Quincy, Months 4 and 5

Let’s call this months 4 and 5 even though month 6 begins on Tuesday. We’re combining months now and I would apologize but it’s all your fault. Really, you should apologize to me. Much like your older brother you decided to REALLY embrace 4 month sleep regression (“Why not all months sleep regression, am I right mom?!?!?”).

This is how my babies work:

Months 0-1: get up a lot at night, eat, go back to sleep pretty easy -- no need for bouncing or rocking or holding.
Months 2-3: steadily improved sleep, 7 hour stretches, one wake up to eat, set up foundation of baby lies.
Months 4-5: No Sleep TIL FOREVER. Wake up every 1-2 hours, demand boob like a starving animal. Any resistance = SCREAMS.

With your brother I put off sleep training, afraid of listening to him cry. But when we did it at 6 months it was pretty easy and then he just slept and it was AMAZING. My pediatrician recommends sleep training as early as 2 months and I know a few people who tried this with amazing results. I swore I would sleep train earlier with you -- possibly even before I returned to work. But I didn’t. You were sleeping ok-ish at 4 months and I thought maybe you would figure it out on your own -- no need to push you, no need to listen to you cry! WIN/WIN. Instead… you started sleeping less and less and I went back to work and I got more and more tired and so shortly after 4 months we decided to go for it and sleep train.

It did not go well.

We live in a 2 bedroom Brooklyn apartment and you have been sleeping in mom and dad’s room. The plan has been to move you into your brother’s room once you sleep better… so for now we’re sleep training you in our room. To make things easier on both of us I decamped to the couch.

The first few nights were as advertised -- you cried a bit, it was hard but ok -- you seemed to

improve.  I literally wrote down this note after a couple of nights, “Your sleep patterns have been exactly like Casper’s -- at 3 months you were consistently sleeping 7 hour stretches but by 4 you’re back to getting up every 2-3 hours and so the sleep training has begun. We’re only a couple of nights in but already there is progress and I am entertaining dreams that somehow you will be my easy sleeping child.” Jesus Christ, I’m a sucker.

You never got past crying from 4am onward until morning (6ish). After 4-5 nights of this we decided that you had to be fed at 4. This worked great for a couple of nights -- down at 7, a couple of short wake ups through the night then eat at 4, sleep until 6ish. Then you decided that your meal need to arrive at 2. Down at 7, sleep until 2, cry for TWO HOURS, eat at 4, maybe just get up for the day. It was hell.

I tried to stay strong and let you cry. Certain you’d figure it out. Certain that if we started going to get you all of the work we’d done would be ruined. But when you would wake up for 2 hours I would be up for 3 since it took me an hour to calm down from your being awake. I was, at best, getting 4 hours of broken sleep per night with at most a 90 min stretch of straight sleep. On the night you woke up at 10:30 and cried until midnight and then woke again at 2 I gave up. I felt like the biggest failure ever but we went back to letting you eat whenever which, even though this meant wake ups every 2 hours (or more) was still more sleep than I had gotten in the past 2 weeks.

Happily, after a few weeks, we have managed to wean you off of the 12:30 feeding which combined with a dream feed around 10 has you sleeping from 7-2 and then from 2-4:30…. Which at this point feels like some sort of sleep heaven.

But you do other things besides wake up all night asking for the boob. Cuter things. Things that mostly make up for the bullshit you pull at night.

All of the crying has won us a baby who puts himself to sleep for bed and naps and who naps pretty regularly. This is something I think I never accomplished with Casper so we’ll take it as a small win.

You’re rolling all over the house -- I’ve recently had to rescue you from underneath a chair.

You’ve cut two sharp little chompers -- your bottom middle teeth.

Your brother likes to get right up in your face, resting his big old head on your chest and sing -song, “I just love this boy.” You think he’s hilarious.

Your hunger cues have evolved from pecking my face to opening your mouth as wide as possible and screaming “AHAHAHAH!!!!” When I arrive home from work and you spot me from across the room you are the angriest baby bird.

You want everything to get in your mouth and when something you’ve grabbed it too large to fit you slam it into your own face and scream at it -- so far this approach has not proven successful but you are undeterred.

You love to have my hand fly down until my palm rested on your face and I grab and shake your whole head back and forth.

You have all the rolls that your brother never developed and I’m working hard not to stereotype you as my chunky child.

