Baby Ada just keeps getting fatter.
I swear she's fatter every morning than she was when we fell asleep.
Today's fatty goodness:
Not a great photo but displays her pudge.
Angry fat vs. Happy fat
(Reminds me of happy fat baby me.)
And in color...
Rosie at the same age, for comparison...
I don't think they look anything alike!
Mother's Day was ok.
I spent the day in a haze of sleepiness. I am so exhausted it hurts. I can't even describe it.
I didn't even bother to get dressed today. My eyes are throbbing.
It was another night of literally no sleep! It's incredibly frustrating because as soon as I get the baby settled Rosie wakes up, or the other way around.
The baby finally falls into a deep, relaxed sleep at 5:30 or 6 in the morning. So guess who has started waking up at the crack of dawn? Rosie, of course.
And I look over at Tyler snoring away. It's not like there's anything he can do--he can't nurse the baby and Rosie just wants me.
He can't get up with Rosie at dawn because he doesn't go to bed until 3:30 in the morning due to work.
Oh well.
I've never been so tired in my life. I sleep 1-2 hours every night. Broken sleep, not a solid 1-2 hours. Napping with the baby (who sleeps GREAT during the day) is not an option because of Rosie.
I know this will pass. It will be better later, everything will be better at some point...when I get a few hours of solid sleep.
This sleepy feeling is nothing compared to when Rosie was a newborn. I thought I was tired then, but it turns out I had no clue. It's hard being on call 7 days a week for two restless little people. Really hard.
I will survive. I will.
Rosie has decided today that she's jealous of the baby, too. Normally I would handle it better, but I can't think clearly when my eyes hurt so badly. I have no patience left. I keep drifting off to sleep at random times, like while doing dishes. How sad is that?
I'm going to bed now, before someone wakes up.
I slept last night! Rosie slept all night long!
The baby nursed some, but nothing that really disturbed my sleep.
I looked at the clock and it was 1:41 at one point when I changed a diaper.
Then I blinked (I thought) and suddenly the baby was choking on my fire hose of a boob. I shoved a handful of cloth wipes in the general direction and looked at the clock again. It was 4:14, that confused me.
I'm too tired to figure out the difference between 1:41 and 4:14.
Then the baby was loudly pooping and it was 7:18 and light outside.
That's a pretty good night of sleep! I still feel so tired though.
It's like some kind of test. A test for what, I don't know.
One night I was laying there thinking that it was just like Chinese water torture.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
Wait until you drift off to sleep, and *just* as you slide into oblivion...JOLT! You have to wake up to tend to someone, or someone is stirring and you have to check, or you hear a cry and it's not even real. Over, and over, and over, and over.
To answer a common question, Rosie does not nap. Rosie *cannot* be allowed to nap. She hasn't napped since like 18 months.
If Rosie takes a nap at any point in the day, then two things happen. First, she wakes up and is so grumpy she ends up crying for at least an hour. Second, even if it was a morning nap, she will not be able to fall asleep at night until well past midnight. She'll be overtired, hysterical, and unable to sleep! She thrashes and rolls around and cries. It's horrible. I will do anything in the world to keep her from napping because of this.
Rosie takes after me. She just doesn't need that much sleep, like she physically can't stay asleep for that many hours in a 24 hour period. She goes to bed around 9 (at dusk, after we lock up the chickens together) and then she gets up sometime between 6 and 8. Usually around 7 on average.
I know kids are supposed to get more sleep, but she doesn't sleep that long! If she goes to bed earlier then she'll wake up earlier. I've tried getting her in bed by like 7:30 and then she's up and wide awake at 5:30 in the morning.
She never slept as an infant either, not like Ada. Ada sleeps for hours and hours, even at night she sleeps through grunting and stirring around. She has even pooped in her sleep before.
Great. The baby started thrashing and my entire plate of breakfast just fell upside down on the cat fur coated floor.
That's ok. I am a Goddess. Goddesses don't need to eat.
Or something like that.
Maybe they don't need to sleep like a normal human being either...that would be lucky.
Rosie seems to be less jealous today, so far, in the hour we've been awake. She announced she loves having a baby sister.
When she woke up while I was nursing the baby I reminded her of all the fun things big sisters get to do that babies can't do. Rosie thinks she wants to nurse all day long and be called a baby, which I'm sure is just a normal reaction since she realizes the baby is getting a lot of attention.
Once I spent 20 minutes listing everything big sisters could do that baby sisters can't do she seemed a bit happier. Especially when I reminded her how big sisters do things like eat ice cream, go to her favorite book store, hold chickens, eat cake, make bread and eat the dough, help mom do chores (she likes to scrub stuff), ride in big kid sized purple car seats (she just got a new one), and the list went on and on...
