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Oscar moved into his big crib tonight. my big boy. sniff.

the mini co-sleeper that he came home from the hospital to, and which has migrated from our bedside to his own bright green room over the past month, has been retired. we spent the weekend in Halifax, and since travelling means it’ll take a night or two for O to readjust to his usual routine anyway, we figured he might as well make the leap to the big crib at the same time. i don’t really know what kind of milestone the move to the crib is, or how to categorize it – congratulations, you’re officially a full-grown baby now?

whatever he is, he’s sleeping soundly, curled up with his bunny in the seemingly vast expanse of his full size sleeping quarters.

and i guess it’s fitting. we realized this weekend, seeing him next to his new cousin Angus, that Oscar’s well past the newborn stage. not only does he dwarf Angus in size, but the two of them are almost different species in terms of interaction. Oscar can laugh now. Oscar can coo, and sit up in a borrowed bumbo seat. and Angus’ older brother Isaac, the two-year-old who benevolently allowed Oscar to use his bumbo seat (briefly), was so much fun to play with and talk to and read with that i realized how much i’m looking forward to Oscar’s continued development: to watching him discover the world, and himself.

bring it on, big baby boy. sleep soundly, and congrats on your graduation.

i’ve never been an easy child.

as an infant, i had colic. as a kid, i always wanted to be the centre of attention. as a teenager, my mother and i suffered from a near-terminal case of misunderstanding each other, and went head to head on a regular basis. even as an adult, despite a deep and genuine closeness and years and years of detente, we still have very different sensibilities. and i am seldom anywhere near as patient with her – her suggestions, her ideas, her stories, her “little reminders” – as i mean to be.

but last night i felt closer to my mother – from across town – than i have in years. it was the middle of one of Oscar’s screaming sessions, and i was walking back and forth across the bedroom for the fiftieth time, swinging him gently, hoping the pain wracking him would let up long enough for him – and me – to fall asleep for a little while. i was tired, and sad – near tears myself from the stress and the frustration of not being able to help him, soothe him. and as i shifted his weight into the cradle of my left arm, shifting my feet in the rhythm of Brahms’ Lullaby, i looked down into his little outraged, howling face and realized that we were part of a dance that is probably truly old as time.

there is a rare intimacy in being awake together, mother and child, in the middle of the night. it is an intimacy deeper than words, one of touch and almost-toneless singing, a private little song and dance evolving all the time. and for a moment, last night, as i rocked Oscar in my arms, i remembered the rhythm of being the one who was rocked like that. and i remembered that my mother did this alone: woke with me through the colic, through the tonsilitis and the earaches that plagued me as a toddler, through the night terrors and the loneliness and melancholy that enveloped me sometimes as i grew. and i realized, though i do not remember, that she too must have held me in weary arms as she paced the floor and looked down into my face desperate for me to shut up. and that she must have loved me like this, too, to keep going, to keep getting up, to keep being there all those nights i cried for her.

i was humbled, and grateful. and it comforted me, that visceral memory of being held close, and the feel of a rough, warm hand on mine.  it reminded me that what i’m doing these nights as i walk the floors is important.  from this, he is learning: trust, patience, how to take comfort from others.  somewhere beneath the consciousness of the adult Oscar will someday become, remnants of our night dance will stay with him…even if he never remembers.  i think i need to tell my mother that i do.  and say thanks.

Oscar is in the hospital.

he’s fine, really, in a weird way. but he’s been, since Tuesday at suppertime, the wee resident of a big old crib in a big old room all to himself in the local pediatrics ward. they sent me home that first night to unfray myself and sleep, because his admission followed a 48-hour crescendo of incredible, inconsolable distress on his part, and we were both exhausted. but the sight of him lying there alone, such a small bundle, his big eyes peering up at me and his face confused by all the strange smells and noises – it nearly unhinged me. i walked out of the pediatric ward and seriously considered checking myself into the psych unit just across the hall.

i’m only half kidding. having a child in the hospital is a miserable thing, no matter the situation. i felt doubly wretched – the much-touted ‘mother guilt’ i was warned about – because i myself am part of “the situation” that’s landed my baby here. turns out Oscar’s diarrhea and discomfort (lamented at length in my last post and thought to be lactose intolerance or a milk protein allergy) are apparently as much a breastfeeding problem as an allergy: a vicious circle we’ve fallen into because nursing comforts his pain, but also causes it. so every time i’ve nursed my crying child, i’ve inadvertantly ensured more crying. sigh. go figure.

we’ve gotten that cycle broken, at least for the time being. he spent 30 hours off the breast, on a special hypoallergenic formula that costs more than my mortgage payments, cleaning out his little system. the improvement was startlingly sudden, and heartening – he stopped howling, stopped flailing his little legs in pain, stopped leaking diarrhea.

