Leap

 

Yummy tricycle.

True. I’ve been quiet.

But not still.

MAS turned 1 the day after Thanksgiving. Only now, looking back on the last month and a half, can I see that that event sent me into a sort of tailspin. All those memories! Most of them unsettling. Just a patchwork of images, really, all laden with guilt, anger, fear, anxiety. And then I’d look up from whatever reverie I’d sunk into to see my amazing son, giggling and laughing and playing. Against all odds so normal I couldn’t help but feel stunned by it.

He’d moved past his premature beginning. But me? I was still stuck. Stuck in a loop of self-blame and regret.

So. That was my holiday season. Very merry indeed.

I finally came to about a week ago, after New Year’s. The day I turned 37.

Again, I started making my daily rounds in the blogosphere. All the old lives I used to inhale. And came across this concept on Shmoopy’s space.

No resolution, but a word.

I too abandoned Resolutions years ago. I just got tired of making promises to myself that I could never follow through with.

But a word? A guiding principle to guide me through the year?

That I can get on board with.

So. My word this year is Leap. I even bought one of Stacie D’s pendants to wear around my neck so I can remind myself of it daily.

Wanna know more about choosing a Word of The Year for yourself, visit Christine Kane's site.
 

At some point  I’ll talk about why I chose that word, what intentions it conjures for me, the ways in which I hope to embody Leap in the coming months, and how it relates to a new blogging project I'm embarking on sometime in late Spring.

Another Thing Mamahood Taught Me

After 36 years, 9 months, 20 days and 34 minutes on this planet, being a mother finally taught me the secret to peaceful living: proper planning & organization!

My friend Mark would be proud, I think.

Carroll Gardens In Fall

This morning, on the walk back to my apartment after working for some hours at the local cafe I caught myself thinking: my god I love my life... After so much angst--a moody adolescence; lost & confused early 20s and the difficult road to mamahood--everything in my life just seems to be falling into place.

If this is how my 30s feel, I can't wait to see what my 40s bring.

    My walk home... 

    And the munchkin who awaited me...

What Do All Of These Have in Common?

Calypso
Kiewit Stinks
lovedoves
Nacho
Sharmaville Network
bxk

Usernames of all the wifi connections in my building!

I have to admit I'm intrigued by Kiewit Stinks. Who is this kiewit--the twentysomething hipster who lives on the first floor or the newborn daughter of the nice editor husband and wife team across the hall? And why does he/she smell so bad?

How we roll (to music class)

Right now I'm loving:

the bibbity;

anything by gapbaby;

happy baby's grrreat greens;

and the beautiful photos over at Progressive Pioneer.

MAS on Smith Street. En route to Music For Aardvarks.

Enter The Nanny

Our new very part-time nanny started this week.

Let me say that again: the nanny started this week! An event filled with joy, relief, a little fear and a little guilt.

She comes from 8-11 on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Not a lot of time, I know. Barely enough time to get started on the million and one projects I'm either late finishing or late starting. But still. Already its making a huge difference. I'm astonished how much more I can get done in three hours compared to before MAS was born. I've become efficient, folks. Before? I was a typical creative: scattered; distractable; prone to sudden insights while doing the dishes. Now? I sit down and do it now because I know I've only got 2.25 hours left and I have X to complete and Y to outline. Yet another way in which I'm not the same Minerva Jane as I was before he so dramatically entered my life.

Yet another gift he's given me.

Back to the nanny.

It took me eight months after MAS's discharge from the NICU to hire someone, even though I was already technically back to work a month before he came home. (Ebronis and I have a marketing firm. We shifted most of our clients over to him during my brief bedrest but I retained one or two.)

My mother-in-law comes one afternoon a week, so this isn't as bad as it seems. Besides, he goes to bed at 7.

Still, things have piled up.

But every time the idea of hiring someone would come up I would hesitate. The money! The drudgery of finding the right person! He was so vulnerable, you see... And I only needed a few hours. Weren't most people looking for full-time work?

All good points.

But behind all of this protesting, all of these compeltely logical reasons, was a deeper psychological one.

I didn't see my baby until 24 hours after he was born. Didn't get to hold him until he was a week old. He spent the first 9 weeks of his life cared for by a team of nurses, a group of predominately Philippino professionals. (I don't know why, but most of the NICU nurses at St. Luke's Roosevelt on 57th were transplants from the Philippines.)

They were all kind, competent people who had MAS's best interest at heart and without whom he wouldn't have survived, but it still felt so unnatural to be told when and how I could feed, hold, and comfort my own child. I had to ask permission every time. Sometimes it was granted, but if it didn't coincide with the nursing rotation it wasn't. By the end a weird psychology had evolved: I started to feel that it I didn't behave he would never be discharged. I tried so hard to be a good enough patient for the both of us.


So when I got him home? It was like I was making up for lost time. I encircled him, protected him in ways I wasn't able to during that last trimester-cum-first two months. And I was reluctant to let anyone else in...


But now? MAS needs more interaction than what I can give. And I need to figure out who this new Minerva Jane is. And get back to the non-mommy parts of myself...

So today she came at 8, fed MAS his breakfast of organic DHA- and probiotic-enhanced brown rice cereal, and took him to the park where they played on the swings and slide. He returned rosy-cheeked and exhausted from the playing. And now? He's napping peacefully in his stroller while I get back to my old bloggy self.

The Sick Baby

MAS woke up this morning with a runny nose.

Mid-morning it morphed into a stuffed nose with a possible low grade fever. (First reading was normal; second reading was slightly elevated; third, he was a little chilly!)

Our pediatrician thinks this is a cold and a minor one at best. Nothing to worry about. MAS also seems to think a cold is nothing to worry about: he spent the morning happily banging his green plastic egg on everything he could find. After a mid-morning snack of sweet potatoes and prunes and milk he's contentedly sleeping on my bed while I type this.

But me? I'd be lying if I didn't admit to a frisson of fear when I saw that clear snot snaking down his upper lip. It could be: flu, swine flu, RSV... ?! Anything, really. But it also could be nothing.

Yes: I know that overprotecting him will never be the answer. Kids need to get sick so they can develop immunities. Put MAS in a bubble now and his first year at school will be a disaster.

Still. I thought I'd put the whole NICU roller coaster behind me, you see. At the beginning of the summer I made such a huge effort to not talk about it and to brush it off as nothing nothing, a little blip whenever it came up. He was born early but he's fine now. Quick, let's change the subject. Have you guys started solids yet? I even stopped blogging here because I didn't want to think of him that way. I wanted to pretend that MAS started life like all the other babies.

All it takes is a whiff of a cold, a whiff of allergies even, and all that comes tumbling down. MAS's story isn't like the others'. I can't change that. No matter how much I would like to.

It will always be there in one way or another. No matter how robust MAS is, there will always be some part of me that remembers my first glimpse of him: my 2 lbs 5 oz half-cooked baby hooked up to god knows how many wires, his nose irritated from the CPAP and his soft mewling cries more feline than human.

During our NICU stay my challenge was to step up to the plate and be there for him in as positive and consistent a way as I could. I spent hours by his side and even more hours holding him in kangaroo care, telling everyone--myself, my husband, my in-laws, the nurses and all the other grief-srtiken parents--that MAS would not only survive but thrive. If I could WILL him better, I would.

But now? My challenge is to step back a little and let him be... With all the flus and colds and scrapes that come with any normal childhood.

As one of the neonatalogists told me when she discharged us that last cold day in January: "Well, he's not a preemie now. He's a former preemie. Now he's just like everyone else."