Thanksgiving Wrap-Up

Holy cow, LL is more than two months old, halfway to three! And wow, he's huge! I was looking at some of the photos from his first week or two and I can hardly believe how much he's changed. Crazy.

I've been meaning to write weekly updates on what he's up to, but somehow I can never find the time. During my pregnancy, I was really good about, at a minimum, writing a post every Tuesday when I "rolled over" to the next week. I've been meaning to do the same thing now every Friday, when LL hits his weekly "birthdays," but so far, I haven't managed to do a single one. I do actually have some of them written, though, from the early weeks, and I'm debating whether I should backdate them when posting them, or just append them all together as one giant catch-up post. We'll see.

In the mean time, I'll just mention that Thanksgiving kind of sucked. Last year, Thanksgiving sucked because we spent the holiday with S's family, including a close family friend who brought their 2-month-old along. S and I were in the middle of fertility treatments at the time, so I was hopped up on hormones, physically sick from the side effects, and depressed after more than two years of trying to get pregnant. Everybody was totally charmed by the baby, but I couldn't even bring myself to hold him because it made me cry. The entire weekend revolved around the baby, and with S's family pressuring us to have children. S's mom, in particular, kept holding up the baby in front of me, exclaiming about how cute he was and bemoaning the fact that her selfish son and daughter-in-law hadn't made her a grandmother yet. I was miserable the entire time.

This year, Thanksgiving sucked for different reasons. After last year's holiday, I kind of expected that LL would get the same treatment that our friend's 2-month-old received last year. Instead, my in-laws had planned all sorts of events that are impossible with a young infant. Last year, we spent the entire 4-day weekend at one uncle's house, and the baby (and his family) were staying at a hotel 5 minutes away, so they could return to their hotel whenever they needed to (though things were very calm at the uncle's house, so they rarely needed to). This year, S's family had us running all over the fracking city. After a day of airports and layovers and air travel, we discovered that we were expected to go immediately from the airport to a cousin's house 45 minutes away, have dinner there, and stay late before being driven home to S's parents house (another 45 minute drive). After much discussion and attempts at guilt trips, we put our foot down and just refused to go, because poor exhausted LL needed to just go home and go to sleep. Things got worse from there. (You expect us to bring a jet-lagged infant on family outings to art galleries and casinos? Really?)

So, the scheduling is the first reason that Thanksgiving sucked. The second reason was that nobody actually respected that I was LL's mother and needed to look out for his welfare. After struggling to get him to nap in yet another different location, I'd walk away for 30 seconds to get something to drink, only to return to find out that someone (usually my MIL) had woken him up so that they could play with him. Once, I finally got him to sleep, but he was in a bedroom at the far end of the house, so I needed to leave the door open so that I'd be able to hear him if he cried. The problem was that there was a cat in the house that kept trying to sit on LL and smother him. When I asked the people whose house we were at if we could put the cat in a different room for an hour while LL napped, I was told no, because the cat didn't like being cooped up. Yes, the cat's comfort was put ahead of my child's health. Sigh.

So, the only way for LL to nap was if I was with him and holding him the entire time, yet I had people reach over and wake LL up while I was carrying him, and whenever I protested that he needed to nap, I was told that I didn't know what I was doing, LL wanted to play not nap, and I was keeping him from his family. And then every evening, when LL completely melted down from exhaustion, everyone scolded me for clearly not meeting his needs (or else he wouldn't be crying). Consider this interaction with my mother-in-law:

MIL: Wow, he's really crying a lot.
Me: Yes, he's really over-tired.
MIL: No, I think it's probably something he ate.
Me: Um, really? Because he has a pretty limited diet these days.
MIL: Okay, then it's probably something that you ate that you shouldn't have. What bad thing have you eaten?
Me: We're staying at your house. I've pretty much only eaten the food you've cooked for us.
MIL: Oh.... So, then, maybe he's just tired.

Did I mention how happy I am to be home?

So, yeah, that was LL's 10th week. Today he's 11 weeks old, so I owe you 10 more weekly updates (including one for this week!). They're coming soon, I promise.