Category: Parenthood

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mindblowing realization

The other night, I had to run to Walgreens to pick up a prescription for Etta. I grabbed some C batteries for the baby swing and headed to the pickup window.

“I’m here to pick up a prescription for my daughter.”

Outwardly, I continued to have a typical interaction with the pharmacist, but the minute the words “my daughter” left my lips, my internal conversation went something like this: “Holy crap, I have a daughter. I have a DAUGHTER. I have TWO DAUGHTERS. Daughter, daughter, daughter daughter.” The word sort of ceased to have any meaning and began to sound sort of foreign in my head.

I mean, somehow, that phrase, “my daughter” just blows my mind. I had already kind of processed that I have babies, but realizing that they’re my daughters? Well, it gives me all kinds of visions of who these little people will grow up to be.

My DAUGHTERS. Photo by Christen Byrd.
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mom enough

I’m no attachment parent, but I have an attachment child.

The whole internet, or at least, the mom-heavy corner of it that I frequent, is abuzz over a particularly trollish TIME magazine cover and accompanying cover story that asks “Are you mom enough?” The cover depicts a model-pretty 26 year old mom breastfeeding her nearly 4 year old son, and the story it teases is a largely biographical piece about the father of attachment parenting, Dr. Sears.

This is not a post about that piece, so much as it is a post about my experience of reading that piece.

Jon went golfing this morning. I’m glad he got to go, and I’m not mad that he went. But it coincided with a difficult morning for me and the Bufflo Gals. In the 6ish hours he was gone, I swear, there were not 5 minutes during which one or the other of the girls was not crying and/or screaming. There were not 5 minutes in those 6ish hours in which I was not holding one or the other, feeding one or the other, shushing one or the other, or changing one or the other. I’m rather proud that it was not until around hour five that I send Jon a text inquiring when he might be home and suggesting that I may or may not have been losing it.

It was while balancing both of my girls on my body, intermittently shoving a pacifier in one mouth or the other, bouncing Etta on my knees while feeding Claire a bottle (of formula, which Dr. Sears would frown upon), that I read the TIME piece about Dr. Sears.

This was about hour 4 of The Screaming.

And when I read that he thinks allowing kids to cry for more than a moment damages their brains, and that he encourages parents to soothe every single cry, and attend to every single whimper, well, I wanted to punch him in his face. And then I wanted to dare him to spend 6 hours alone with my twins and try to achieve the impossible feat of never letting one or the other cry for more than 5 minutes.

At least once per day, I will be feeding one while the other sits in a Boppy, bouncer, or bassinet, screaming her head off until her little face is beet red, because she too is hungry, or in need of a change, or desiring some snuggle time. And I will have to just leave her there, because if I stop feeding the one I’m feeding, I will then have two screaming babies on my hands and not nearly enough hands to comfort both of them. This means that sometimes, by which I mean at least once a day, one or the other of my babies is crying for 10 minutes, or more. Deal with THAT, Dr. Sears.

The thing about grand theories of parenting is, they’re grand in theory. They almost never work in totality, across the board, for all parents and all children. I find many of the feminist criticisms that attachment parenting asks too much of mothers (and alienate fathers) very valid. I find the scientific criticisms of Sears’ claims that normal amounts of crying damage babies’ brains comforting, because my babies are going to cry unless I grow a second set of arms.

At the same time, I’m thankful that attachment parenting folks have popularized things like babywearing, something that has worked very well with Etta, whom I refer to as my “attachment child” because she likes to be very close to a warm body at all times. We joke that the solution to most Claire problems is to feed her, and the solution to most Etta problems is to hold her.

Bottom line: take what’s useful to you from parenting gurus, but don’t make it your religion. And don’t you dare suggest to a new mom of twins that she’s damaging her kids because they cry sometimes. Because you’ll make her cry, and then she’ll want to make YOU cry, and THAT might cause some damage.

 

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my babies robbed me

They don’t always sleep this peacefully. Mama could use some caffeine. (photo by the amazingly talented Christen Byrd, whom you should let shoot you sometime!)

