Perfect Storm

We have a lot going on right now. I'm almost done with a huge experiment at school, hopefully the last big one that I'll need to do for my dissertation, and I'm almost ready to start analyzing data and writing up results. I'm half-heartedly looking for a post-graduation job, which I should really be doing whole-heartedly but, um, I'm not. S just had a project canceled at work, followed by a big reorganization, so his work life is in chaos. And in less than six weeks, S's entire extended family (~20 people) are descending on our house from out-of-state for an entire week of Thanksgiving merriment. Thanksgiving is a HUGE deal in S's family, and hosting the festivities is such a big job that they rotate it around from year to year. We've only hosted once before, and it's our turn again. Hosting Thanksgiving involves planning all meals and entertainment (including several prepared games, shows, and craft projects) for every day of the week. And the meals are all elaborate productions involving many traditional American, Hawaiian, and Japanese dishes. Last time we hosted, I started all the planning and prep work in early October, but this year I've done nada, nothing, zip so far. Which has me a little bit panicky.

Normally, finishing a dissertation and looking for a job and planning a week-long holiday celebration for twenty in-laws would be plenty to both fill my time and stress me out. But instead, they're all taking a back seat to LL and this I am Toddler, hear me roar! clingy temperamental sleep-is-for-babies-who-haven't-yet-turned-one "thing" he's going through.

We seem to be facing a perfect storm of circumstances for LL over the past month. There have been a lot of disruptions and new things for him to deal with all at once, starting with the daycare change. You may remember that a month ago, Natasha's mother was in a bad car accident, and Natasha flew home to be with her. Sadly, her mother never awoke from her persistent coma, and has passed away. Natasha has had a devastating several months, after losing her father back in February. She is now back, she reopened her daycare this week, and she seems relieved to be back with her children. LL is definitely thrilled to be back with her and all his daycare friends after more than a month of a rotation of new care providers.

In addition to all of the daycare changes, LL also reacted poorly to his 12-month shots. And his growing brain has clearly made a bunch of new connections all of a sudden, as he has suddenly figured out how to climb, how to better manipulate small objects, and how to participate in conversations. (He only knows a few comprehensible words, but that doesn't stop him from babbling nonstop. I ask him a question, and he responds with entire paragraphs before pausing and looking expectantly at me, waiting for my response before continuing the conversation. He totally gets the give-and-take of verbal interactions. All he's missing is the speak-an-understandable-language part.) He's also gone through an amazing growth spurt -- tables that he could stand underneath just a week ago are now a source of frustration, since he stands up and smacks his head on the underside. He's also mid-transition between two naps and one. (Good lord, nap transitions are a pain in the butt!) And he sprouted at least three more teeth this week (two incisors and a molar on the bottom, possibly more on the top but he won't let me check).

Any one of these factors (daycare changes, brain development, growth, teeth, vaccines, dropping naps) would individually be enough to disrupt him a bit, but all at the same time? He's a clingy, sleepless mess. He seems to want to be independent yet simultaneously attached to me, and we haven't quite figured out how to achieve that. He crawls to me and begs to be picked up, but doesn't actually want to be in my arms. When I return him to the ground, he throws a temper tantrum. If I sit on the floor with him, he does not want to be in my lap, yet he claws at my shirt as if he wants to be held. When he's in this mood, the only thing that works is for me to lie down in the middle of his play area and let him crawl back and forth over me, which he finds endlessly amusing. (He also loves being tickled and he loves being chased and he loves chasing me, but he has to already be happy before engaging in any of those activities.)

He's waking up at least once almost every night. Usually he wants to be held for a little while (and to have a middle-of-the-night chat -- like I said: nonstop babbling) but two nights so far, it's been night terrors, which are horrible to deal with. (For the uninitiated: night terrors are when children start screaming and thrashing around in the middle of the night. They're not awake, but it looks like they are. They don't react to your presence and usually cannot be calmed down no matter what you do. And apparently, children are totally unaware that it's happening.) Some night terrors are just random, but apparently all those disruptions mentioned above can trigger them in toddlers. We're hoping that they'll go away soon, as things start to settle down. And we absolutely need to get him sleeping through the night again, because S and I are walking around like zombies these days. (We were both sick last week, too. Sleep deprivation probably made us easy targets.) S is lobbying for some cry-it-out experimentation, but I'm hesitant to do it while LL is in a separation anxiety phase.

So, um, that's what's going on in our house right now. Both the dissertation stuff and the job stuff probably deserve their own posts. There's also starting to be this lingering second-child question, which seems like a ridiculous thing to even bring up in light of everything else, but it's there nonetheless.

