Monday

We had a good weekend with Mr. Ibis. The growth spurt was challenging but I'm oh so glad it fell on a weekend when I had his help (seems to have passed as we are back to 3 and 4 hour blocks between feeding). Two heads are always better than one. And I had been worrying a little about the lack of time Mr. I and the boy had together during the week and whether they were bonding enough. That fear was put to rest as Miles spent plenty of time with this daddy over the weekend. Mr. I even wore him in the baby wrap for a few hours, something he previously hadn't been that interested in trying.

We gave Miles his first bath (almost a week after the cord stump fell off, but hey, it was hard to find the time!). Miles wasn't too keen on that at all, since newborns hate being even a little chilly, but we got those great keepsake photos and videos and shared them with my parents online.

Sunday was a bit rocky for me emotionally, especially as the night wore on. I am a relatively even-keeled person and have remained so, for the most part, through pregnancy and post partum days, but I'm certainly not immune to the roller coaster of hormonal changes that are typical for this time. I feel the most weepy in the evening when I would, in my old life, be settling into bed peacefully, but now have the night stretched before me full of tiny bits of interrupted sleep and more time spent soothing a fussing baby. It's daunting, particularly so on a Sunday night with the whole week ahead and Mr. Ibis less available.

The other hard time is in the very early morning - around 3 or 4 am. It's always darkest before the dawn, as they say. This is the time of day that I tend to grapple with big scary fears and feel especially vulnerable and sad and pessimistic. This is when I have terrible thoughts about bad things that could happen to Miles, about whether his daycare provider could secretly be a psycho, about whether Mr. Ibis still loves me, about whether I am mean to my dog, about whether I am going to manage this whole motherhood thing. If I fall back to sleep after this dark period of contemplation, I tend to have bad dreams - lately they are always about being rejected (by my husband, by my mother) and having no where to go with my baby.

I want to stress that I don't feel this way all the time, or most of the time, or even half the time. They're just little moments, little windows into a scary world concocted by the deadly combination of hormone crashes and sleep deprivation, but they don't last. Always, by the time the sun comes up and I've greeted Mr. Ibis and had a cup of coffee, everything seems good again. But I just want to put it out there, that post partum hormones can mess with your mind, even if you for the most part are doing great.

I am trying to savor this time at home with Miles as much as I can, because I know the minute I go back to work I will miss this so much. I spent hours upon hours just watching his little face - a luxury of time that I won't have again anytime soon. I am, naturally, convinced that he is the most beautiful little boy ever born.

He is already changing so much. His face looks a little different every day, and sometimes I feel like I can glimpse the face of the little boy he will become. He uses his hands more now and sometimes lightly brushes his fingers over my breast as I nurse him. He's starting to interact with me a little more - in subtle ways, of course, since he still is very young. But now, after a good meal when he has a little quiet alert time, he enjoys studying my face as I talk to him and make goofy faces. Surely I'm not imagining that when he wakes from a nap he seems glad to see me, and if he's not quite deliberately smiling yet, I think I spy a happy look come over his face when I cover him in kisses.