all very simple, then, right? except that this fancy-ass formula is only supposed to be given in hospital. it’s not something parents can buy over the counter, even if we wanted to spend his entire education fund getting him through until he starts solids. and i’m still not entirely ready to give up on breastfeeding until we get straight answers about these allergy issues. but to do that, we need to play more with trial and error, and risk making him miserable again in the process.

as so often happens once the ‘experts’ get involved, there are umpteen opinions floating about as to the correct course of action from here. his nurse gave an “i’m not telling you what to do, but…” sermon this morning on how all her kids were raised on cow’s milk, straight from the barn, from day one. i thanked her for the advice…and refrained from commenting on my unfortunate lack of a barn and cows. another mentioned that soy formula might be a less costly replacement for the hypoallergenic stuff – which is true, though about 50% of kids with milk allergies also react to soy, apparently. the lactation consultant has helpful if inconvenient advice about pumping off the first ounce of milk from each breast before i feed, thus limiting the amount of lactose in the milk. will do. but she also instructed that if he wants the breast every hour and half, i should give it to him and nurse for as long as he can stay awake. which is all very nice, but my dear glutton of a son can nurse for well over an hour at a stretch. by my calculations, that will leave about twelve cumulative minutes per day for me to shower and attend to those other pesky things the world seems to require of me. like eating, and unloading the dishwasher. and writing blog laments.

i’m not sure what we do from here. i stayed here at the hospital last night, and put Oscar back on the breast, after carefully pumping off that troublesome foremilk and eschewing dairy with vigilance. these precautions may help deal with his allergic symptoms…we’re waiting to see. whether they help deal with the insatiability three weeks of diarrhea seem to have created in him, and make it possible to get him back onto a two-or-three hour nursing routine remains to be seen. i hope so. i felt good with his little head in my hand, his little mouth smacking away on me. it’s the scenario i want…but not at the cost of his discomfort or every second of my spare time.

so…the blogger’s cry for help…if you out there in the great ether have words of wisdom that don’t involve me buying a farm or giving up all attempts at sleep and personal cleanliness, they’re very very welcome. dear abby, dear readers…what would you do?

Oscar is coming home. tonight. :)

being sprung from chez hospital has come as a bit of a surprise, since no noises about homecoming had even been made at all until last evening. the boy, however, has been coming along like a house afire, eating with gusto (he has discovered his inner Cormier, i believe) and leaving his birth weight in the dust as of yesterday. so early this afternoon i tracked his doctor down, and when she agreed that he’d be good to go by tomorrow, i figured why not ask for more?

“how about today?” says me. “why not?” says she. “but you know, once you take him home, there’s no return policy. final sale.”

i think, for all the sleepness nights and messy diapers and pacing the floor ahead of us, i can live with that.

happy Midwifery Day, world (one learns about such interesting holidays when one has time to read the hospital bulletin boards)

happy homecoming, little Oscar. we’ve been waiting for you. :)

forgive me – i am now about to become one of those parents lamented, scorned, and laughed at by…well, everyone. or at least everyone without children of diapering age. i am posting about poop. and Oscar just christened me.

everything seems like a bit of a tragicomedy to me these days. we’re still in the hospital, Oscar and i, and he’s still learning to nurse, still alternating between gaining and losing weight, still being tube-fed some of the time. i am stunned, daily, by how much time it really does take to feed a not-quite six-pound human. people mentioned this before, but as it wasn’t my time being sucked out of existence, their message didn’t really sink in. i’m an efficient person, after all, when i want to be. but apparently babies are not especially interested in efficiency.

here, i exist in a spiral, like a planet consistently spinning slightly closer to its sun and shortening its orbit. the Bon & Oscar orbit consists of a series of activities: change baby–toggle breast at baby–nurse baby–wake baby–tickle baby–toggle breast at baby again–change positions because arm and/or baby fell asleep–burp baby–change baby again–wrap baby–pump breasts–clean pumping equipment. it’s a consuming cycle, and being goose-stepped through it by a daily series of nurses with different temperments and different opinions about what precisely would be best for Oscar gets hard on the head after nine days.

so tonight, when i hopped up – or at least maneuvered myself off my Bride-of-Frankenstein perineum – to change my wailing son an hour into the attempted feeding cycle, i wasn’t really thinking. the nursery curtain was pulled for privacy, and my hands were full of squirming baby, so i left my shirt up and my swollen, pinata-sized breast hanging free to airdry during the feeding intermission. i peeled off the tiny diaper, wiped the offending emissions that had been distracting Oscar from his dinner, and – just for a second – left his little pink bum uncovered while i reached for another cloth. Oscar chose that moment to project more orangey poop than had any right to be hiding in someone that small all over his fresh diaper (lying uselessly beneath him), his sleeper, and my bare skin. i nearly managed to deflect some of the spray by grabbing a corner of the clean diaper as a block, but succeeded only in getting the rest to decorate my jeans rather than my chest.

