Excursions... present and future

Oh yeah, baby, a little 'mom n' baby' hiking will save the day! Nahanni and I joined a hiking group that treks every Wednesday here on the north shore and I swear, it has been a saviour for me - I love not only getting out there in nature and getting exercise with my babe, but it is wonderful to do so with other moms who are all going through the same things as we are. Different ages, lots to talk about, it's a great opportunity to just hang out and talk and to not always be so solitary which I am inclined to do and also is somewhat dictated by having a small baby. I look forward to it every week and I can't wait for mom and baby snowshoeing this winter! I feel like it is so great to get some exercise as until recently I was okay with the baby weight (not thrilled, but relatively understanding of myself) and now I'm really over it and looking for ways I can exercise. Daddy has agreed to cover me in September so I can go to real yoga and actually do the poses and this is a treat beyond measure at this point. I love mom and baby yoga but it's more about baby than yoga, and I could use a little zen. I just about had (okay, I actually had) a meltdown the other day over the passport fiasco - is it valid is it not? - and luckily daddy talked me down off the ledge (well, he and a woman from Service Canada) so I could see how I can easily unravel without some sort of outlet. He took Nahanni and had daddy-daughter day while I went and had my hair done for real - it was wonderful - and fabulous to feel good again about my lid, to feel like it was an asset instead of a liability! I put on earrings and a white skirt (yes white!) and I even wore a necklace and perfume for the first time in four months - I felt like a new woman - hell, I almost took a picture, I was so excited... I guess it's true what they say - it's the little things.

And sometimes, I guess, it's the big things. Big as in 14'9" (which is an ironic number now that I think that when I weighed Nahanni on Tuesday she weighed 14lbs 9oz...) Yes, we are now the proud owners of a 14'9" SOTAR Raft (which Ez will repeatedly tell you stands for 'State of the Art Raft') Yep. Finally we have our own boat, something Ez has been yearning for for some time now - he was like a little kid, he was so excited about it. Now I can admit, it wasn't quite how I wanted to get it - he bartered it in exchange for the money someone couldn't pay him for work, but I was really happy for him and for us to finally have our own little piece of rubber for the river. Already he's exclaiming 'We can take it on the Nahanni!' and we are planning all the trips we can take even now while she's so young. I love this about our life, that we love the outdoors and find every way we can to enjoy it and the adventure and peace it brings to our lives. We feel proud and excited to know that Nahanni will grow up on rivers and in nature, and we hope that some of her fondest memories will involve a big yellow and blue raft, blue skies and sparkling waters.

which isn't to say...

Which isn't to say that it's all sunshine and lollypops, especially lately. I'm frustrated on so many levels, frustrated from never getting any decent sleep, a situation which seems to be worsening by the day. Frustrated with my chubby belly, with inches that have sprung from nowhere and refuse to go away, with my lack of fashion sense in general of late - hell yesterday I didn't even manage to brush my teeth until the evening... I saw a woman walk past me today, wearing a tiny sylph of white dress (white? hah!) with little shorts underneath, tanned legs, high heels, hair blown out, makeup on, fashionable handbag. I caught sight of myself in a mirror, hat on, scraggle of hair escaping its braid (braid? I never thought so either...) plain jane shirt, jeans of a bigger size than I've ever owned and my ubiquitous running shoes and backpack (yes, I said backback) and I wondered to myself how I had gone from her to me in just these few short months. I felt a sadness descending on me that I haven't been able to shake - wondering if I am just watching my own slow spiral into middle aged mediocrity. I feel like I used to be pretty. I used to be successful. I used to be...something. Of course, now I am a mother and it is wonderful in a myriad of ways, but I still do long for some pieces of my old self. I wonder where went the person I had so long been, filled with ambition and dreams and fire - where now I could be a candidate on 'What Not to Wear' (please, please, don't dare nominate me...)
Aside from that, there's the usual issues - trying to be a good mother and wife, trying to salvage my sexuality and my career ambitions and wind them together with my desire to be a great mother. Nahanni has been such a wonderful baby and I felt terrible this weekend - I really was losing my patience. Friday night I slept so horribly and she was up so often as she has been of late (although she has also slept through the whole night twice and put herself to sleep at naptime too). Saturday she was good as gold until the evening and then she was so fussy, I was starting to feel crazy as it was another single mommy weekend with Ez on the river. Repeat the whole fiasco of Friday night, up every hour, never wanting to be off the boob and by 5:30 I was fit to be tied - and getting bitchy. 'Nahanni!' I said finally, desperately. 'Just f*cking GO to sleep!' - I was so tired, I was just worn through like an old sock. I just left her on the breast and finally, mercifully slept until she awoke at 11:30 Sunday - when the minute I felt her head and touched her little hand I could tell she had a fever - and let the guilt begin. I felt terrible, like the most awful, selfish mother on earth, trying to get sleep when my daughter obviously was so fussy because she was sick and needed me!
I couldn't help but think of Marianne Brophy at the mommy group, talking about a woman once pulling out a length of string, maybe 25 metres and calling that an 80 year life span, then gradually dividing it in half - 40 years, 20, ten... down to a few inches which represented this time in which I am embroiled now. A few inches is all that there is of this long life we hope for our children, a few inches of time in which they need us so completely, so maddeningly sometimes. When I think of those few inches, I feel differently about these sleepless nights, I hear her cries differently and I remember to relish these moments when she needs me so much. Okay, so I don't relish every second, and sometimes it takes a few deep breaths, but I do find that it makes these challenging times easier to bear when I think of that little piece of string, all that ties me to this vulnerable time in her life. Like they say, I'll sleep when I'm dead - for now, I live, a little ragged, but nonetheless swept up in the pink beauty of her.