L'Shanah Tovah

This month is my last first day of school. Sort of. There are a whole host of reasons why that is not technically true. If I decide to go into academia, I'll have lots of future first days, but as a professor instead of a student. LL will start school some day, and I'm sure that the first several of his first days will have a huge effect on me as well. I'm also likely to take a class on ... something ... again someday, so that will technically have a first day of school. But this month is my last traditional it's September and I'm a student and school starts today! day. Weird. After preschool, kindergarten, grade school, middle school, high school, college, and grad school, I'm going to finally be done. That's 25 years of education there. I've crammed in just about all the book learnin' I can handle for now.

Honestly, I don't know if I'll even be able to convince myself to get through the next several months. I am ready to be DONE, and the academic year has barely started. Nine months to go....

LL's new daycare is working out great. LL even made a new friend! They sit on the floor vaguely near each other and play (separately) with toy cars. Then they both crawl over to the big basket of blocks and lean on it at the same time to make it tip over. In one-year-old terms, I think that means that now they're BFFs. (For one-year-olds, the bar is pretty low. "You didn't steal my crackers?!? You're my new bestest friend!")

My entire extended family is flying into town tomorrow for LL's big birthday bash on Sunday. Our theme for the party is "Stuff LL likes." We're serving yogurt and oatmeal and watermelon and crackers. Everybody will play with cars and blocks. There will be regularly scheduled dramatic readings of Sandra Boynton's Barnyard Dance! Then, we will all take a nap. Truly, a party for the history books.

Oy!

I love being a mom. But let's be honest, there are a lot of things to dislike about the job. Keeping LL safe is hard work, especially now that he's mobile. Finding nutritious things for him to eat can be tough, considering my limited time to shop and cook and prep food. Trying to find the right balance of encouragement and discipline is getting trickier as he gets more capable and more aware and more curious and more defiant. Reading the same kids book dozens of times a day, with the proper voices and sound effects, can get boring. Sleep deprivation over a long enough time period does weird and horrible things to the mind and body. Repeating "Gentle! We don't pull Mommy's hair!" over and over and over is unbelievably annoying. But you know what my absolute least favorite aspect of being a parent is? Child care. I can deal with everything else, usually happily, with a giant smile on my face, but when problems arise with child care, my life completely falls apart. Completely. Finding decent child care consumes me. I worry about it constantly, and once the problem is "solved," I continue to worry about it. And as soon as everything seems okay and I trust my new child care provider, it falls apart again. Good lord, I hate dealing with child care.

Thanks for all the suggestions of nanny-share and craigslist and relying on stay-at-home friends. Sadly, we have no friends, none at all, that use a nanny. All of the working moms I know use daycares. We are big craigslist users, but the majority of the crappy daycares that we've visited have been found through craigslist. And I really do mean that we've seen some crappy daycares. Recall: Baby Factory, Total Wackos, Lila's Place, Piper.... (We found Natasha through craigslist, too, so it hasn't been a total loss. But the hit rate has been depressing.) As for stay-at-home friends... we have LOTS of stay-at-home friends. Tons. I can count on one hand the number of my mom friends that actually work outside of the home. But when I sent out a "please please please help us!" plea to the stay-at-home friends, we got a deafening silence. Followed by a few offers to maybe take LL for half a day sometime at the end of the month. To be fair, I do understand the reason: all of my stay-at-home friends have one child, and every single one of them is currently stressing about whether to have a second child. They're all agonizing over whether they can handle taking care of two children at once. When faced with the prospect of trying it out, using LL as the stand-in for child number two, I think that they all froze in panic and decided that they're really not ready. One of my friends felt so guilty about coming to that conclusion that she offered to leave her own two-year-old child with her in-laws while she cared for LL, thereby helping me out without needing to care for both children at once.

The good news: we seem to have found a decent solution, for now. One of my friends recently started her son in an in-home daycare, and because of several job-related relocations, the daycare happens to have several immediate openings. The woman who runs it agreed to take on LL on a temporary basis, knowing that he'll probably only be there for a month or two. (I didn't want to mislead her.) We know two children at the daycare, one of whom has been there for almost two years. The parents and children all love it there, and it's been open for over 20 years. Everything about it is perfect (except the location, which is a pain in the ass, but really, if everything else about it is great, I can deal with the horrible commute for a month or two). LL started there today. Fingers crossed that everything goes well, and that this place can carry us through until Natasha returns.

In happier news, the Packers beat the Bears on Sunday. I had the highest score in the league for fantasy football this week. LL's vocabulary is growing, in three languages. Lots of family members are flying in later this week to celebrate both LL's birthday and Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year). And I have officially reached my pre-pregnancy weight. (I have a little more to go to reach my pre-fertility-treatment weight, but I'm taking baby steps, so to speak.)

Nap Experiment

LL takes three naps each day. One at 9am, one at 11:30am, and one at 3:30pm. Each one is reliably between 60 and 90 minutes. On very rare occasion, he skips one of the first two, usually because of something like teething pain or grandparents refusing to stop playing with him. Lately, he had been skipping the third nap on a semi-regular basis... maybe two or three times each week.