In comparison all baby sisters get to do is lay around and get milk all day, then get poopy all over their bums.
Now which one looks like more fun!?
She agreed it might be a lot of fun to be a big sister instead of a baby after all. Hopefully that notion will stick.
Anyway, anytime I feel like I'm totally losing my shit I can at least look at my sweet fat cheeked baby and get a surge of love and happiness!
Thank God for that.
I really have to go grocery shopping today. We're out of everything!
So far it hasn't been hard taking the two of them out places together, but Rosie and the grocery store recently didn't work out well if you might remember. Those stupid car carts!! I wish I could put a bag over Rosie's head, run and hide all of the car carts from her sight, then take the bag off and walk in the store and enjoy our shopping trip.
While sitting here nursing the baby I made an extensive grocery list with a meal plan and a list of healthy snacks we'll have on hand.
I can't wait to get the food so we can eat it. All of this nursing is making me starved!!
Did I write about the egg fiasco? I'm too tired to remember...I don't think I did.
While I was recovering from giving birth for the past two weeks I asked Tyler to take care of the chickens. Before I gave birth I showed him several times what to do--
Put a handful of oyster shell in the feed bucket, a handful of scratch grains, then four scoops of feed. Then another handful of oyster shell, another handful of scratch grains, and four more scoops of feed, and a handful of each thing again on top. Then throw in whatever scraps we've saved.
That's easy. Take it outside, pour half of the bucket in each feeder. (I use litter boxes for feeders. They're cheap and they work great because all of the chickens can eat at once, and they can easily be hosed out or whatever.)
Then give the chickens water in the hanging waterers and in the few dog food dishes laying around out there. Rinse out and fill the 5 gallon bucket full of water for emergency extra if it gets really hot and they run out. They roost on the side of the bucket and drink from it. You only have to rinse out the bucket every 3 days or so...the ducks drool food into it and it ferments and smells like vomit if you don't rinse it out!
On your way back in refill the dog water dishes. Then turn off the water and put the hose away.
So that's not very hard, right? It takes me 10-15 minutes each morning at the most.
Come to find out he hadn't been doing all of that, instead he had just been opening the coop doors when I asked him. Poor birds. I know I wrote about that.
But here comes the best part--I also asked him to collect the eggs every afternoon before he left for work. This isn't hard, it takes less than 5 minutes.
I assumed he was doing it, but of course...no.
It turns out he'd skipped a few days at a time and then gone out and collected all of the eggs at once. See, I'm really careful about egg collecting. I collect them every single day, sometimes twice a day if it's really hot or cold out. No chicks will develop in fertile eggs unless they are incubated or sat on, so if you keep up with your eggs then it's not a concern.
The other day I felt well enough to take over the chicken chores myself again, and when I went out I discovered I had a broody hen in each of the two coops. I asked Tyler how long they'd been sitting and he said he didn't know, he hadn't noticed there were any broody hens.
It's Tyler, of course he didn't notice. Captain Oblivious.
Are you seeing where this is going?
He had waited like four days, then collected eggs out from under broody hens unknowingly.
Then he mixed those eggs into all the rest of the eggs.
OMG.
There were 200 eggs in my house, and some of them had baby chicks started in them.
Noooooooooo!
I candled some of them. The thing is, it's hard to tell through dark shelled eggs if anything is going on in there so early. By day 4 you should see veins that look like a spider, and sometimes you can see an eye forming if the shell is thin and white.
Most of my chickens have dark, thick egg shells.
I cracked one that looked suspicious and the chick forming made me dry heave.
I threw away almost all of the eggs last night. I'm so upset!
What a waste of eggs and hard work from my hens. :-(
Ok enough rambling.
I lied, either I'm not a Goddess or Goddesses do need to eat...
I wish I had loyal followers to bring me some delicious offerings! Instead I'd better go scrounge up something from my kitchen...
I did it.
Do you realize that?
I nourished this tiny baby in my womb. Then I gave birth to her, all on my own.
As soon as she came out of me I scooped her up. My hands were the only ones that touched her.
No one took her away. No one interfered other than to offer words of joy and encouragement.
It was perfect.
She's perfect.
People won't stop asking if we've taken her to the doctor yet to see if she's healthy.
No, we haven't taken her to an office full of sick people to find out if she's in good health
Does she sleep well? Is she a good baby?
She nurses. She pees. She poops. And most of all she smells sweet, and I can't stop sniffing the top of her head.
What baby isn't a good baby, anyway?
People ask such silly questions.
All the time, since her first hours of life, she is like this:
A picture is worth a thousand words, right?
I don't know what to do with myself.
I'll never be the same again. No one warned me it would be like this.