sadness, love and retromelancholy

I've been going through something lately, wavering constantly through a series of emotions that all (surprise) revolve around the birth of my daughter, around becoming a mother. I find so often that I am thinking in the future in an effort to better capture the present. I feel almost obsessed with the fact that Nahanni will so quickly be not my baby anymore, I think so much about her separation from me, it hurts me. I see young girls - any age - four, ten, fifteen; and I think that someday that will be her and I can scarcely comprehend it. I see teenaged girls walking down the street, plugged into i-pods, chatting on cell phones and I know that someday I will not understand my daughter, nor she me. It's like getting a broken heart from a guy you haven't met yet...and yet, I can't seem to stop thinking like this. I'm so often overcome by the intense feelings I have for this child, I ache for it. I love to look into her face while she sleeps, the sweep of dark lashes that brush the pale oval of her cheek. Her rosebud mouth, puckering and chatting in her sleep, the round curve of her brow beneath my palm. I feel crazy for the wide open grin that erupts from her face with every new thing she learns, you can see how proud she is of learning, how true is the joy in her face when she wakes up to you, when you make her laugh that gorgeous, tingly giggle that you would do anything to make her repeat. I live for these moments and I fear the time in the future when, like her frailest newborn days these moments fade into the foggy ether of time and I become the woman who yanks her by the arm in frustration, scolding her for whatever misdeed has tried my patience. Right now I live most of my time with her in a sort of dreamy bliss - I could stare at her for hours, studying the daily changes in the colour of her eyes, watching the shape of her eyebrows evolve, the crook of her wet smile, the dimples of her increasingly pudgy little hands, the roll of fat at her wrist. I can't bear to think of the time when she won't be my baby, when I won't be able to put her into the sling and hold to her my breast and feel her tiny fingers tickling my side as we walk. I feel like a buffoon, so inarticulate is my effort to put these feelings into words, the bricks and mortar of my love for this girl, this incredible gift of fate that she is.
I was lying with her tonight, she has been clingy all day and I finally just gave in and lay with her and turned on the tv and was delighted to find 'The Breakfast Club' playing on Encore - a movie that I still know most of the words to even after almost twenty years. It was so interesting to watch it with these new eyes, finding myself identifying with the Principal as much as the kids, remembering for myself what it was like to feel all the emotions of those days. To see those characters that I so understood as a teenager weep and cry and have hearts broken - and to look with these eyes, my mommy-eyes and knowing that the ache that I felt as a teenager, all that angst and emotion and fear and sadness and melancholy - all of it I still feel, only now it is caused by a tiny girl in orange footsie pyjamas. I guess emotions are the constants in our lives, it's just the causes that change.
I'd do it again though. I'd do it a thousand times just to know the joy that she has brought me - and I will risk it. I will risk the very crumbling of myself, of all that I know of myself, all the fears and pain and the crises of loving - all just to be with her. In some ways it makes me more fearless in life because I know that nothing on earth could hurt me in any way that approaches how she,or anything happening to her could. I used to think tragedy was what happened to you. Now I know that it is something happening to the one you love the way I love her.

Ridin' that Train...