Just as we were starting to think that maybe he was ready to consolidate to two naps (by pushing the mid-day nap a little later, to say 1:00pm or so, and eliminating the afternoon nap) we ran into a forcing function. LL is the only baby at Natasha's daycare. All of the other kids are right around two years old. They all take a single nap, at 1:00 every afternoon. Normally, nap time is when Natasha can sit down for a moment, eat lunch, straighten things up a bit... you know, the same things that normal people do when their kids nap. Unfortunately, LL is always waking up from his midday nap just as the other kids are going to sleep, which means that Natasha doesn't get any down time at all.

When LL was smaller, she carried him around with her while the other kids napped, and sometimes put him in a swing to hang out while she ate, which was fine. But now he's kind of big to lug around all the time, and he doesn't always agree to play by himself on the floor while she eats or cleans up. (I know this from experience -- he's happy to play on the floor if I'm playing with him, but heaven forbid I try to focus on something other than him, even if I'm sitting right next to him.)

Anyway, Natasha was slowly losing her ability to cater to his unique schedule. So, she reluctantly gave us a choice: we could let her move LL's midday nap closer to 1:00, so that it overlaps with the other kids, or we would have to find another daycare. (When I say she was reluctant, I mean it -- she was practically crying at the thought of losing LL, which is probably also a sign that she's really really tired to have brought it up in the first place.) The whole thing also sent me into a horrible panic, because we've been through enough daycare searches and turnover to make me know that I do not want to find someplace new. But then we said, hey, we were thinking about consolidating his naps soon anyway -- no time like the present!

So, Saturday and Sunday, we did two naps, 9am and 1pm. Each day, by 1pm, poor LL was a sleepy little zombie. Totally exhausted. And his normal bedtime is 7:00, but by 5:30 each day, he was yawning and looking at us with these pitiful little eyes, pleading to be allowed to just go to bed already. And he was so grumpy by bedtime. Noon to 1:00, and 6:00 to 7:00 were ugly. I mean, I'm cranky when I'm tired, too. (Honestly, I feel like I've been a bit cranky for several months now, thanks to constant sleep deprivation.) But LL is normally so good-natured, that it was horrible to watch him be in such a bad mood. I kept telling S that it felt like we were breaking the baby.

But we thought that maybe he just needed to get used to the new schedule, so we kept at it. LL is with Rosie on Mondays, so we told her about LL's new schedule. But when I got home, Rosie told me that LL was tired and cranky by noon, and she couldn't torture him, so she put him down for his nap at 12:30. And then at 4:00 he was falling asleep while playing, so she put him down for another nap. She told me that he was very fussy, then asked if "fussy" was the right word, because English isn't her first language, and she'd never before had to describe that type of behavior from LL.

I was almost scared to bring LL to Natasha's on Tuesday. When I dropped him off, I told her that she could try the 1:00 nap we had discussed, that he's been doing that for three days now, but that he was still adjusting. I picked LL up at 3:00, and asked Natasha how his day had been. Apparently, he started yawning and rubbing his eyes at 11am, so she put him down for a nap. He woke up shortly before 1pm, but consented to play by himself, so it wasn't too bad. And then he fell asleep in the car on the way home, and slept until after 4:30. (He had to work off all that sleep debt from a weekend of missed naps, I guess.) I told her that we had been trying to push back LL's nap to make her life a little easier, but she shrugged and said that while she appreciated the effort, she knows that forcing babies to change their schedules doesn't make anybody happy, so she'd try to make do.

So, clearly he's not ready to give up his third nap yet. On Tuesday, Natasha seemed so relieved that we were even willing to try it that she told us not to worry, that she could work through it for another month until he's ready to try again. But the whole experience left me a little nervous. I'm nervous about traveling next month and dealing with a nap-deprived LL. And now I'm nervous that we'll have to find yet another new daycare.

I'm a scientist, so I have to admit that I like experimenting a bit on LL. Food experiments, in particular, are a lot of fun, though messy. But sleep experiments suck. Blech. I'm hoping that LL is well behaved at daycare for the next few weeks, so that we don't have to run another nap experiment until he's really ready for it.

Milk Magic

For the last few weeks, my milk supply has been decreasing. I have to pump twice while I'm at work, and I had been getting ~7 ounces combined for these two pumpings. Which, I'll note, isn't enough to cover LL's two feedings during this time, but I also pump in the evenings and on the weekends, so it was kind of close enough... but I'll leave the full Milk Math discussion for a future post. For those non-lactating people out there, I'll just mention the basic fact that an electric breast pump is less efficient than a baby, so pumping less than the baby would eat is totally normal.

Most women are told to expect to get 3-4 ounces per pumping session, which would mean that I should be able to get 6-8 ounces each day at work, so I was okay with my output of 7 ounces. Then I started struggling to get 6 ounces . Then I was regularly getting closer to 5 ounces. It got to the point where, instead of getting 7 ounces while I was at work, I was lucky to be getting 4 ounces. Which sucks. And creates a serious shortage as far as being able to feed LL.