So many women don't know what they are being cheated out of--this baby bliss.
So many women don't want to take the time to find out. Oh, but they don't know what they are missing...
Hello? Can anyone hear me? Is this thing on?
What he was thinking of, in fact, was the whales' songs. In the past the whales had been able to sing to each other across whole oceans, even from one ocean to another because sound travels such huge distances under water. But now, again because of the way in which sound travels, there is no part of the ocean that is not constantly jangling with the hubbub of ships' motors, through which it is now virtually impossible for the whales to hear each other's songs or messages. So fucking what, is pretty much the way that people tend to view this problem, and understandably so, thought Dirk.
Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
"We have a secret in our culture, and it’s not that birth is painful; it’s that women are strong."
— Laura Stavoe Harm
The tea parties in our house continue.
I've eaten so much wooden food, I'm going to be pooping mulch for weeks. My poor bum hole.
Rosie is still basking in the big sister glow.
Baby Ada loves the ring sling. Thank God. I was able to reclaim the kitchen sink today.
Tyler had been in charge of it for the past two weeks and it was nasty.
Really nasty.
Like...old food, standing water, mold, and dead bugs nasty.
In my kitchen.
Where I eat.
EW.
Ew, ew, ew.
It's all good now.
(By the way, that Green Works soap is actually not green...or all natural. It's chemical scented and has the same ingredients as regular soap! Tyler bought it to try, and it's gross. It smells terrible. The 7th generation soap is way better.)
Rosie always hated the ring sling as a baby. She much preferred the Moby wrap.
Well go figure, Ada hates the Moby and loves the ring sling. As long as she's happy...
Since I was able to get the sink back to sparkling white. I feel SO much better. Nothing is right when the sink is gross, the laundry is piled up, and the floors are dirty.
Tomorrow I just have to fold one load of clean laundry and vacuum...the vacuuming is a desperate situation similar to the sink. Yikes.
I'm so tired today. The baby woke up a million times last night. She kept peeing and pooping!
I seriously slept less than two hours total.
This morning my eyeballs felt like they were melting into my skull. I wish I could nap...the baby certainly naps plenty.
Oh well. I still feel so happy, even while dying from exhaustion. I still can't explain it.
I do wish I had someone to help me do stuff, but...
Tyler tries to help, he's just...well the dishes are a good example. He tries, I think, but it's like he does the most half-assed job possible. And what's worse, he doesn't seem to realize it.
I mean I appreciate his effort, but I can't figure out...I can't figure out a lot of things.
I've been asking him to let my chickens out in the mornings, but he can't seem to take them food and water unless I say specifically to give them both.
WTF?
I've been assuming he was feeding and watering, and he hasn't. It was like 85 degrees today when I went out and the poor things were parched!
He hasn't been making sure the dogs have water outside either, so they have been drinking the very smelly duck pool water. (I need to clean it out BADLY.) This gives the dogs diarrhea and farts that reek like smelly fermented duck shit. It's so terrible.
I really have to get back to doing all of these things myself, poor creatures. I swear I normally take great care of all of them. It's my morning routine and I honestly enjoy doing it.
Being exhausted and penned down by the baby is a bit frustrating when I suddenly realize all of the things that aren't getting done, which is why I'm glad Ada loves the ring sling. She's going to be spending a lot of time in it!
I don't mean to talk bad about Tyler, because I know he tries. I'm just frustrated at not being able to get everything done myself.
Speaking of getting things done, I have to go lock up my chickens, get the girls to bed, and candle some eggs a hen abandoned...Tyler couldn't remember how long she'd been sitting on them...maybe I'll have to incubate them! Shhh.
Before I do that...despite housework and chore frustrations I'm still basking in baby goodness.
And in my lap right this second...passed out and ready for bed.
May we both sleep better tonight!
I'll leave you with this quote I just read. I want to save it, and here is a great place to do so.
"What keeps our faith cheerful is everywhere in daily life, a sign that faith rules through ordinary things: through cooking and small talk, through storytelling, making love, fishing, tending animals and sweet corn and flowers, through sports, music, and books, raising kids up; all the places where the gravy soaks in and grace shines through. Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people."
-- Garrison Keillor
I just cooked supper for Rosie and me while nursing a sleepy baby.
Angel hair pasta, marinara and meatballs, and steamed broccoli on the side.
It went ok, cooking all alone with a baby glued to me. The only bad thing that happened was a bit of marinara splatter.
You know, just a bit...that culminated in my dogs licking marinara sauce off of my non-washable beige walls.
Ahem.
I'm so glad to not feel sick at my stomach anymore. I'd forgotten what it was like to feel human! To go out in public without dry heaving or just wanting to go lay down...it's nice.
