During her first weeks, Ingrid easily fell asleep anywhere and any time. When she gradually became more alert, getting her to sleep became more of a struggle. I didn’t want her to get used to falling asleep on the breast – I think it would become inconvenient in the long run, and even in the short run it would mean that I am the only person who can get her to sleep. What if I fall ill? So we tried to find some other way to help her fall asleep. Initially the main solution was a dummy. We’d spend ages by the side of her Moses basket, popping the dummy back in her mouth when it fell out too early, and then trying to take it from her before she was completely asleep (because otherwise she’d wake again when she lost it later).

One night she just wouldn’t go to sleep that way, no matter how much I tried. I was too tired to carry her around in my arms all evening, so I thought I’d try my new Tinokis sling. And as if by magic, she was asleep within 10 or 15 minutes! Since then, the sling has become my #1 sleep tool.

Ingrid really doesn’t know how to fall asleep on her own. In fact she seems to actively fight sleep. When she is tired, she doesn’t start yawning or looking sleepy – she just gets whiny and fussy. And as she gets more and more tired, she gets more and more upset, until she can be crying and screaming constantly. This often happens within minutes of the first sound of tiredness.

When she’s crying with tiredness, motion – in the sling or the pushchair, or simply in my arms – is the only thing that keeps her relatively calm. All the lower-touch sleep tricks that I’ve heard about – singing, shushing, patting, holding a hand on her chest – are pointless; she ignores them completely and doesn’t get the least bit sleepy. The crying and the rocking goes on, she sounds more and more desperate, until suddenly, really suddenly, she gives up, her eyelids drop, and she is asleep.

I am constantly surprised by how forceful the rocking needs to be! This is no gentle swaying or swinging. When she’s in the sling, I need to really bounce her up and down. And when she is in the pushchair, I actively seek out bumps in the pavement to make sure that she gets enough “bounce”. Too big a bump will shock her awake again; too smooth a pavement just has no effect.

We sometimes still try to get her to go to sleep in the Moses basket, just so she doesn’t forget how that works, but now that she’s a lighter sleeper, it is getting harder and harder. We generally give up and I put her in the sling anyway. By that time she is sometimes so tired that it only takes two minutes of rocking before she is asleep.

For her night sleep and the long mid-day nap, I try to move her from the sling to her Moses basket when she is fast asleep. I don’t want to carry her around all the time! Sometimes it works, sometimes not… and sometimes it seems to work but then she wakes up 10 minutes later and misses me, and goes back in the sling anyway.

I don’t know what I’d do without the sling. Develop enormously strong upper-body muscles, perhaps. Just today I ordered a second one, because this one needs washing, but I don’t want to spend even half a day without it.

And I really hope that this is only temporary. Well, I’m sure it is temporary – I’ve never heard of a teenager who needs to be rocked to sleep – what I mean is, I hope this phase doesn’t last too long. She will have to be able to fall asleep without this much work by the time she starts in the day nursery, when I go back to work. I doubt if anyone there will want to bounce her up and down for every nap!

While Ingrid is a lovely baby, and getting lovelier by the day, I really cannot say that I enjoy staying at home and taking care of her all day, every day. It’s challenging and boring at the same time.

First of all, it can be immensely frustrating because there is very little feedback, and the little that there is, is very unclear. She is a black box: I am taking care of a system whose workings are hidden from me, and whose feedback is generally limited to two states: “I’m OK”, “I’m not at all OK, fix me!”. When she seems hungry, there is no gauge to say whether she is very hungry, a little bit hungry, or just feels like snacking on the breast. When she seems tired, there is no way to know whether she really is tired or simply bored. And no way of knowing whether what I am doing to calm her is (1) just right but needs some time to work; (2) almost right, just needs some tweaking; or (3) totally wrong and making her more upset. All guesswork. And to make it worse, even when I think I’ve figured out some part of it, that part is sure to change so my solution stops working again.

At the same time, I find it quite tedious to take care of a baby. My days are very repetitive. Change, feed, burp, keep her awake, try to get her to sleep. Wait an hour or two while she sleeps, and start over. And repeat all over again. And each step is the same every time. Getting her to sleep is especially boring: it generally involves patting her while rocking / swaying her in a sling, for 10–15 minutes, and again if she wakes up halfway through her nap. So every day I spend about an hour rocking and bouncing from one foot to the other.

