There's a question people love to ask you when you have a newborn, and it is a question that makes no sense to ask. It's almost like a nervous tick. It's word vomit. I think a lot of people ask it before they realize what they've said. Shit, I've put this question to new moms before.
You may be racking your brain trying to figure it out what this question is. If you are, then you either have never had a newborn or it's been long enough since you have had a newborn to mostly block out the trauma. If you already know the question, it's likely you're either here in the trenches with me or you've been in them recently enough that your boots are still wet. To make sure we're all on the same page, that question is "are you getting any sleep?"
Let me tell you, I struggle when someone asks me that question. Am I getting any sleep? I generally try not to be a raging lunatic but newborn tired makes it very hard to reign in the beast within. What I'd like to say (and don't out loud) is "FUCK NO, I'm not getting any sleep!! Do I LOOK like I'm getting sleep?"
I know I am presenting physically as sleep deprived. Someone asked me yesterday if I have a black eye. I do not. It's just the bags under my eyes. I got the same question when RB was fresh. It warmed my heart then as it did now. I know the question was well-meaning. My veneer is thin and I am too tired to be nice all the damn time. I do my best to keep it mostly in my head, but there's only so much room in there so sometimes it must come out.
I'm breastfeeding with Lil J. We're calling him Lil J. Beau's probably going to call him LJ. I've been calling him Baby J. Feels like that'll stick for me. I'm sure I'll be calling him Baby J even when he's six feet tall (we think both boys will get the tall genes) and towering over me. The one syllable is a little weird for us, just with RB having two. Ironically Beau and I both have one-syllable names, which I've only just realized. But J is a J in a long line of J's, so a nickname is necessary. LJ is named after my dad, who is named after his grandfather whose nickname was Jeff (after a show called Mutton and Jeff), and my brothers name is also Jeffery (goes by Jake, though).
Anyway, so I've been breastfeeding LJ. With RB, breastfeeding was a fucking struggle. We lived in Struggletown, USA - population: us. It's been much easier this time around. LJ doesn't have the shallow latch or aggressive tendencies RB did. I am also armed with more knowledge both about breastfeeding and about babies, and I've accepted that he may need formula at some point, and there is nothing wrong with that. That said, even though it's going better, that term is relative. That doesn't mean it's going well, per say. It's still hard and painful and mentally quite taxing. I've already started pumping as I do plan to eventually exclusively pump, but right now we are combining bottles and nursing. I know that pretty much anywhere you look online tells you not to do that, that it can create "nipple confusion", but this is what's working best for us and this is what we'll go with for now. Because I do plan to exclusively pump as we move forward, I'm just going to give LJ the opportunity to wean himself off of nursing on his own time.
Now, all that said, feeding a baby is feeding a baby. Feeding a newborn is feeding a newborn. Newborns eat so erratically. It's honestly so wild. He has cluster fed through the night two nights of the four he's been out of the womb, and the first night was literally the first night he'd been out of the womb. Cluster feeding basically means eating like a little psychopath at any given time. He could nurse for 25 minutes, and then 3 minutes later demand to nurse for another 15. It is a cluster. It is a cluster both of feedings and also just a clusterfuck in general. I think the first night we were home from the hospital, he ate every hour through the night and then once 7:00 a.m. hit, he was like, "I think I'm going to start sleeping in 3 to 4-hour increments if you don't mind." And I was like "that sounds great except I am a normal person and I'm acclimated to the sun rising and setting as a normal person is. So you've kind of fucked me up for my energy level today but sure you go ahead and sleep it off." And he's pretty much been sleeping really well through the day and not at all during the night.
We're trying to do what we can to fix his confusion on days and nights. He legitimately has them perfectly flipped. It's really quite incredible. I mean, obviously this is how babies are born and you have to teach them, so we're just in the learning phase. We did have a better night last night because I worked really hard yesterday to make sure he took in more calories in the daytime so he wasn't as hungry at night. I think I actually slept for three consecutive hours last night which is a pretty big fucking deal right now, so I've got that going for me which is nice.
As for RB, he is now having nightmares, which is fun. When I say fun, I mean not fun at all. Now he's definitely of an age where nightmares are not uncommon. But obviously he's going through a pretty big change as are the rest of us and last night he had a nightmare and it I guess scared the shit out of him because he took a hot minute to recover from it.
I believe we are looking a pretty exciting sleep regression right in the eyes for RB. Tonight is the first night that we as a family of four are home without anyone else. Beau and I just got done doing bedtime with RB. We put LJ in his crib in his room and he slept and hung out, displaying his extra chill personality as he has been. RB , on the other hand, was full blown toddlering. He was not super jazzed when he got home. And when I say not super jazzed, I mean he was just kind of bitchy. We finally got him to settle down and eat dinner because we turned on Mrs. Rachel (she is everything). After dinner, he wandered around the living room and was in an okay mood because he actually was able to crawl up on the couch tonight with no help and that really floated his boat. However, we had to interrupt his wonderful couch and Mrs Rachel time to go do bedtime, which really, as my late grandmother would say, chapped his ass.
We recently bought toilet seats for potty training and RB had his first successful pee on it right before bath time tonight, which was very exciting. He was pretty proud of himself. Then things took a very sudden and angry turn for our guy. He was super pissed when we took him off of the potty, he was pissed when we gave him his medicine (normally he's very good about medicine), he was pissed when we put him in the bath, when we took him out of the bath, when we took him to his room, when we put on his PJs, and when we sat down for story time. Honestly I guess I could have just said he was pissed the whole fucking time. He only settled once we were in the dark and I was singing some lullabies, and then he got really settled and really comfortable on me. It made my heart so full. I've really been looking forward to being able to sing my guy to sleep. I have always sung him to sleep, unless a grandparent is here, and it means just as much to me as I think it does to him (maybe more). Not being able to do that has been really, really hard on my heart. It was really, really nice to be able to do it tonight. But then I had to transfer him from me to his crib, which pissed him off again and then he took forever to settle after that.
I recognize that he's going through a lot; he's seen so many people over the past week or so and this baby is here every time he turns around, and he's really not sure what to make of it yet. I'm sure in a way he's feeling some kind of toddler insecurity about having to share his parents and his limelight. I have no doubt that will go away, but for now, it's just something that we're going to have to navigate as a family. It's kind of funny that RB is so bothered by LJ's very existence and LJ really could give a fuck. I suspect this will likely be their dynamic as we move forward. Funny how it can be established so early on.
I went off on a tangent there, but all I'm really trying to say here is that while this newborn slowly sucks the life out of me both literally and figuratively, my toddler is siphoning my remaining energy both physically and emotionally. I know that we will get some kind of balance going in the next few weeks, but being in free fall is really difficult for now.
If you made it this far in this blog, thanks for reading. I hope you walk away with a lesson learned not to ask new parents how they're sleeping because the answer is they are fucking not so don't even bring up sleep!
Just for funsies, here's a log of LJ's eating habits the other night so you can see just how little I truly did sleep.
And here's LJ himself, totally unbothered by the effect he's had on both my sleep and his brother's emotions.
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