Friends, books, and lactation consultants all told me that the herb fenugreek is the answer to all lactation ills, so off to the store I went. Herbal lactation assistance came in three forms: capsules, tea, and liquid. The capsules are straightforward: take two, several times a day. The tea contains a mixture of various herbs that are all supposed to increase milk supply, and the instructions explained that I was to brew it, covered, for exactly 10 minutes, and drink it 2-3 times each day. The liquid (heretofore referred to as "the potion") came in a mysterious dark bottle, contains the same basic ingredients as the tea, and the instructions said to take 1-2 droppers of potion 3-4 times each day, without drinking any other liquids for 20 minutes before and 20 minutes after taking the potion.

I've never been much of an Eastern medicine, new agey type person, so I bought the capsules (and, surprisingly, the tea. Because I like tea.) but I couldn't bring myself to buy the potion, which just seemed too "out there" for me. It probably wasn't helping that I kept calling it "the potion." After a cup or two of the carefully brewed tea, and several of the capsules, I confided to S that I didn't really expect them to work. Why would tea encourage my breasts to make more milk? It seemed really silly.

But here's the thing: several weeks ago, when I had a cold, I read that the menthol in cough drops can decrease your milk supply, so I strictly avoided cough drops. Why would I wholeheartedly believe that cough drops can decrease milk production, but tea can't possibly increase it?

Which reminds me of when I was trying to get pregnant, and I read that certain foods can decrease the chance of conception, so I religiously avoided those foods. But an actual honest-to-goodness medical study found that eating ice cream can increase the chance of conception, and I dismissed it as hogwash, even though I really love ice cream. So apparently I'm just an inherently pessimistic person. Something could be bad for me? Run like the wind! Something might be good for me? Sure, whatever, that must be superstitious nonsense.

S also tends to think that all of the various herbal whatnot is superstitious nonsense, but he also thinks that me buying it in one form while laughing at it in another form, then doubting the effectiveness while I put myself through the careful timing of tea-brewing several times a day, is just my way of torturing myself. (Have I mentioned the incredible guilt I've been feeling because of the decrease in milk supply? The crushing belief that if I hadn't gone back to work and been forced to rely on pumping, my supply would still be fine, which means that I'm putting my own selfish desire to finish my PhD ahead of the basic nutritional needs of my helpless infant son? No, haven't mentioned that? Hm.)

So at the end of last week, I went out and bought the potion. Fenugreek is used to flavor artificial maple syrup, and I love love love pancakes, so I had been hopeful about the taste. Sadly, the potion tastes disgusting. I feel silly drinking it. But as I take it, I chant to myself, "This will work. This will work. Magic potion. This will work." Then, you know, I spin around three times and throw salt over my shoulder.

And at work today, I pumped 6 ounces. So score one for the magic potion.

Five Months

After everything that happened last week, you know what rounded out my life this week? My grandfather was just diagnosed with cancer. Hey Universe -- thanks again!

On a brighter note, LL is doing much better. The temporary fix that the pediatrician recommended that we try while we wait for our appointment with the specialist seems to be working wonderfully, and LL's symptoms have completely disappeared. I'd rather not continue with this temp fix, since it isn't very enjoyable for anyone involved, but it's fairly small in the grand scheme of things, and if it works, then fine.

The new nanny worked two days this week, which means that I got to work two days this week. She's working out wonderfully. We're going to call her Rosie, because she's so happy and cheerful and LL adores walking around the park with her. And she reads lots of books to him, which he doesn't really get at Natasha's.

We're trying to examine our budget to see if we can keep Rosie on one or two days a week even after Natasha gets back. Natasha's daycare normally closes at 3:00, which is a bit early for me to end my workday. Having Rosie stay until 4:30 makes a huge difference in taking off the pressure for me to run to work, rush to get stuff done, and get out of the office on time. Even having just one a day each week when I can work a little bit later, or even go grocery shopping on my way home, seems like it would make a huge difference in my sanity.

For Valentine's Day, S and I stayed in and ate homemade risotto and watched a bad movie. It was nice. Every year, starting before we were even dating, S has bought me roses on Valentine's Day. He forgot this year, and I was kind of surprised to find that I didn't really care. I'm not sure what that means.

LL is five months old today. Sometime in the last five months I must have blinked or something, because he's suddenly looking less like a baby and more like a little boy. He enjoys tummy time for long stretches now, propped up on his elbows so he can look around, which makes him look... older. And his hair is filling in remarkably evenly, so it looks like he has a classic little boy haircut. People keep asking me whether we've cut his hair, but we haven't... it's just growing that way on its own. He's learning some games that I play with him, and reacts differently to different games. He knows Itsy Bitsy Spider, and Peek A Boo, and This Little Piggie, and How Big is LL. We video-chatted with my parents on the computer, and we got them to make funny animal noises to make LL laugh. He was very accomodating, even though Grandma's sheep sounded different than mine. And he gets all these complex facial expressions that give the strong impression that he's wise beyond his years.

