BabyX(2) is almost seven weeks old, and our lives are starting to be a little more…normal? My partner and I slept in the same bed two nights in a row (as opposed to splitting the night each awake and downstairs for 1/2 night, with the other getting a whole block of sleep of like…5 hours) and our baby is sleeping 3 hours in a row! It feels like big progress from basically unlivable to “breathe in. breath out. ok we can do this!”
Of course, baby is also adorbs and starting to do really baby things like say “gah” in a cute baby voice. Both during the last night (when she was snorting and wheezing like a rhino in her bassinet) and during the day (when she was saying “goo” and “gah” like a movie-baby) I have been forced to ask baby if she is trolling me because it’s so “image of what a baby is/does”. But so far, she appears to be sincere!
We’ve learned more about what is going on now with baby and her family of origin and all of the options for the future. It’s so hard to watch the future and hope for and be supportive of family of origin and just also, really, truly, have every desire to keep this baby forever. I love how easy it is to love her. I hate how easy it is for me to be jealous, envious, and just sad, about the people in my life who are producing their very own babies and just get to KEEP THEM. Getting babyX(2) definitely filled the void – it’s kind of absurd how much I’ve been enjoying having a small baby – even the boredom and exhaustion of it. But people very close to me just had their own baby and I’m legit having a hard time with it. I’m a comparer, and it’s just so. so. UNFAIR. I just want to keep my adorable warm squishy good-smelling baby! It’s made me think about trying to get pregnant again, about IVF, about every option that has direct permanency. But we stopped trying to get pregnant because the hopes and miscarriages were both physically and emotionally draining. And we stopped considering just straight forward adoption for a lot of reasons. And IVF is real expensive, and has only 20% odds of success for my age range – maybe even less because I’ve already had more than two miscarriages.
And you end back where you started – at love this baby TODAY and tomorrow just happens. In some ways, I think one of the reasons that I am adjusting to parenting so well (much better than any of us expected!) is because being with a baby forces you to be present In The Moment. One of my biggest problems is that I often fail to appreciate the present because I spend so much time worrying about the future – even when it’s a waste of time and energy and I have already done everything that can be reasonably done to ensure security and desired outcomes. Baby is helping me to be “IN THE MOMENT” all the time – even the times without baby, because each piece of time is finite and allocated to a specific goal.