Yeah, baby - we're riding the sleep train again. Actually, the picture is of us riding the miniature trains out in Burnaby yesterday, but the talk is all about he sleepin'. Last night I put Nahanni to sleep pretty painlessly, just rocking her and stroking her forehead while she sucked her thumb and she went down like a dream. Slept peacefully and would have stayed so had I not woken her by accident trying to zip up her sleep bag - but even then, she woke up, I fed her again and she went right back to sleep until 4 am when she woke up to eat and then went right back to sleep until almost 8 am. She played for about an hour and was tired again at 9 so I rocked her for about 5 minutes and she's been sleeping in her crib now for almost and hour and a half; not too shabby. I'm feeling a lot better about this in general, yet I still feel like we are teaching her about self-soothing while honouring what she needs as a still very young baby. She certainly seems much happier and I really think that she's learning well, now that she can get the thumb in on a pretty regular basis. She's getting stronger and stronger on her tummy and can spend ten minutes or so with her head held up before she gets tired and frustrated. The worst part of this new stage is that she's hard to figure out what to do with - she won't stay on her back but she gets frustrated on her belly, but I can tell it won't be long before she's on the move and then it will be a whole new round of frustration...for me, trying to figure out how to baby proof this little place. I'm staring right now at a tangle of cords that has a life of its own, no matter what I do with it and surely that is not baby safe. Everywhere I look something is a 'choking hazard' and I'm forever picking cat hair off of everything, including little fingers and toes. I know I should just accept the wabi-sabi nature of all this, but I have trouble doing so. I know my mom always says that she wishes she hadn't bothered bing so fastidious when we were kids, and I'm not nearly so much as she anyways, but still, I would like a little bit of order in my own personal chaos.
Eh, what's life without a little chaos, huh?

Sleep - Doing it our way...

Okay, even though I'm sick of it, I'm still going to talk about sleep. As you know if you've been reading this lately, we've had some issues with the various methods and opinions about sleep teaching. I am painfully unfond of the 'cry it out method' and I really think that our little experiment in that served only to create mistrust in our baby - she has never slept worse that she did when we tried that. We went from a baby who had no nap issues, slept like a dream and only woke once per night - to having a baby who wouldn't go down ever, who woke four times a night - it was insane, and I felt that in listening to her, she was saying 'uh, this isn't working for me...'. So we've backtracked and are helping her to sleep at night and thus she only needs to go down once - no more waking up every fifteen minutes, back to one night feeding and later morning sleeping. I have let her go a bit in her cosleeper at night and have discovered that now that she knows how to get her thumb in her mouth and isn't fraught with displeasure - she can soothe herself back to sleep. Okay, not every time, but often, and to me, that's much better progress. I have a much happier baby and she has a happier mommy, and I don't feel like I've betrayed the trust and closeness I've built up by cosleeping and babywearing and generally loving her to death since her birth. This gentler method works much better for us, because it is working better with her, listening to her and her needs and not simply forcing the issue for my own convenience. Right now she has just woken up and is happily lying in bed, sucking her thumb and occasionally cooing to let me know she's awake. I feel like I have my old baby back - and I'm really happy with that.

Life and other Stuff

Well, I'm sick of talking about sleep (and not really doing it...) I'm so tired of there being 5000 conflicting opinions about it - so I'm going back to parenting by instinct, I felt much more successful... We're still having issues with Nahanni going to sleep on her own, but I think she's very young and she's learning to soothe herself with her thumb and so I'm going to give her time and I really think she'll get it on her own (okay, with a little help from us). My heart tells me that it's too much for her right now, too soon - and besides, it just seems downright cruel. I've been able to stomach it and we will do it in the future if she doesn't learn on her own, but I have confidence that it will all fall into place in due time.
Otherwise, here are just some plain old pictures of life. We went to the Aquarium with Tobias and his 2 kids, Noe and Maddox and we put Maddox's anemone hat on Nahanni. It was so cute and funny, and although she looks so sad, she was actually laughing until so many people noticed her and kept staring and talking to her with it on. So cute! We had a lovely time there, and I thought and hoped that Nahanni might enjoy it as something interesting to look at - I think it worked as you can see in the photo.
She's doing very well, she weighs just under 14lbs and she rolls over every time you put her on her back - although she gets pretty frustrated when she does it. I can see how much stronger she gets every day and how she'll probably crawl before I can get everything babyproofed...
She's wonderful and sweet and generally irresistable.