Maybe he really is that wise. He wasn't just born yesterday.

When It Rains

Holy crap. Too much happening. Cannot cope. Seriously. Let's recap my week:

After some unusual and odd symptoms in LL, I innocently called his pediatrician to make sure that everything was okay. I expected to hear, "Yeah, don't worry about it!" over the phone. Instead we had two emergency pediatrician appointments, a just-in-case exam that made him screech in pain, and a referral to a specialist. Right now, we don't think that it's anything too serious, but whatever it is, it will need to be taken care of, and it's breaking my heart.

Next, S's grandfather suddenly and unexpectedly passed away this week. He lived far away from us (as in, there's an ocean between us) so he hadn't met LL yet. We had mailed him lots of photos, and we were planning on bringing LL to visit him in April, which ended up being two months too late, though there was no way we could have seen this coming. He had been so excited to meet his first great-grandchild. We've been asked not to bring LL to the funeral, but S is trying to decide whether he will be able to fly there himself. Given LL's medical problems, though, he's understandably reluctant to leave us alone, even for a few days.

Next up: S's company had major layoffs this week. S's job is still safe for now, but several of our close friends lost their jobs this week. And the layoffs mean extra work and longer hours for S, which is particularly stressful on top of everything else going on right now.

The layoffs and longer work hours for S means that he isn't able to stay home at all with LL, so I didn't work again this week. (We had been planning to trade off, so that I could work a few days, too, but alas, it's not going to happen that way.) We did hire a part-time nanny, who worked one day this week, but since it was her first day, I stayed home to show her the ropes. Some friends of ours who recently moved out of the area referred her to us, since she was a nanny for their daughter for more than a year. She's only available two days a week, so over the next two weeks, I'll be able to go into work for just four days. It's just as well, since LL isn't feeling that great, and I want to keep an eye on him. Also, one day of the nanny costs almost as much as a full week at Natasha's, so we couldn't afford more than two days each week anyway.

And, just in case a death in the family and layoffs and childcare problems and LL being sick weren't quite enough to deal with, S was in a (very minor) car accident this week. With my brand new car. No injuries, but it was unquestionably S's fault. (Yeah, he's distracted. See above.) It ended up being cheaper to pay for the damage (our car and the other car) out of pocket rather than making a claim through insurance, so we've been dealing with the other driver and repair estimates all week.

To cap it off, my brother called last night because he thinks that he's starting to see early Alzheimer's signs in my mother, and he wanted to know if I'd noticed anything. (I haven't, and I think he's imagining things, but holy cow it's hard not to be paranoid and over-analyze everything now. Alzheimer's does run in our family.)

Also, LL has been waking up several times each night, then getting up at 5am, and wanting to be held for the rest of the day. And he's not napping. I'm averaging 4 hours of sleep a night. This morning, I had my first shower all week.

Happy Valentine's Day.

Random Thoughts

I'm at home with LL (still) and jotting down notes during his naps. Another week without being able to go into work. Anyway, this post is going to be really random. Don't even bother looking for a common theme or anything.

There are a lot of icky daycares out there. Like the one where the woman wanted to give my child some bizarre herbal supplement, and I got the sense that she'd start adding it to his bottles (against my wishes, obviously) if we left him there. Or the woman who held LL for 30 seconds, then handed him back to me in a panic the moment he started to fuss a little. Or the woman whose extremely creepy husband and heavy-metal-t-shirt twentysomething son are both also in the house all day. Or the woman who happily told me that she and her two assistants take the 15 kids (including infants) on field trips once every week or two; when asked how they get around, it turns out that the three women take all 15 babies and toddlers on city buses. Or the woman who told me, when I asked why she likes running a daycare, that she only does it because her husband doesn't make enough money. (At least she's honest.) Or the woman with a house that is even less childproof than mine, who told me not to worry about it because the children spend the entire day in the playroom, which is a room the size of a small walk-in closet, with no windows.

One of the daycares that we visited was called Julie's Little Angels Day Care. On the printed information that Julie gave me, there was a typo so it said "Little Angles" instead of "Little Angels." S suggested that maybe it's Little Angles because all of the babies are so acute. I really love my husband. But we still don't have childcare.

I recently took an online quiz in which you answer a bunch of questions about your interests, your climate preferences, hobbies, outdoor activities, career, and family, and then the site recommends that top 24 cities in the US where you would be happy living. Out of these 24 cities, my number one city ended up being the city in which I was born and raised. (I haven't lived there since I left for college at 18.) Number six on the list was where I went to college, more than 1,000 miles away from where I grew up. Of the remaining 22 cities on the list, 18 of them are within 150 miles of where I grew up or went to college (and most of them are actually within 50 miles). None of them, not a single one, is within 1,000 miles of where I live right now, where I've been living for the last 10 years. And people wonder why I plan to move after I finish my PhD.

