passing her to others and stroking her cheek and waving her arms around like a conductor – and she’ll sleep through the whole thing. So I put her in bed, because that usually wakes her up almost straight away, but she remains dead to the world. So I go finish filling out the necessary forms to let the government know we’ve just had a baby and I check Facebook and I read an article and then I decide that if she’s sleeping, I should sleep too, so I wash my face and brush my teeth and change into my PJs and set up the pillows and water for night feeds and then I climb into bed, I stretch, I get myself comfy, I think, I plan, I reflect and pray, and then finally, I let myself relax and I release a long and exhausted [silent] sigh as I close my eyes.

And then she wakes up.)

And oh, YEAH: People think it’s okay to tell you how to parent when you have a newborn, even when it’s your second child (they don’t know I’ve forgotten everything). I certainly hadn’t remembered this.

You know what advice drives me the most crazy? Variations of, “You know, if you pick her up when she cries now, you’ll have an 18-month-old who won’t sleep through the night!”, with the implication that if your child doesn’t sleep through the night at 18 months (it’s always 18 months), your child will NEVER SLEEP THROUGH THE NIGHT EVER and you’ll be dozing in 2-hour blocks until the kid moves out in approximately 20 years’ time. To avoid this inevitable outcome, it seems you should leave your 2-week-old to cry and not rush to check on her when she grumbles and never – I repeat never – let her fall asleep on you, so that she learns early that a full night’s sleep is the most important thing in the world to you and you therefore won’t stand for her needy shenanigans.

It’s bollocks. I suspected it was bollocks even before I’d experimented on Moses (by doing everything “wrong”) and confirmed that it was, in fact, bollocks. My experiments aside, it seems illogical to say that the sleep patterns you set up in the early days last for all time, but when it comes to feeding, babies can continually adapt to new patterns over their first 18 months. I’m fairly confident Hazel won’t still be needing gallons of breast milk per day when she’s 18 months old; I weaned Moses at that age. AND, if lifetime patterns are being set up now, I’m totally okay with my baby learning early that she’s at the top of my priority list, and that I’ll always do my best to show up when she needs me. THAT won’t change over the next 18 months/20 years/ever. So here’s my advice to advice-givers: Back up what you say with statistics and studies rather than simply telling me to do things the way you chose to, or, better yet, hold your tongue.

And oh, YEAH: I’m extremely grumpy when sleep-deprived.

Hazel Evelyn

Waiting. Impatiently.

Over the last couple of months, Mo’s questions have shifted from “Why?” to “How long is it until…?” Some are easy to answer (“How long is it until we’re home?”) and others are harder (“How long is it until I finish my dinner?”). While I try to consider and answer each question well, a few times now I’ve fallen back on a reply Mr Bull gives Peppa Pig’s family when they ask how long it will be until a road’s fixed: “It will take as long as it takes.”

The baby’s due date came and went yesterday. I can feel my body getting into labour mode, but I’ve given up going to bed thinking, “THIS COULD BE THE NIGHT!” I’ve worried for my whole pregnancy that she’d arrive too early (I needed something to stress about once she made it past the first trimester); now that she’s on time I vacillate between feeling so over being pregnant that I cry at everything and fight overwhelming urges to punch the smug-looking woman on my birth book, and feeling a zen, “It will take as long as it takes.”

Mostly the former, though.

Grr.

I’m finding it easiest to work on the zen thing by avoiding all people as much as possible (if ONE MORE PERSON looks at me and says, “Still going?!”, I WILL STAB THEM IN THE FACE WITH  A FORK) and distracting myself with episodes of The West Wing and Modern Family.

I want to be able to walk again rather than waddle, and to have enough lap space to cuddle Moses, and to cut my toenails and shave my legs without having to manoeuvre myself into positions typical of Cirque du Soleil performances, and to be comfortable.

I want to finally meet this squishy, squirmy girl, who I never thought I’d get a chance to meet.

It will take as long as it takes.

It will take as long as it takes.

It will take as long as it takes.