Week Two: The Sibling Factor

There was a time that I thought we had enough burp cloths and receiving blankets, more than enough actually. Between leaking diapers and gallons of spit-up, we're accumulating enough laundry to do one load a day. Thank god for Ian's dad, he bought a used washer and dryer for us last month (I had told Ian while I was pregnant that I would not live in a house with an infant and no washer and dryer). Sunday night in about two hours we went through about 3 blankets, five burp cloths and countless outfits... sometimes I think Will spits up more than he gets in. On top of all that, the diaper leaked while he was lying in our bed, so we had to change our own sheets as well. All in all, it was a difficult night, Will just wouldn't settle down, and all he wanted to do is nurse. Usually I don't mind being used as a pacifier too much, but that paticular night I had a return of the stomach problems that started in my third trimester. Fun.

But Will has been petty good at night, and during the day too. The thing he hates most is being alone. As we say, he's just a snugglekins. By far, his favorite thing to do is nurse, evident by his weight gain - this week at his ten day checkup, he had gained back his birth weight and then some, so he's a hefty nine pounds and four ounces. Will is also spending some more time alert, looking around, and frowning. He gets these serious expressions, it's pretty hilarious. Yesterday he was lying next to me and looking at me with his lips were pursed tightly with one eyebrow raised. While I do like his serious little frog faces, I can't wait to see him start smiling. I think that will also be a big payoff for Emily, who desperately wants to interact with her little slug of a brother.

While many times during the day, Emily is great at entertaining Will, balancing an older child with a new baby is proving to be more difficult than I had imagined. Try explaining to a four-year-old exactly why she doesn't need to sit next to you while you nurse the baby all the time, or why she doesn't need to hover over the baby at every diaper change. The conversation usually goes something like this:

I sit down to nurse Will and Emily follows along leaning over my shoulder and begins breathing into my face and poking the baby.
Me: "Emily, why don't you go play in your room / read some books/ etc... while I feed the baby"
Emily: "I want to look at him"
Me: "You can look at him when he's finished"
She then moves in closer and begins to pat Will's head with her sharp elbow digging into my side
Emily: "But he's cute"
Me: "Please Emily, just go play, or at the very least, scoot over"
The exchange continues on like that until Emily stomps off in and proclaims "You hurt my feelings!", and I feel like a total bad guy.
Probably not one of my most shining parenting moments, and believe me, it's not like I run her off evertime she wants to be involved. Most times I'm perfectly happy to snuggle with both kids or read her a story while I nurse, but you know, sometimes it's enough, you know?

Since I'm with both kids during the day while Ian's at work, I'm finding it hard to keep them both entertained and happy at the same time. And then Emily has become more and more clingy since Will was born (for obvious reasons). Although I do try to include her whenever I can, and encourage her to interact with Will and have her spend one on one time with both me and Ian, but my patience is really being tested. It's a difficult time for her, which I try to remember, but it's hard enough to get some personal space with a newborn, and she used to be so good at entertaining herself for hours, I'm just at a loss.

My goal is to get to a point where we can establish some kind of routine, kids love that. Take walks, go to the park, there are luckily a ton of cool, free things to do in a college town. Hopefully that will allow me to keep my sanity at least until kindergarten starts... in three months. Oy.

Week One: Beautiful Boy

After months of anticipation and preparation, William Howard arrived at 10:27pm on May 16th, 2005. While arrived, does not quite accurately depict the true nature of his birth, we have our baby at last, our little Will, who is truely is as perfect as can be.

Now that our lives have returned to some sense of normalcy, I'd say the things that suprise me most is how quickly I had forgotten about the hours spent doing nothing but nursing, the fear of leaving the house and have the newborn melt down in public, and and how an entire day can pass with nothing to show for it - the baby continues to be hungry, wet, dirty, and the laundry continues to pile up.

On the other hand, this time I do feel more calm, knowing that this too shall pass. Part of me wants this newborn phase to last forever. Too soon Emily has become this enormous kid, and I know the time I have with Will, curled up asleep in my arms, making little squeaky noises, ends too soon.

Every day I'm amazed at how perfect little Will is. I find myself spending countless hours just staring at his little face and stroking his soft hair. On friday after we brought him home, Will still hadn't pooped since we were at the hospital. I called Will's doctor and talked to the nurse, and I expected her to say "oh, it's nothing, happens all the time". Instead she told us to bring Will in right away so the doctor could check him out. Thankfully it turned out to be nothing, and the peditrician made me feel a little silly for being concerned about it. That is just the kind of reassurance you need as a parent though, to have a good laugh about being worried that the baby isn't pooping enough, when now we're up to our elbows in runny yellow baby poop.

Luckily, we haven't had to be reminded often of how fragile life is, especially with children. Sometimes my heart just aches at the thought of something happening to Emily, and now with Will, I wonder what we got ourselves into. But then there are those moments, like this morning when Will was curled up between us, making little grunting noises in his sleep, that make me realize how lucky I am to have so much to lose.