LL finally, finally only woke up once last night, instead of the 3x he's been doing for the last few weeks. Sadly, the I'm-up-for-the-day time seems to have permanently moved from a reasonable 7:30am to a pre-dawn 6:15am. I think that's something I'm just going to have to live with.

LL is starting to wear 9-month clothing. The 6-month stuff does still technically fit him, but when he's in cloth diapers, they're very tight at the crotch. Now that I've emptied his dresser of all 3-month clothing and a good deal of the 6-month clothing, it is obvious that we're starting to run out of clothes. The mountains of clothing that we received as gifts seem to taper off around the 6-month mark. I think we'll still have enough clothing to keep LL comfortable while he's in 9-month sizes, but once he outgrows those, we're actually going to have to go shopping. To date, I've purchased three outfits for him, and everything else has been gifts or hand-me-downs. That's going to have to change in a few short months.

LL's consistent rolling from tummy to back seems to have stopped. (It only lasted one week.) Last week, it seemed like an awesome way for him to avoid the work of using his arms and abs and neck muscles when put on his stomach -- he could simply flip himself to his back. This weekend, he discovered another way to effectively avoid tummy time, without even having to do the work of rolling over: simply rest your head on the ground. We put him on his stomach, he briefly lifts his head, then he turns his head to the side and rests his cheek on the blanket. No exercise required. This maneuver seems fairly obvious now that he's doing it. Any suggestions on motivating a lazy infant to exercise on his tummy? Shaking toys above him doesn't do it. He just gives me this look that seems to say, "You want to play? Move me to my back! Otherwise, I'm just going to rest right here and suck on my fingers."

S and I are both only fluent in English, but people sometimes assume that I speak Hebrew, and that S speaks Japanese. Someone asked me the other day what LL's first language was going to be, and I said "I dunno, maybe Lisp." It wasn't until I got a really blank look that I realized what they actually meant. You think that LL is doomed to be a nerd?

LL and I visited my tech start-up again yesterday. He thought one of the robots was really cool until it moved its arms, which seriously freaked him out. So I guess we're not ready for robots yet.

Rolling, Sleeping, Partying, Oh My!

LL is 20 weeks old today. That's kind of an unwieldy number for weeks... I'm pretty sure that I'm only supposed to be talking in months at this point. He's four and a half months. And we had a few new milestones this week!

LL rolled over! LL hates tummy time with a passion. He rarely tolerates it for more than a minute, whining uncomfortably for 30 seconds, then moving to all-out hysterical screaming until he is rescued and returned to his rightful position on his back. Nonetheless, we've been told that we need to keep attempting tummy time, to strengthen his upper body. On Monday, he realized that, when he was put on his stomach, he could Do Something About It. He rolled to his back. And gave me a smug what-are-you-going-to-do-now grin. I thought that it might be a fluke, so I returned him to his stomach. Nope, he definitely knows how to roll. Every time he is put on his stomach, he now rolls to his back within 30 seconds or so. Every single time. The era of tummy time is over.

Possibly related to the increased strength and flexibility needed for rolling: he has fallen in love with his own feet. For a while now, he's had a habit of holding onto his knees, but he wasn't interested in reaching all the way to his toes. Now, he grabs each foot in his hands and stares at his toes in amazement. Endless entertainment.

Also, a milestone for me and S: we hosted our first party since LL was born! (I'm not counting the bris, which was a big party, but it wasn't at our house, and we did most of the prep for it before he was born.) We had 20-some friends over to watch the Super Bowl on Sunday, including several children, which was a lot of fun. It did bring about several annoying conversations, though. ("Your house isn't childproof." "Yes, I know, we haven't done any childproofing yet." "You know you're going to have to childproof." "Yes, I know." "That right there? You're going to have to get rid of that. It's not childproof." "Yes, I know. We know what we have to do, we just haven't needed to do it yet." "Also, that over there." "YES, I KNOW.")

We're also firmly in the middle of the infamous Four Month Sleep Regression. LL had been so fantastic about going to sleep easily around 6:30, sleeping until 4am, going immediately back to sleep after eating, and then getting up sometime after 7am. Now, he struggles more in the evening, not wanting to go to sleep. He wakes up around 10:30pm and insists on eating. He wakes up again around 1am to eat some more. He refuses to go back to sleep after eating, a problem that we haven't dealt with since he was two months old. If we try to soothe him back to sleep without eating, he gets hysterical. And then he wakes up at 5:30 or 6:00am and will not go back to sleep. Last night, S had to walk him around the house for an hour, from 2-3:00am. I also don't entirely know what to attribute it to. Yes, it could be the normal four month thing. But it also coincides with me returning to work, and I've read that lots of babies start waking up more frequently at night, wanting to play more at night, wanting to nurse more at night, after Mom returns to work, to make up for missed time during the day. It could also be that my menstrual cycle returned this past week, which I've read can alter breast milk and throw babies for a bit of a loop. S and I are both exhausted from dealing with it all. Hopefully LL will calm down soon!