My babies are adorable. They’re also thieves.

And I’m not talking about my belly button, though that still hasn’t come back, and I’m afraid it never will. Once it popped, it just can’t stop?

No, I’m talking about coffee.

I LOVED coffee. At one point in college I had a four cup per day habit, but had recently cut back to one beloved cup each morning. Fair trade CSA coffee, brewed in a French press, no less. For most of my pregnancy, I continued to have my one cup of coffee per day. It was a ritual I continued to enjoy, and clung to perhaps more tightly since I was deprived an evening glass of wine.

Then, sometime in the 3rd trimester, when I was the size of a house, something weird happened. Coffee no longer tasted good to me. I’d make a cup, thinking maybe something was just off the day before, have a few sips, and then find myself unable to drink anymore.

Now, promptly upon delivery, my heartburn, which had reared its ugly head after such foods as say, a glass of water, disappeared. My bladder was suddenly able to hold more than a teaspoon of liquid. But my taste for coffee has yet to return. And you know what that means?

I am enduring newborns, without caffeine.

Heaven help us all.

 

The above photo is from our newborn photoshoot, which I will write all about very soon. In the meantime, you can see more photos on the website of our amazing photographer and friend, Christen Byrd, whom we highly recommend.

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parenthood one month in

Saturday was my due date. Instead of being in labor, I spent the day with my ONE MONTH OLDS. They’re already growing up so fast! There’s no way they’d fit in the little preemie footie pjs they came home in just four weeks ago. Amazing how time flies when lived in 3 hour intervals between baby feedings.

Time also apparently flies between blog posts around here…sorry about that.

The truth is, my life is rather boring but happy at the moment. I’m not kidding about the living in 3 hour intervals thing– we followed the “golden rule of multiples” from the start, which is “one up, both up,” and mercifully the babies are on roughly the same eating/sleeping schedule, which works out great until I’m home alone with them and they’re both screaming with hunger at the exact same time, and I can currently only feed one at a time because they both like to try to drown in their food, or dribble it all over themselves, or choke themselves by sucking the nipple too far into their mouths. Luckily, until June, Jon is home with me most of the time, and we can just both feed a baby at the same time. This also means we can trade off at night and get longer stretches of sleep!

In a similar vein, I’m no longer mournful about not being able to breastfeed. Formula may be stinky and expensive, but it’s also fast and easy, and it allows my husband and me to share in the feeding of our babies. It also means I’m getting much more rest than I would be if I were nursing, and I’m enjoying having my body mostly to myself after 9 months of sharing it with two other people. I get to drink wine in the evenings! More than one glass even, if I’m feeling crazy!

Another thing that’s working out great is cloth diapering. I was really hoping it would work for us, and it totally is. I don’t find the cloth diapers to be any more disgusting to deal with than the disposables we used for the first 2-ish weeks, and when we have babies spitting up and such all the time, we’re already doing an extra load of laundry every day anyway. If anyone is particularly curious about what we’re doing, I thought I’d give a quick rundown.

We have a “stash” (oh cloth diapering lingo!) of 36 newborn all-in-one diapers (aka AIOs). They are BumGenius XS’s, Lil Joeys, and some Kissaluvs. (When the babies are bigger, we’ll switch to my stash of one-size pocket diapers.) I chose AIOs because they’re the easiest to use, and the most like disposables. I could probably wash every other day, but I just do a small load every day because I’ve got other stuff to wash anyway. I run the dirty diapers through a rinse and spin cycle with no spin, and then I add in the other laundry and do a “sanitize” cycle on the heavy duty setting for extra water. We tried All Free and Clear detergent, but I wasn’t crazy about it (I felt like the diapers still kind of smelled), so now we’re trying Tide Original Powder. I figured I’d exhaust all my available-at-Target options before moving on to more specialty detergents. I’ve been mostly drying the diapers in the dryer, though I’d like to line-dry them more often.

