So we had our baby November 25th, his name is Tobias Chandler Fidalgo. We call him Toby. He is perfect and completely healthy and he is a veritable chunk of boy, weighing in at over 13 pounds at his two month appointment. One of these days I'll do a post about the actual birth experience, which was quite something, but suffice it to say it was not pain-free and I'm glad it didn't last any longer than 12 hours or I might have given up on the whole idea entirely. I'm supposed to be returning to work in two days, which is really hard to believe. On the one hand, I'd rather not have to work so I could be the one to take care of my son. But on the other hand, I've decided that I wouldn't make the ideal stay at home mom. Part of it probably has to do with giving birth in the winter; winter has always made me a little stir crazy and being stuck inside with no adults has sort of compounded that problem. I have trouble compartmentalizing when I'm home all day with the baby. I look around and the house is a disaster and I think, "I'm home, I should clean up." But cleaning up never ends. There is always a stack of clothes to either be washed or put away. The rug always needs to be vacuumed, the dishwasher always needs to be run, the recycling always needs to be taken out. If I didn't have a baby to look after I could really keep this place looking good but then, if I didn't have a baby that wouldn't take much effort at all. And I'm not even that anal-retentive; think how rough it would be on someone who is, you know, actually neat.
So back to work I go. At least I'll be able to eat lunch with both hands. I'll be working Fridays from home and we'll have to see how that goes. Toby's not quite as high-needs as he was those first few weeks. For the first few weeks of his life I'd look up at the clock and it would suddenly be 11 pm and I'd still be in pajamas with a half-drunk cup of coffee next to me going, "Jesus, it's 11 o'clock already!!?"
The sleep thing is the major obstacle to full-on parental bliss, which I knew it would be. I was more phobic about that than I was about the pain of labor, and I was right to be. Labor lasted one day but the sleep deprivation marches on and on....and on. I remember going to Target when the T. was about 2 weeks old and standing in the middle of an aisle trying to remember what I had gone there for and almost falling sleep on my feet. It's gotten a little better than that but not much. I'm still getting up several times a night of course, and I have to confess that I do not do so cheerfully. I do so with varying degrees of resentment and agitation.
Lately it usually goes something like this: Toby will go to sleep way later than he should, like between 10 and 11. I go to sleep as soon as I possibly can thereafter. He wakes up anywhere from 20 minutes to 3 hours later and he cries. Paul may or may not have come to bed by this time, but if he has and he's asleep, he doesn't hear anything so I usually take this first one myself. I go in to feed him and try to get him to go back to sleep, with some kind of combination of rocking and jiggling him about. He falls back to sleep so I wait a few minutes to make sure he's really good and out before I try to put him back in his crib. I try to make my movements in doing so as smooth and noiseless as possible, like a cat burglar or someone in Cirque du Soleil. I've gotten so that I even know where all the creaks in the floor are in there and can avoid them completely. I make my way over to the crib and bodily lower myself until the top half of me is inside the crib with the baby, then I slowly try to let his head and body down to the mattress. At this point several things might go wrong. He might sort of startle and flail his arms around which is usually deadly; it wakes him back up. Helicopter arms = Mommy not getting back to bed for another 20, 30 minutes. He might open his eyes back up and then you're toast. Or the worst by far - he might fart explosively. Wakes him every time. And if I do manage to make it back to bed, I lie there like a war vet with PTSD - every little creak and sound makes me think he's about to wake up again.
We'll get there. Eventually he'll sleep through the night and so will I. In the meantime, there's always MAC Studio Finish Concealer for the samsonite-sized bags under my eyes. At least Paul has a matching set.
