Penny – Week 40

 

40 weeks! That’s as long on the outside as I was on the inside! I have celebrated this 9 month milestone by developing a weird rash, refusing to eat (finger foods I’ll take only a little, purees are out of the question), and waking up every two hours in the night before demanding to play at 5am.

Peekaboo is my favourite thing, and so are cats. My godparents have one and it is totally hilarious. Every morning I pull my books out of the shelf and I go straight for Slinky Malinki every time. I love that book. I carry it around with me and have even started to eat it (mmm, cardboardy).

I make a wonderful whirring noise with my tongue, like Predator! I’m also getting the hang of not putting everything in my mouth these days. Believe it or not, it is possible to inspect something using just my eyes and my hands. Taste is obviously an element I still like to explore, but I find this works better when Mum isn’t watching.

Penny – Week 34

grabby mcgrab grabberson. standing at the coffee table.

Being on holiday is awesome, because I get to play at the beach and eat sand and splash in the rockpools, and we got to stay in a whole new house with new fun things to climb up and fall off and chew on, oh and also they wanted me to sleep in some weird mesh box and I wasn’t having any of that. So I got pushed around in the pram a lot and I slept between Mum and Dad at night and got to have aaaaaaaall the milky-milk I wanted so that I didn’t scream and wake up Granny and Grandad. Winning.

So now climbing up on things is my favourite thing, and sometimes (a lot of the time) I fall down and I hurt myself and what’s with that? I hate being on my back, like, ever, so I sleep on my left side or on my tummy and don’t even talk to me about nappy changes. One time I pooped so much and squirmed so hard that Mum had to put me in the bath.

My night schedule goes something like this: bed at 7pm (I complain about it), wake up at 9pm, 11pm, 12am, and 1am, taking about 20-30 minutes to go back to sleep each time. Then at 3am I wake up and decide I don’t want to go back to sleep any more. So I stay up. Until 5am. No amount of milk, or jiggling, or shooshing, or patting, or rocking, or Mum sitting on the floor by my cot crying is going to convince me that this is unacceptable. One morning we went outside at 4am and saw a possum walking along the fence. Then Mum put me in the car and we drove around the dark, deserted streets until the sun came up.

 

 

Penny – Week 32

Want it. In my mouth. So badly.

This week some new people arrived, called Granny and Grandad! I think they must be famous because I’ve seen them on a tv show called skype. It’s a great show but they are much more fun in person. They play with me a lot and take me on walks and talk to me with a funny accent. I love them.

I now commando crawl with such determination that I have blisters on my toes. Mum says they are the hardest working toes in all of Dulwich Hill.

I am waking up more at night time again. Mum used to think that three times in the night was a lot, well, I showed her! But it is dark and I can’t get back to sleep and I know she is just in the next room so if I cry loudly enough somebody will come and cuddle me and that’s nice. Sleeping is for chumps anyway. During the day I am stretching from three naps down to two naps, so there is more time to play! I have also started to pull myself up to a standing position, if there is someone nearby that I can lean on.

Also, do you know about these animals called DOGS? They are THE BEST. They are furry and happy and slobbery and jumpy and yappy and crazy. I LOVE THEM.

Relentless

The crying will peak at six weeks, they said. Your baby will become more predictable, they said. She will be smiling and seem to appreciate your efforts more, they said.

LIES. ALL DIRTY LIES.

This is the fourth day of pretty solid whinging, crying, not-sleeping and outright screaming. To love somebody so damned much and want to hurl her out of the window so fricking badly is quite a juxtaposition. When I hold her and she is wailing, the line between wanting to hold her tightly for comfort and squeeze the heckins out of her in frustration can be very thin.

At the moment I am standing in the kitchen with the laptop on the bench, wearing Penny in the bjorn carrier over the top of my pyjamas. Thankfully she has fallen asleep now but only after a good twenty minutes of jiggling (god forbid I stop for two seconds to take a sip of tea). And now I am stuck, because history tells me that should I stop swaying or try to take her out of the carrier we go back to square one.

