Two nights and three days with baby DOWN! Baby STILL ALIVE! Apparently thriving? It’s pretty hard to tell when thriving means “eat, sleep, potty, cry, repeat” but so far I’m feeling pretty good about the experience.
We have a whole changing table in the bathroom area, we have a bassinet next to the bed, we have a baby room with a crib and dresser and closet…and the whole family is basically living in the living room/dining room area, we’re changing the baby on a towel on the dining room table and baby is sleeping in a stroller bassinet (totally safety rated for early baby bassinet sleeping!). This is for general convenience of change and feed in quick succession, but primarily so that the partner not on active duty during the difficult nighttime hours can actually sleep uninterrupted for a reasonable number of hours in a row before tagging in for baby-night-nurse relief. Babies definitely sleep every second except when you want to lay them down in their own bassinet and actually sleep yourself…they are VERY alert and needy when that time happens! The best thing about a house with a second story is the ability to go where you cannot hear the baby cry – if I hear it AT ALL it’s dramatic wake-up with adrenaline rush and no going back to sleep for at least an hour – even if the partner is on baby-duty and doing a bang-up job and it’s my limited rest time. A small apartment would be hard in this way – and I bow down to any single-parent, it’s beyond me how they handle this early time.
Last night we went to our first party together – a very local burn-night party, featuring good friends in our burning-man-style fuck-all party-wear. Not shown: my unicorn fighting a robot leggings! Baby is not super-stoked on costume parties yet and is too tiny to wear most anything, but we did our best – she’s wearing various ill-matching neon and polka-dots and has TWO different hats with ears…but mostly she was shoved inside the wrap where she sleeps so peacefully you actually have to wake her up to eat so her party-wear was less featured. 
Baby LOVES Moby-wrap (ours is a friend’s homemade one and it works ACES). I am typing with baby in it NOW in preparation for the return to work tomorrow and it’s going pretty well. I assume this is how very pregnant women feel – sort of unwieldy and very far away from the actual keyboard! This baby is currently smaller than many newborns, so it’s hard for this never-preggers to understand how this ENTIRE THING could be shoved up inside a person!
I wish there was a newborn needs lending library. Like, a bassinet and a Moby-wrap are GREAT for the beginning tiny baby time – but that’s a REALLY SHORT TIME. We are so lucky that people have stepped up with so much we really aren’t having to buy much of these short-term items…but Craigslist is FULL of people trying to offload super-useful things with an incredibly short shelf-life and large cost. In some ways, we are the best investment for your used items…we could do this stage a LOT of times in the next couple years!
Tomorrow we start stage two “make it (me) work”. I’m literally just going to take baby with me…it’s a holiday so there will be few people in the office, she sleeps in the wrap or her stroller anyway, and it’s my awake hours so if I want to share in the parenting responsibilities, I have to find some way to work and care for baby… and really, at this tiny age, what’s the difference if I have her with me at work or at home? I guess we’ll find out! My work includes paid adoption maternity time off, which is amazing…but we aren’t “adopting” right now – with fostering we could end up taking home brand-spanking-new babies multiple times in a year – so, with these life choices, and these goals, it’s time to Figure. It. Out. This is, at least today, what it means to be this mother.