The part that rankles me the most, I think, is the utter lack of flexibility. I cannot ask her to wait just a few minutes – when she wants food, she better get it immediately, and when she is crying out of tiredness, she cannot wait until I’ve finished my meal, for example.

I really am looking forward to a more communicative Ingrid. Much of this does come down to communication, doesn’t it? When her feedback becomes more nuanced than just “this is good” and “this is awful”, when it becomes possible to play with her while she’s awake, when she starts understanding what I say… this should all become much more enjoyable. I hope so!

Both myself and Eric have received several request for more photos. So here they are! There is now a whole photo gallery with pictures of Ingrid in all sorts of settings and poses. We will be adding new pictures as and when we feel like it, and removing old ones if / when I run out of server space (unlike the photos I’ve posted here, the ones in the gallery are all full-size). I will not be posting about all such changes here, but the gallery appears to have an RSS feed, which should provide notifications when new items are added (although I must admit I haven’t tested it myself).

New things Ingrid has learned:

• Smiling!
• Faces. In the last week or so, she has become really interested in looking at faces. When she is near people, she prefers looking at their faces to staring out through the window.
• Imitating. Just this morning she learned to copy facial expressions – Eric and Ingrid were making faces at each other. It seemed to be hard work for her – she tired after a few minutes.
• Head. Her neck is a lot stronger, and she can now hold her head upright and turn it in different directions, without constant support. She’s still far better at starting a movement than controlling or stopping it: the movements often end up being way too forceful and going too far, so she throws her head around quite wildly, and ends up hitting me with her head a few times every day…
• Hands. Ingrid now knows that her hands are hers, and that she can do things with them. “Do things” in this case really means “put them in the mouth and suck on them”.

Ingrid’s life revolves around my breasts. Therefore, so does mine. Hardly an hour goes by without thinking about breasts. (“I defy anyone who is breastfeeding a five week old baby to go a whole 10 minutes without saying boob or breast. I honestly feel like that’s all I ever say anymore.”)

Breastfeeding must be the world’s cheapest and most effective breast enlargement method. Mine – not particularly large to begin with – grew by 2 cup sizes. Seriously, they must have at least doubled in size, if not more. And that’s when they’re empty: let one go un-sucked half a night, and it inflates to the point where it no longer looks like it should be a part of me. I think Eric looks at them with cautious fascination… I myself am starting to view them as alien objects, belonging to Ingrid, not me. She’s just stuck them on me so she doesn’t have to carry them.

For the first time in my life, I have a cleavage. Overrated, I think, this whole cleavage thing… sweaty and itchy.

Size is just half of the story, of course. There’s the milk, too. Breasts, unfortunately, don’t come with a screw cap… the closing mechanism is a bit loose. Basically, they leak. A lot. They leak through everything: the nursing pads (which should, and do, absorb most of the leakage), the bra, the t-shirt, and sometimes the sweater too. Black has turned out to be the only practical colour for t-shirts and tops: everything else looks like I’ve painted two bulls-eyes on my chest.

And I leave wet stains on the bedclothes. Eeuw!

On a more serious note, I think both Ingrid and I have more or less figured out how this breastfeeding thing works. I’ve also found positions that allow her to eat without gagging and choking on the milk when it flows too fast (which it often does – we had some unpleasant days last week when she was really struggling: sucking once, then spluttering and gagging, letting go of the breast, and then crying because of both discomfort and hunger).

Ingrid can now latch on pretty well on her own, without me going through a whole procedure. Most of the time I just need to point her mouth roughly in the right direction and she takes care of the rest. She hasn’t yet learned to look for the target herself: she tends to keep her eyes closed while eating (for concentration?) and tries to suck whatever she can reach… which is rarely the right thing!

Waking up

It’s one month since Ingrid was born. Time flies.

(Actually it was one month yesterday, but yesterday was a day with much fussing, and lots of trouble falling asleep, so I never got around to writing this.)