I think the cloth diapers are really cute, and I like that we’re not creating tons (literally) of trash by using disposable diapers. Other folks use cloth for health reasons, but those weren’t one of my top priorities. Most of all, we’re saving a ton of money over what it would cost us to have twins in disposable diapers. I know some folks try to claim the energy and water from washing is just as expensive, but with our high efficiency washer and dryer, it’s totally a negligible cost.

As far as the babies themselves: they are perfect. Sure, Claire sometimes reminds me of a hungry hungry hippo (do NOT get between that girl and her bottle), and Etta is our little Fussbudget who wants to be held all the time, but they are the most precious and beautiful little things I’ve ever seen. When they’re snuggled together? The cuteness is somehow multiplied by a factor of 10. I’m so looking forward to seeing their personalities develop.

A month in, motherhood has both changed and not changed me. I feel like the same person, even though I was worried that I wouldn’t. Sometimes I look around and feel like I’m playing house and wonder who entrusted us with the care of these two little people. But at the same time, I’m surprised by how much I don’t mind all the work that care involves. I used to have a hair-trigger gag reflex, but now I can deal with all manner of the disgustingness babies produce without batting an eye (though the nasty smell of formula spit-up in my hair still makes me want to run for the toilet).

I’ve still not spent an entire day alone with the babies, and we have basically only ventured out to doctor’s appointments and church, and then always with Jon. The very idea of going somewhere alone with the babies seems VERY daunting to me at this point. Two infants is just a lot to handle.

As for all of my fears about how having twins would rob me of some of the specialness of a new-baby experience, they were both founded and unfounded. I read the posts of new moms of singletons on one of my pregnancy message boards and see things like how they never let their baby cry for more than just a second, how they’re always rushing to comfort their baby, how they never put their baby down, even how exhausted and frustrated they are, and I almost want to laugh AND cry. With two infants and only one me, if Jon’s not home, sometimes one baby just has to scream her head off when I’m feeding her sister and can’t stop to feed her too. I’m always having to put one baby down to pick up another. And nighttime feedings take twice as long because I have to do the whole routine twice. I must resist the urge to say, “we had only one baby home for a week and it was SO EASY.” Seriously though, my theory is that 2 babies are 4 times harder than 1, though I should probably save that sentiment for the multiples message boards– infancy is hard, no matter how many infants you have.

I still get plenty of baby snuggles. I still spend hours staring at their tiny faces, gazing into their currently still-blue eyes. I still have babies falling asleep on my chest. I still feel very bonded and connected to both of them. And all of us are doing so much better than I could have possibly imagined either while pregnant or just a month ago.

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maybe NOT baby…

Image via BL1961s Flickr.
Image via BL1961's Flickr.

So it’s been about a week or two since I wrote my “Maybe Baby” post about starting to think about having kids.  Today I picked up the September issue of Skirt! magazine and read a piece by Valerie Weaver-Zercher, and now I’m pretty sure having kids, while still definitely something that will happen some day, is back in the not SO soon pile.  The piece, called “Mentor or Mom” is about Weaver-Zercher’s experience as a mother of 3 who has a lot of 20 year old college girls in her life.  She sees herself in them, and she seems to have a fantasy about shattering their illusions of what their lives will be.  She imagines:

I pull the college women aside, fix them with a steady gaze and whisper in a conspiratorial voice: I was once like you.  I baked bread in Germany and walked through streams in Nicaragua.  I worked for a magazine and had a company credit card and wrote editorials that shocked people.  I got married to a man willing to clean bathrooms and we lived in a city and walked to market and protested the death penalty.
And then I had a baby. Here I pause, then raise my eyebrows.
And two years later, another. Another significant pause.
And two years later, yet another.
I stop for awhile, until they think I’ve made my point and begin to sidle away. Then I begin again: Each child is like an earthquake that hurls your identity off the shelf, I say. You will spend years picking yourself off the floor, along with everyone else’s socks and Play-Doh. You will no longer know who really wins: the one who goes to the office all day, or the one who stays home with the kids. You will feel guilty about each choice that takes you away from your children, and resentful of each choice that takes you away from your calling. And here I grab them by their scrawny elbows and bring it home: And you will never, ever judge a housewife again!