You remain an easy baby -- despite the sleep challenges --  willing to entertain yourself in the crib or on the boppy or or under your play gym grabbing your guys for upwards of 15 mins.

A few friends with only one child have cautiously asked me if having 2 is a nightmare and I tell them honestly that it’s fine. It's difficult to describe how parenting is now both more complicated and more effort and somehow also easier. You let more things go. You have lower expectations. You let if be your whole life for now. You let the love fill you up and you cry because somedays that isn't enough. But most days it is.

Quincy, 1 month

Quincy, Quinca-roo, Quincer, Stretchy, Milkyface, Junior -- Happy one month birthday and welcome to the blog!

I fear that I will not be able to do as much writing about you as I did about your older brother -- you can blame him for replacing my writing time with LEGO time, puzzle time and arguing about eating lunch time.

But back to you. You arrived one month ago via the traditional exit a mere 12 minutes before your scheduled eviction. Everyone was shocked having resigned ourselves to a second c-section. 7lbs 12oz, 21 inches long, perfect.

You came out of the womb looking like your daddy -- so says almost everyone. I imagine it must be true even though I can’t really see it. I was similarly unable to see people’s claims that your brother looks like me. But you have blond hair and eyebrows and a round head so it is likely that a fair bit of daddy genes are shining through.

I’m happy to report that even though you were a real wild man in the womb now that you’re out you are a relatively chill baby. You don’t mind being left by yourself in your crib or bouncer and when you cry it’s almost always because you need something obvious. Mostly you need milk. But it also seems much of your crying is directly related to a need to burp, fart or poop. The cries are often preceded by long annoyed grunts which can go on for hours especially at night. I feel almost as bad for you as I do for my sleepy self.

You are already the king of spitting up. I know this usually peaks around 4 months which is horrifying considering the volume of spit up that you already produce.

Your brother loves to ‘nuggle us both -- sliding in under my arm on one side of me and reaching his own arm over your back as you sleep on my chest. He likes to trace your ears and tell me how small they are. On the day you were born he announced that your name would be Dinosaur Robot and he continues to bring this up a month later, thinking it a much better name than Quincy. He tell me how much he loves you on a daily basis. He also did your immune system the favor of bringing home your first cold before you were even a month old so you have a sad hacking cough that bothers mom much more than it seems to bother you or the doctor. So far so good on that big brother thing.

I am afraid of doing too much comparing of you and your brother but it’s difficult because he is my only other baby data point. So. You are calmer (we have almost never had to take you into the bathroom to chill out to the soothing sounds of the vent). You are fairer. You are less worried over. You are less photographed.  You at bigger (94th percentile for height!).

I am calmer. I almost never get up to check your breathing. I'm less sure that there is a method to baby madness and less inclined to google every whimper grunt or cry. I've learned that most of the time the answer to "Why is my baby _________?!?!?!?" is "Babies: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"

I am also less overwhelmed and surprised by my love for you. Before you were born I had the usual second time mom concerns that I could not possibly love you as much as I loved Casper or that I would somehow love Casper less. But none of those fears have come to pass. You are both loved equally and more than I could have ever imagined.

Peritonsillar abscesses Is Latin for "You're Screwed"

I have had the good fortune to be a relatively unblemished health record. With the exception of the occasional bout with the common cold, an annoying icky eye disease and the ongoing issue of being allergic to the world I’ve suffered very little at the hands of illness. I have never broken a bone, been bit by a dog, been stung by a bee or had any body parts removed. But there is one instance of horrible sickness in my past.

In 2002 kissing my new boyfriend (one of few not ever featured in the Winner’s Parade) resulted in the punishment of a standard issue sore throat. This was fine as it allowed the boyfriend and I to bond over my illness through me lying on his futon (which was located on the floor which was not really ok) and him feeding me raspberry sorbet (aka the only food that my throat was not currently revolting against). After a couple of days of nursing I mostly recovered and jaunted off to a weekend of early spring hiking with a girlfriend in Northern CA.