Ingrid has focused her efforts on growing, i.e. eating and resting. She has gained about 800g, which – given that she started at 3950 – is a pretty good rate. It took me about eight months to gain 25% of my body weight, and she did it in one!

She has also started to develop a personality. No longer a generic newborn bundle, she now has her own voice and face, and her own gestures and facial expressions. She likes turning her head to the left when given a choice (lying on her back, for example) and to arch her back really really far back when waking up.

She likes looking at lamps and windows, but is not particularly interested in faces. She does not react much to sounds – she does not find them interesting, but is also not alarmed by loud or sharp noises.

She doesn’t mind clothes being pulled over her head, but is very annoyed by the process of getting arms into sleeves.

Her hands are learning to grip things: when something grippable happens to touch her palm, she often grabs hold of it. (Remarkably often this happens to be the sleeve that I’m trying to get her arm through, or the front of my t-shirt.) But I don’t think there’s any intention behind it yet.

This weekend we bought Ingrid her first development tool. Hers is from Mothercare and not Fischer Price, but it does vibrate! She hasn’t done much productive work with it yet, but that is just a matter of finding the right incentives, I’m sure.

The only time of the day when Ingrid is guaranteed to be totally satisfied with the world is when she is in the bath. No matter how grumpy she is before, I only need to put her in the bath and a second later she is quiet and happy. I guess it must feel just like before she was born, except for the light.

Of course, the moment she leaves the bath is probably her least favourite moment of the day. Even if it takes a fraction of a second to lift her up and wrap her in a towel, she starts her desperate cries of complaint.

And as you can see, she is made up of one large head (for eating and crying) and one large stomach (eating again), to which little skinny crooked limbs have been attached almost as an afterthought (for occasional waving around).

Looking at things objectively (trying to, at least) we’re doing great. Ingrid is eating, sleeping, gaining weight. I am eating, sleeping, and not losing too much weight. But I find it hard to be satisfied. It’s not that I am dissatisfied… I just want things to be even better – NOW.

During the first few days I wished I wasn’t so sore and exhausted. I got that.
The rest of week 1 I wished that breastfeeding wouldn’t hurt so. I got that.
Week 2 I wished for more predictability and routine, and to have time and energy to at least eat regularly. I got that.
Week 3 I wished that Ingrid could fall asleep without an hour of fuss – shushing, rocking, holding, dummy-popping etc. We’re sort of getting there – sometimes it only takes 20 minutes, and sometimes we just give up after a while and let her fall asleep with the dummy.

If week 1 had gone as well as today, or even if I had known that everything will go so well so soon, I would have been ecstatic! But now that we’re here, instead of being satisfied, I wish for more… I wish we could find a predictable way to get her to fall asleep when she is asleep, and I wish I had time and energy for something other than making sure the two of us eat and sleep enough.

All of these things have seemed completely inachievable, which is very frustrating. (Much of that hopelessness has probably been due to my constant tiredness. Things always seem a lot worse when you’re tired!) And now is no different. At least now I know enough to recognise the pattern and know that what I want will indeed be achievable, and even quite soon (if the pattern repeats itself).

I guess its human nature to never be quite satisfied. Or my nature, at least.

Edited on November 6th at 3:30 AM

First day on my own with Ingrid. (Eric’s paternity leave ended so he’s back at work.)

Everything went reasonably smoothly, including another trip to the breastfeeding support group, and even a bath for Ingrid.

Knowing that I had no one to hand off Ingrid to if I got tired, made me more focused and patient with her. It also made me pay more attention – or maybe it was just that I was now obliged to notice her behaviour
throughout the whole day.

In any case, I noticed something I should have picked up a lot earlier: I’m feeding her to sleep almost every time. Either she falls asleep during feeding, and we put her to bed. Or when she’s stayed awake for a while after feeding, she hasn’t been able to fall asleep for a long while, and after a while we’ve guessed that maybe it’s because she’s hungry, and then she’s fallen happily asleep. Either way, it’s already difficult to get her to sleep without a feed, so she’s probably already started to associate the two. Not good.

From now on I’ll have to force her awake after feeding, somehow. But she is very good at sleeping when she’s sleepy! I have yet to find a reliable and non-violent way of waking her.