A while back I heard about this ‘wonder weeks‘ business and downloaded an app on a whim. I read through it then promptly decided to ignore it in case I somehow became a self-fulfilling prophecy. On the second day of screamfest – which incidentally came after about five days of magical, lovely, perfectly behaved babe – I opened the app again. “Penelope is in the second leap. 13 day(s) until the end of the leap.” I’m sorry, thirteen days? I’m stuck with this baby for thirteen more days???

I’m trying to remind myself that this will pass and ignore the premonition dictated by this particular theory (honestly, thirteen days???). I’m yet to decide whether the whole thing is a load of baloney but it is disturbingly accurate so far.

Luckily for us, Husbandito is on early shift this week which means he is getting home at around 3.30pm each day to tag team me out. But I am feeding more frequently, and for longer, so I don’t feel like I’m getting that much respite. And after a day of painful feeding from ol’ righty, I realised this morning I’ve developed a blocked milk duct resulting in a white spot on my nipple. The pain when she starts sucking is eye-watering, and sends sharp shooting pains right up the boob. As with most breastfeeding related problems, all I am really suggested to do is keep feeding from it. I’d like to run it under a hot shower, but showering while wearing the baby is not really ideal. In fact wearing her makes it hard to do any of the recommendations – air the boob, put warm or cold cloths over it, etc. Fortunately I don’t have any redness or lumpy bits, so I know it’s not mastitis. I hope. I also had a flu jab yesterday so I feel rotten anyway – very stiff and sore down my arm and across my shoulders. Stupid timing. And don’t even talk to me about sleep. Let’s just say that I’m pretty sure lying down for all of five minutes out of every hour does not constitute actual sleep.

We’ve got parent’s group again this afternoon (they won’t mind if I show up unshowered in my pyjamas, right?) so at least I’ll have a sympathetic ear and plenty of distractions if the babe decides to holler through it. Last week as we sat around airing our concerns, a number of women were saying things like “I unfairly expected this to be all roses”; “I thought it would be a lot easier”, etc. They seemed to be worried about things that didn’t bother me. I guess I consider myself a realist, probably bordering on the side of dramatist rather than optimist, and so had actually expected the opposite – for it to be much worse, for myself to not handle it so well, for her to cry unrelentingly. I felt it best not to contribute to the group discussion rather than risk sounding pompous by admitting this. As I sat there listening to more and more similar statements, I started to get eaten up by my own mind. “Why doesn’t that bother me? Why don’t I agree with these women? Why don’t I question my own parenting skills? Oh my God, does not feeling like a bad parent make me a bad parent??”

Yep. I genuinely went there. Fortunately I realised how idiotic I sounded before my brain had a chance to melt.

Anyway, I’m on the other side now. I still don’t feel like a failed parent because we don’t know what is wrong with Penny even after we’ve tried what feels like everything – what’s wrong is that she is a baby, and babies cry for no reason sometimes. But I do feel teary and frustrated and asleep on my feet. And I’ve been standing here typing this whole post with a baby strapped to me for close to an hour now and my back is starting to protest, so I might go try my luck actually putting some clothes on, going to the toilet, that kind of thing. Fingers crossed.

Penny – Week 8

I am going out on lots of adventures these days. Mum and Dad have taken me out to cafes, on long walks, to the skatepark, to a place where there were lots of other babies (I think they call it new parent’s group), and I have finally met some special people like Grace and Mum’s super best friends Nellie and Gato. Everyone always tells me that I am so small but Grace was even smaller, so I feel like a big grown up girl now, especially because I am in big girl nappies now too (infant size). At the beginning of the week I was feeling really happy – I smile and gurgle and stare at Keith the lion a lot. Then halfway through the week I didn’t feel so great any more, so I decided to spend a heck of a lot more time crying. I have started having long feeds again instead of short snack sized ones but I don’t like sleeping. What if I miss something really interesting?