My poor baby has terrible, awful tummy pains. Something is causing gas or something and he stays awake for long periods in obvious discomfort, arching his back and crying. We finally got some simethicone for him which should provide some relief. Hearing him cry for hours is as annoying and frustrating as you might think, but it's also heartbreaking when I know that he's doing it because he's in pain. The worst part is that it seems to flare up at night, leaving Simon and I unable to sleep well.
Last night we finally passed out around 3am. We're actually not sure when he fell asleep because we didn't mean to fall asleep. We were desperately trying to stay awake to get him settled. We failed. We apparently fell asleep while he was fussing. He must have settled fairly soon afterward as well, because he didn't fuss loud enough to wake us up, not until he woke around 8am asking for food. Needless to say, aside from the times we were awake to feed him, we slept in quite late today. I got up around 11am, Simon got up at 2pm.
So how is parenting? Probably understandably hard to explain. It's not as hard as I thought it would be...and yet in many ways so much harder than I thought. The actual caring for him is mind numbingly easy. Feed, burp, change, repeat, repeat, repeat, bathe, repeat steps 1-3. I'm aware that it gets more complicated, but for right now....so very simple. The harder parts are the hours - I won't say sleep deprivation because so far, there's been fairly little real sleep deprivation. Delayed sleep, yes...odd hours, absolutely...but we've very rarely been absolutely DEPRIVED of sleep. The odd hours have been fairly hard to get used to. Getting used to waking up in the middle of the night and napping in the middle of the day has been, when you think about the timeline, fairly easy. I mean, I've been home only a week and I pretty quickly went from being a zombie at night to actually being somewhat awake. I also went from not being able to fall asleep in the daytime to being able to fall asleep pretty much whenever I want.
It's also scary, by the way. I spent the first 2-3 nights exhausted more because of horrible nightmares than because of the baby crying. I had any number of nightmares in which Xander was killed in some sort of accident. The only one I can remember clearly involved Simon holding up a mangled and bloody Xander to show me and saying (with some horror), "I fell. I think I hurt the baby." (I still shudder when I think about this dream.) That's the kind of shit I dream about. It's ALL I dream about. It is not fun, but I know it will stop.
I'm totally used to getting bodily fluids on me now. You'd think the poo bothers me most but it totally doesn't. Baby vomit is SHOCKINGLY horrid. It looks gross, smells putrid and while I can see blood and guts, I can't see vomit without my own stomach turning.
The entire thing is a constant learning experience. We're getting better at working out his signals and figuring out what he needs and wants and we're becoming more confident in our abilities and more relaxed in our approach.
And on that note, I'm going to go and nap.
It might sound crazy, but we took Anastasia to a chiropractor a few times when she was little, and that seemed to help settle her down. He was gentle, and mostly did massage while i held her, and used the clicky thing on the lowest setting a couple of times. She seemed to like it once she got used to it. If Xander doesn't get better you might find it helps.
ReplyDeleteHey Tandy, not that I know, but I heard that nitrous causes really vivid bad dreams... or as I refer to them night terrors. I hope they have stopped for you. Has Zander been checked for a hernia?
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