Also exhausting us: the search for daycare. We've looked high and low, investigated lots of possible solutions, interviewed several more places, and we've got nothing. I've been home with LL all week. Natasha isn't reopening her daycare until March 2, which means that we've got three more weeks to figure out. And to answer some questions on this topic: yes, we had a plan for backup childcare, for when Natasha was sick: I could take a few sick days, S could take a few sick days, and a few friends could take LL for a day or two if necessary. But none of that covers the scenario of having no regular childcare for an entire month. As for having our parents help us out... my parents aren't retired, so they can't fly here for a month. S's parents are retired, but they still have very busy lives. They might be willing to come out here for a week, but that's about it. And even if they could come for longer, I think that I'd go nuts having my mother-in-law living with us for a month. Seriously, I'd go batty. Nevermind that she refuses to follow any of our wishes for how LL should be cared for; she doesn't believe in naps (!); she doesn't like cloth diapers; she wants to feed him every hour; .......

So, for now, I've just warned my advisor not to expect much out of me for a while. Which didn't go over very well, but there's nothing I can do about it. Our search continues.

Jinx!

I am the stupidest woman alive. Seriously, the absolute stupidest. Yesterday, I had the nerve to tempt the Universe by saying this: "After just a week of leaving him at Natasha's, I find myself already more at ease. So, with the daycare situation hopefully resolved, I can focus on other problems." (Yes, I'm quoting myself. From yesterday's post.) The Universe took less than twelve hours to laugh in my face. "You're at ease?" the Universe snickered, "You think that your daycare situation is resolved? Here -- let's see what you do with this!"

LL's new daycare provider, Natasha, called last night. Her father suddenly and unexpectedly passed away. She's shutting down her daycare for the next several weeks so that she can fly back to the Ukraine.

I'm going to pause here to say that, obviously, Natasha is suffering more than I am. She's basically around the same age as me (thirtysomething) and I can't imagine losing a parent at this point in my life, especially while living so far away. I feel terrible for her. Also, she's probably going to lose some clients. All of her clients, myself included, are going to have to find alternative daycare solutions for the next several weeks, and odds are, some of them aren't going to come back. So when she gets back from the Ukraine, she's going to have to fill a lot of open slots. It's probably going to suck for her. In a minute I'm going to resume pouring out my anguish over how the situation is so incredibly sucky for me and S and LL, but I want to be clear that I understand that it isn't all about me.

Having said that... this situation is totally sucky for us! To recap, LL has had one week at crappy Baby Factory, then one week sick at home with me, then one week at Natasha's, and now another week at home with me. And next week, he's going to have to be in yet another new place (if we can even find someplace decent, again, on incredibly short notice). I don't know how many times I can expect him to recover from us totally scrambling his little world.

I have no idea what to do now. Natasha thinks that she'll be gone for at least three weeks. I have a huge deadline at work in eight weeks. It is absolutely not negotiable, and I'm barely going to meet it if I work straight through. It would be impossible to meet the deadline if I took the next three weeks off. S's situation isn't much better. He was just transferred to a new leadership position at work, and taking on a huge responsibility only to immediately take several weeks off would be, um, career-limiting, to say the least. So we need to find a new daycare, and fast.

We could probably cobble together care for LL among several friends and neighbors, but I really really don't want to make LL adapt to that many new caregivers in quick succession. Having four caregivers in five weeks is bad enough. Having a different caregiver every day for the next three weeks would be way too hard on him.

So. Tomorrow I start calling daycares. Again. And hoping that I can arrange to visit, interview the caregiver, call references, make a decision, and start easing him into a new place next week. For this week, I'm just screwed. I probably won't be able to work much next week, either.

Yes, Universe, you got me. You win.

Sigh of Relief

First off, thank you thank you thank you to those of you who left comments about home daycares! You really helped to put my mind at ease as we left LL at his new daytime digs last week.