Yikes! I may not be a college woman, but that’s enough to send me heading for the hills, or at least the birth control pills. But Weaver-Zercher continues:

Young women don’t need phony assurances about how easy it is to be both a mother and an individual, to maintain both a family and a career, to win in both the office and the house. Such platitudes can only lead to disillusionment and anger– unless the next decade brings about sane maternity leaves, affordable childcare, universal health insurance, and family-friendly work environments. (I’m not holding my breath.) Or maybe, if they have children, they and their partners will find better ways to navigate these days of early parenthood– some way to change the world, change gendered patterns and still change diapers. I’ll be the first to cheer them on (provided I’m not too jealous).

On the other hand, maybe some college women will end up like me: bewildered, exhausted, not sure whether they’ve won or not, or whether they even trust the society that’s keeping the score. Indeed, maybe college women need me a little bit like I need them: as a prompt to reexamine how we calibrate wins and losses, and as a reminder that when it comes to motherhood and work, winning and losing are categories that no longer make an iota of sense.

I hope to be one of the ones to change gendered patterns and still change diapers. To read bedtime stories but still find the time to write for myself. But then I read things like this and wonder if I’m not just a hopelessly naive no-longer-in-college woman.

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maybe baby

Image via the Google LIFE photo archive.
This lady makes it look sort of fun...Image via the Google LIFE photo archive.

I’m married to a pediatrician. This means he really likes kids. This means he spends a lot of time around kids. This means that he spends a lot of time giving people advice ABOUT kids. This means at some point he needs to have a kid so he can test out for himself all the stuff he spends his days telling people about kids. This means at some point I need to have a kid.

And for a long time, this has pretty much been my line on the subject: “Yeah, I guess at some point I need to have a kid so Jon will know what he’s talking about!” (This is mostly a joke– he’s a great doctor, and most doctors spend their days treating things with which they have no experience. We don’t require oncologists to have had cancer, and most women are ok with male gynecologists, even if those men don’t really know what it’s like to possess a uterus, ovaries, or vagina.)

My other line on the subject has been that I won’t have a kid while my husband is a resident, working 80 hours per week, because “I didn’t get married just so I could be a single mom.” But we’re into our final year of residency, so that line won’t work for much longer.

Add to this that my husband is about to have a milestone birthday and is currently working in the nursery, surrounded by adorable babies and happy families, and you’ve got a clock ticking. I’m not even sure it’s a biological clock, but rather, some sort of societal clock that expects certain things to happen at certain times, particularly in the South and in the Christian culture in which we operate. Continue reading “maybe baby”

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bufflo and babies

I have a weird relationship with kids.

Scariest movie Ive ever seen.
Scariest movie I've ever seen.

On the one hand, I absolutely love them.  I’m the girl making googly eyes at your baby in the grocery store checkout.  I am the one who will hog your newborn when I get the chance to meet her, and will beg you not to make me give her back.  Heck, I volunteer rocking babies in the Special Care Nursery just so I can hold sweet, adorable, sleepy teeny-tinies once a week (I call myself a semi-professional baby rocker).  And not just babies, kids crack me up.  They say the funniest things, they have the craziest theories on the way the world works, and their sweetness can absolutely melt my heart.  I spent one summer as a camp counselor to a bunch of eight year olds and loved almost every minute of it (almost because the world’s worst sound is puke from a top bunk to the floor at 4 a.m., and I learned this the hard way).

On the other hand, I am terrified of almost everything related to childbirth.  Yeah, yeah, I know, you’re like, uh, Ernie Bufflo?  Everyone is terrified of childbirth.  Yes, I’m aware of that.  I’m telling you that I’m even more insanely terrified than most people you’ve met.  Terrified and squeamish, which I know is super strange from a girl who just loves to gross people out with medical anecdotes at the dinner table.  A girl whose entire family is in the medical profession.  A girl whose mother used to teach Lamaze and wrote a master’s thesis on special anti-nausea acupressure bracelets for pregnant ladies.  That’s me! Continue reading “bufflo and babies”