Meal planning is in the works because I can cook, eat, and enjoy food. This makes me practically scream with joy. I spent the morning nursing my chubby cheeked baby, eating wooden food from Rosie's constant tea parties, and looking up new recipes to try--simple ones--so that I can cook healthy meals for Rosie every night. Since Tyler is at work in the evenings he won't be here to eat (or help) and that means I can cook whatever I want. Tyler is quite picky.
Bring on the vegetables! I can't wait. We're having shepherd's pie, chickpea curry, baked lemon pasta, pasta primavera, and whatever else I WANT.
This does not include plain grilled meat and a potato, sorry Tyler. Or fast food. Or any frozen food. Or any food made by Nestle for that matter, as long as I am doing the shopping.
I have to get going on my garden so that I can enjoy all of the aforementioned fresh veggies. I've got tomato plants in several varieties growing strong in a big pot. They need to be planted in the garden oh...any second.
I put some broccoli plants in my 4x4 raised bed, and I still have half a big pot of broccoli plants to finish putting in.
I have a big pot full of bell pepper plants, and a few Habanero pepper plants...
Lots of seeds to plant--two kinds of zucchini this year and yellow crookneck squash, corn, green beans, water melons
My pea plants are getting big over in the 4x4 bed. I'm not sure what the carrots, radishes, and swiss chard are doing in the containers...I've never grown any of those things before and they look kind of small and sad to me so far. But they are growing, so that's something I suppose.
My apple trees are growing nicely, all except one. The Yellow Delicious tree isn't well. It sprouted leaves, but they are tiny and curly and wilty. The other trees have flourishing big green leaves now. I have no idea what's wrong with it--it's in the container with another apple tree and the other tree is doing fine. Maybe it's just an unhealthy tree? I'm so lost...anyone with dwarf apple tree advice? I don't know how 3 trees could be healthy and one under the same condition could be so sad unless it's just the tree itself.
Gardening with a newborn is hard. I have to plant things in small increments. I think it will be easier once I stop bleeding and don't have to worry about over exerting myself.
I do have a great helper, Rosie...but she freaks out when dirt touches her fingers...or she sees a worm or any other bug...at least she has enthusiasm I suppose.
My big garden is tilled up thanks to Tyler! It just needs to be raked to get all of the plant debris and clumps of dirt out. There are some vines on the fence that need to be cut back too. That's normally easy for me to do, but again with the over exerting of healing self...bah.
Anytime I do too much I have a small gush of red blood, which is gross and annoying. I hope it heals soon!
Otherwise, everything with my body is almost fine. I feel normal...nothing like after I gave birth to Rosie. I can't even tell where my little tear was! Things are still healing a little though--when I wipe it feels somewhat numb down there. It's strange...but I don't think anything is wrong. Just the tissue is recovering from that big stretch from the baby's head.
My pelvic bones feel funny. I think I need to scrape together some money and visit a chiropractor because my left leg feels as if it's walking in a different direction other than straight ahead, and my tail bone is killing me.
I guess pushing a baby out kind of jolts everything down there.
My sweet baby Ada is growing big so fast. Not only has she already gained a pound, she also is starting to smile here and there. She's following things with her eyes today too! She watched Rosie eat her yogurt next to us on the couch and then she just grinned and stared.
I don't know what to do with her--she's so happy and content almost all the time.
And I'm so happy! I've never felt so happy in my entire life. What's up with that?
I could sit here and stare at my baby for hours, every detail of her chubby face, her squishy thighs, her brand new belly button, her fluffy baby hair...
I did not feel this way after having Rosie. Not at all. I spent weeks shuffling around and crying, worrying about random things like falling down the stairs while holding her, disturbing things like her temple getting bashed on the sharp corner of a table. Wondering if I would ever sleep again, getting angry at her for not nursing correctly or for waking up every time I tried to eat or shower. Resenting my loss of alone moments. Furious at Tyler for not helping enough. Feeling alone.
This time...I haven't had any of those feelings. I don't know what's different. It's maybe a combination of her wonderful birth and the fact that she's my second baby--I've already been through the initial shock of parenthood and I've adjusted. Baby Ada is like icing on the cake.
Delicious, mind blowing, amazing, beautiful icing.
It's not that I love(d) Rosie any less. Not that at all. It's just this baby...everything about it...bliss!
I don't want this feeling of happiness to ever go away.
It makes me want more babies. Badly. If this is amazing, I wonder how much better it can get.
It's like I have postpartum euphoria instead of blues. I wasn't aware this could happen.
Yeah, my sink is full of dirty dishes and my dogs licked supper off of the wall tonight. But that's somehow unimportant, it pales in the glow of this...I can't even think of a word for it.