We went ahead with a trial run at the small home daycare that looked so promising, and so far, it is working out wonderfully. Better than I could have ever hoped for, in fact. So good that I need a blog nickname for LL's new daytime caretaker. I'm going to be racist and call her Natasha, because she is so stereotypically Russian that I just can't help myself. She was a Russian ballet dancer, before she had kids and moved to the US and became a preschool teacher. She keeps making random comments like, "You breast feed and use cloth diapers? How unusual! I thought most Americans like to take the easy way out!" and "I'm actually Ukrainian, but you Americans don't know the difference, so I say that I'm Russian." and "I'm glad that LL isn't bundled up too much. Americans dress their children too warmly. We Russians know that the cold makes children stronger." This last one is particularly funny to me, since I grew up in Wisconsin but now live someplace where the coldest it gets is usually in the 50s, so any mention of "cold" around here makes me giggle a little. And when I picked up LL one day last week, one of the toddlers explained to me that Natasha made them borscht for lunch, but LL didn't get any because babies don't eat borscht. Natasha felt the need to explain to me what borscht is, so that I wouldn't be concerned that she was feeding the children something too weird. Everything about this makes me smile, especially since I myself make an awesome cabbage borscht (my great-grandmother's recipe -- she was Ukrainian, too). So, yeah, on the blog, I'm going to call her Natasha.

Anyway, LL is having a fantabulous time at Natasha's. Whenever I picked him up from Baby Factory, he was sitting alone somewhere, and then he was despondent and lethargic for the rest of the day. In contrast, when I pick him up from Natasha's, he's happy and smiley and giggly. He's napping well there, he's eating well, and he spends time playing outside. Natasha gives me a full report not just of how many diapers she changed, but also details like what toys he enjoyed playing with, and how the other children interacted with him. It's awesome.

He is also clearly loving being around the toddlers, and they seem to have adopted him as the coolest baby doll ever, so everyone is getting along. And LL is so enamored of the place that he has been on his very best behavior there as well. In reference to my previous post, his adorable behavior has even made Natasha comment to me that she's having so much fun with him that she mentioned to her husband that maybe they should have a third child.

When LL was at Baby Factory, I got no work done because I was constantly worrying about him. After just a week of leaving him at Natasha's, I find myself already more at ease. So, with the daycare situation hopefully resolved, I can focus on other problems. Like how in the world it will be possible for me to pump enough milk while I'm at work to keep up with my incredible growing baby....

Baby Factory Alternative

We officially pulled LL out of Baby Factory yesterday. It would have been earlier, but LL and I have both been house-bound with our colds since last week. Also, even though I knew that I never wanted to bring him back to that place (three days was more than enough!) I also didn't want to officially cancel our spot there without having some sort of alternate care in place, since I do kind of have to show up at my lab one of these days. I've been back to work for almost two weeks, but I've actually been in to work on only two of those days. It's lucky that I'm a student, or I'm pretty sure that I'd be fired by now. Grad students can't really be fired. Once you're like me and past all the major milestones, grad students can pretty much just be belittled by their advisors until they leave on their own. My advisor is fairly clueless about parenting and social lives and the like, but I'm pretty sure that he's also compassionate enough not to do that in this case. Anyway, I had a long talk with the director at Baby Factory, and the silver lining is that she agreed not to charge me any money. Technically speaking, I've already been billed for January, and I'm obligated to give them 30 days notice, so I would owe them for most of February, too. But the director quickly agreed that since LL was only there for 3 days, and the care sucked, they wouldn't charge me for February and I could tear up the bill I received for January. She was also extremely apologetic about the experience, and a little shocked by some of the stories I told her. S thinks she was just putting on an act for my benefit, but I don't particularly care either way. The good news is that we are officially done with that place!

The better news is that we may have found an alternative to Baby Factory. It's a home care place, which is something that I hadn't really considered until our experience with Baby Factory. The woman who runs it seems great, she used to be a preschool teacher at one of the top schools in our area, the kids at her house seem nice and respectful and mellow, the place looks safe and fun, the place has been running for several years, and the parents that I've talked to as references have wonderful things to say about it. (Also, one of the parents is a pediatrician, which makes me feel good about the level of care.) There's an immediate opening because one of the families that used to go there just moved out of the country.

My only reservation is that all of the kids are 2-3 years old, and the woman has never had an infant there before. (She's cared for her own children as infants, but she's never cared for one since she started caring for several kids at once.) Right now, she's looking after 3 toddlers (though one of them is only there 2 days/week), so LL would be child number four, and she'd like to add a fifth as well. My understanding is that five is kind of standard for home care places. But, caring for five kids when one of them is an infant seems unfathomable to me.

The rates are so low compared to Baby Factory... S and I are considering offering her more than her quoted rate in exchange for securing her promise that she won't take in a fifth kid. We're going to bring LL over for a trial run next week, just to see how it feels. (It would have been this week, but LL's not fully over his cold, and he's still so clingy from being sick that I don't think it's a good idea to start him somewhere new for the next few days.) I think that LL will like being around the toddlers, and the little girls we met there when we visited seemed excited to have a baby around, so I think that he'll have no shortage of people waving rattles around for him. But I still worry about anyone's ability to take the time to soothe an infant to sleep for a nap, or even feed a bottle, when trying to keep an eye on a bunch of toddlers.

Anybody out there have experience with these places? Is it really possible for someone to properly care for an infant while also watching three or four toddlers? Anything else we should be looking for, or watching out for, when evaluating small home daycares?