i have never before had anyone poop on me – i don’t swing that way. and while i figured that major bodily fluid coverage would happen eventually between me and my offspring, i hadn’t imagined that the eventuality would be quite so explosive, or so public. half-naked and feces-bedecked, i was forty feet down the hall from my room, my tub, and any clean clothes.

the weird part is, after a day of really erratic feeding and some deep surges of terror, paranoia, and weepiness in me about Oscar’s sudden onset fussiness, the baptism by baby poo didn’t bother me much. it was warm, hardly smelly. it covered me like a Jackson Pollack work, in a monochrome burst of vivid orange. and it was funny. i giggled, then laughed aloud. the release obviously offered Oscar relief, because he stopped howling and looked up at me with his sage baby stare, blurry and wise. he has no shame yet, no sense of dignity to get offended by functions he does not yet control. and standing there, covered in poop, i found him the most marvellous creature alive.

i just hope, if he ever reads this later, he forgives me for telling anyone.

this morning i had a little talk with the baby.

the discussion was a bit one-sided on my part – i’m taking advantage of my developed linguistic skills while i can. if the child has his father’s temperment, after all, just the idea that someone can do something he can’t will likely spur him on to the proper use of complete sentences at the age of six months.

but this conversation was a short one. bowl of cereal in one set of swollen fingers and box of Kleenex in the other, i propelled myself from the kitchen to the living room couch, and heaved myself onto the seating surface. i blew my nose, attempting to clear its reddened breathing passages of the wretched cold i’m sporting. i rearranged my belly so my cereal could sit on top of it without irritating the minor hernia i’d just given my sternum while hacking up the refuse of said cold, while avoiding the patch of skin i’d stabbed on the corner of the counter when i forgot my girth and reached too far forward for a coffee cup. and i managed to curl one leg – bruised from tripping over the forlorn figure of the exercise bike last night on one of my countless trips to the bathroom – under me. then i panted a few times, to try recover some of the oxygen squandered in all this exertion.

finally, i looked down at my belly and said “Baby, your hotel is falling apart.”

i swear he kicked me. perhaps language is not such a great advantage in these parent-child conversations, after all. but at least he seemed to be listening, which is more than one can expect from most conversation partners when one begins to wallow in the litany of one’s aches and pains.

he is a bit of a rock star tenant in the run-down and increasingly close confines of Chez Bonnie, wreaking havoc and wrecking the place as he goes. but i am not trying to give him any eviction notices just yet…though i am curious about how many more of my bodily systems can succumb to infection, swelling, and/or random injury from my dainty perambulations through a suddenly seemingly narrower world.

i’m not sure that his empathic skills are developed enough just yet to really be interested in my musings or my self-inflated miseries…but i just like talking to him. a lot. i wander about the house like a demented autocrat, making pronouncements in thin air, addressing…well, the belly. this ‘conversation’ has been a fairly late development in this pregnancy – it took long weeks of bedrest for me to breach my own walls of hesitancy and fear, to connect with the baby-to-be as a self, to trust that this time things might work out okay. now, having crossed most of those boundaries, i have come to see us as intimates, he and i. and intimates in a way i realize we may never be once he does check out of Hotel Utero and we become, fully, two. thus, i’m using the time i have with the wee hostage not merely to make him aware of the damage he’s doing to his mother’s physiology, but also to stuff him as full of important information about the world as i possibly can.

some of this wisdom is generic mom stuff that i imagine (fear?) i’ll be blathering on at him about for the next twenty (fifty?) years. while eating, i make sure i point out how delicious the spinach is, and how much babies like spinach. (i say far less about the hot fudge sundaes surreptitiously crossing the placenta).

much of the spiel, though, is gendered.

“Baby,” i say, severely, after dodging some mom’s Honda doing seventy down our tiny side street, hiphop thumping from the windows, “the peach-fuzz-moustachioed boy driving that Honda is neither actually cool nor manly.” and “son, hockey hair does no favours for anyone.” i i also throw in those little things that i know i’ll never get to say later, since by the time he’s old enough to understand what i’m talking about we’ll both be too embarrassed to broach the conversation: things like “stay awake and talk to her afterward, boy” and, in the same breath “if she is a her.”

we all make assumptions about who and what our children will be…and we shape these eventual someones, even in the womb, with our exhortations and our own limitations. quite shamelessly, in my case…and i wonder “am i going too far?” so i add a little rider to my commentary, resolving to scale back on the subliminal diatribe:

“to thine own self be true, little one,” i say, nobly.

but then, i can’t help myself. i summon my best film noir stage whisper and remind him; “a boy’s best friend is his mother.” :)