Then the cold came back. I figured my gallivanting with the boy toy and skinny dipping in a chilly river had deservedly resulted in a relapse. So I spent a couple of days in bed with hot tea and popsicles and hoped for the best. At the time I was working as a contract employee and thus did not have health insurance so rather than go to the doctor like a big girl I choose to call my nurse mother once every 3 hours to cry on the phone. Next time you have a cold do not look to an emergency room nurse for sympathy. Mom’s general reaction to each phone call was “oh, your throat hurts? Poor baby. Today at work someone DIED.” Eventually my throat hurt badly enough that the thought of a $300 doctor bill seemed worth it in return for some prescription meds so on the 6^th day of my illness I drove across town to the clinic to find out just what was wrong with me.

When you get any minor illness your body sends out the good bacteria to march in the war against the evil germs and usually these valiant warriors fight back the tide of illness so you can return to a life of tempting disease by drinking too much and only sleeping on weekends. But occasionally when the tide of war turns too sharply in favor of the invaders your own army turns against you. I know because this happened to me. Apparently one night half way into my standard issue cold my good bacteria were getting killed in droves and, war weary and saddened by the death of so many loved ones they decided “fuck this body, let’s join the other side!” The invaders were happy to have the size of their army increased and assigned my traitors to the task of building a huge bacteria fort on my tonsils. At the time of my visit to the doctor the fort was housing millions of troops and through numerous remodels and expansions had grown to almost fill my throat. A few more barracks and I would no longer be able to breathe. This accursed condition is called a Peritonsillar abscess – Let’s see what Wikipedia has to say about it.

Peritonsillar abscesses are widely considered one of the most painful complications, primarily the surgical draining of the abscess itself. The patient is operated on awake, surgically slicing open the tonsil and draining the abscess.

AWESOME!

The clinic doctor took one look at my throat and announced that I needed to take a trip to the Ear Nose and Throat specialist. My naïve request for directions so I could drive myself there was all but laughed at, “Silly girl, you can’t drive, you’re body is currently revolting against you, who’s to say that your foot won’t join the dark side and rocket your car through the front of the hospital?” And so after receiving a huge needle full of steroids in my ass (an effort to stave off the growth of the abscess until I could get to the hospital) I called my friend John and pleaded for a ride to the Stanford Hospital.

The ENT doc peered down my throat and then leveled with me about the extent of the damage. “Ok, so the first thing we’ll have to do is drain the abscess with a large needle. Unfortunately we can’t put you to sleep for this procedure because twilight sleep causes the throat to relax too much to get the needle to the abscess. I’m going to try to numb your tonsils but because the abscess is so large I don’t know if I’ll be able to get around it in order to use this other huge needle to give you the anesthetic.” Doctors are really super duper smart so I was unsurprised when this prediction turned true. The (in retrospect miniature) anesthetic needle poked around somewhere near my gag reflex but was incapable of delivering its sweet nectar. Next the doctor eased the HUGE drainage needle down my throat as the nurse who was letting me squeeze her hand into hamburger whispered, “I’m sorry honey, this is the worst thing we do here.” The doc was able to drain the abscess even though I passed out near the end and had to be revived with smelling salts (who knew they still used those?). As I came to the doctor assured me that she thought she was able to completely drain the abscess but that she was worried that if she didn’t lance it the abscess would fill back up. Do you know what lancing means? It means someone shoves a knife down your throat and hacks off bits of your body. Luckily the always supportive nurse assured mid slicing, “now you know you can get through child birth since this is much more painful!”

John drove me from the doctor directly to the pharmacy where they handed me a 1 quart bottle of liquid Vicodin which I chugged like Gatorade. Apparently the peritonsillar abscess healing process is supposed to be very quick so the next day the doctor called me at home to see how I was feeling. She was perturbed that my voice hadn’t returned and asked that I come back to the hospital in case she “didn’t get all of it and had to go in a second time.” I remember thinking “no thanks, I’ll just die. How painful can asphyxiation be really?” Luckily I was just a slow healer and was not forced to pull a second stint as knife swallower.

A hilarious aside to this story -- a couple of days after the hospital visit I realized that if I didn’t want the huge bill I ran up at the pharmacy to overdraw my bank account I needed to go into the office and get my paycheck. Despite my illness and my general hatred for talking to people in the service industry I decided to physically go into the bank in order to expedite the delivery of emergency funds to my account. When I reached the front of the line the teller started talking at me in that characteristic very loud and slow voice that people reserve for the mentally challenged. It took me a moment to figure out why I was being given the courtesy ‘tard treatment but then I thought about how my voice sounded and I sighed and angrily slurred at her, “I’m not deaf I’m SICK.”