Saturday was a lazy day for mom and dad. We made breakfast, took our time about getting to the store, ate a late lunch, napped, gave the lil mouse a bath, and crashed early. Keeley woke up at 4 am demanding food (what else), and was back in bed within 15 minutes, needless to say she ate the milk mommy had pumped out before bed from a bottle. Breastfeeding would have taken WAY longer than that. We all hit the sheets again and started getting ready to go visit the families when I woke up at 7:30. We were out the door by shortly after 9 am, so that wasn’t too bad. Especially since Aunt Flo decided to rear her ugly head for the first time in a year at 4 a.m. Talk about a shock to the nervous system. I thought that witch would stay gone for a few more months. Apparently not. Anyway, we had to hit the store one more time on the way there to finish getting my mom’s birthday present, luckily what she wanted, between the 2 store visits we found JUST enough, and headed on out to the farm. For those of you that don’t know, my parents don’t live on a farm, that’s just what we city folks call it, kind of jokingly. It’s not the villa, or the lakehouse, or the beach house, it’s the farm. Because I don’t know anyone that has a villa, lakehouse or beach house.
All 16 of my immediate family members were there, as well as my sister in law’s parents, who came to celebrate my nephew A’s birthday. Since Keeley was born, I don’t have a whole lot to do when it comes to helping out. I don’t know if that’s fortunate or unfortunate. But usually I have my arms full of baby, and quite frankly at this point in time? I’m not sure I want to help anyone do anything. I need all the strength I can manage to hang onto. Maybe that’s selfish, but I hear that you have to be selfish when you have kids, at least from time to time, in order to keep your sanity. So I watched while pizzas were built, encouraged Keeley to smile and told her what everyone was doing. After all, while everyone else was having their babies, I was the one in the kitchen helping out. Maybe it’s my time to have a rest, after all.
I encouraged her to smile at all of her relatives and offered for the birthday boy to talk to her, he has seemed mighty interested, and for an 11 year old boy, that’s a bit odd in my book, but maybe that means he’ll be a great dad someday way off in the future.
We got home late, got the mousekateer in pjs and crashed. Keeley woke up at 9 am. Granted I had been awake twice before then, but still. It was a nice way to start the morning. She was relatively better at nursing today. I don’t really have any hope that she’ll be able to nurse like normal so that I won’t have to rely on the breast pump, she just is too flaky for that (yes, I called my infant flaky, deal with it) — but, she is healthy, happy (if the coos and smiles are anything to go by) and gaining weight and inches steady as she goes. It might be a pain for me, but who said motherhood would be easy? If that’s the toughest thing I have to deal with for the first year of her life, big whoop. Being born early, and all the circumstances that led up to her birth and the first few days of her life, things could be much, much worse. Happy and healthy. Who could ask for anything more?
Ya know, when I had my first baby, I kept waiting to adjust. Kept waiting for things to get easier, because it was SO HARD! I didn’t expect things to be so hard. I was so TIRED and here I was with this little person and sometimes no idea what to do with him.
Waited and waited for things to get easy.
Then one morning I woke up and realized that I *had* adjusted. That I knew him. That I could predict what he’d need next.
It sounds like you’re there, now.
🙂
Happy Motherhood.