Fourth Month as a Mom

Battle of the Bottles
[3M6D] OMG! CC took bottle from me, the original milk vending machine! Yoohoo Horray! Lately we’ve been heading out a lot, so in the absence of bottle or myself when he’s in carseat, we give him his monkey binky, which shaped very similar to the bottle nipple. Maybe that helped him identify with the bottle nipple, he is now definitely happier with the bottle! :) We’ve also tried hard to keep up the habit over the Christmas holiday so our nanny won’t have to re-do the work all over again.

[3M2W1D] Another OMG moment! CC took the bottle from Mara this time without even as much as a whimper! As part of the new year resolution for  both myself and CC, we have decided to make bottle drinking as one of the item. And on first day of the year, he started to do so! It did take a lot of experimenting to get here though. We tried different bottles, different nipples, different apparatus, different positions, different background music/TV shows, different milk temperatures…You name it, we’ve tried it. Finally, we went back to the very first bottle we used, and it worked! So you can imagine how proud Mommy must feel to see it all come together! 2.5 months of stress and hard work has finally come to fruition. I must say, it’s better than any work recognition!
Although somehow I think CC was motivated by my promise of, “The sooner you take the bottle nicely, the sooner you’ll get to have all sorts of different yummies!” ;)

Sleep
[3M4D] Wow, did that just happen? On the night of Christmas Day, CC slept for 6 hours straight! A Christmas miracle!

[3M1W1D] Okay, I don’t want to jinx it, but this is the third day in the same week that CC has slept for close to 5-hr stretch! In fact, last night, he slept for a 5.5-hr session (9-230am), then another 5-hr session (3-8am)! And he didn’t even put up a fight during the night feeding! He just ate, burped, ate again, and sleep! Yay! We’re definitely going to strengthen his day routine and hopefully that’ll transfer to his night sleep pattern too.

[3M2W1D] Oh I probably jinxed it. He’s back to feeding every 2.5 hours at night! Although it could also be he’s cold, he peed, he has gas pain, or all of the above.

Sleeping Arrangement
[3M1W1D] We are trying to finalize the sleeping arrangement with CC. From the very beginning, we know it’s not realistic to do family bed. Simply because we already have a family bed situation going on with Twilight. And baby + puppy + two adults on the same bed, albeit king size bed, is just not a good idea. So we have had CC sleep in his own crib in our room during night time, and portable crib in livingroom during the day time for the first month.

By the second month, we’ve noticed even though everyone tells you to let baby sleep in noisy, well-lit room during the day to establish his day/night pattern, it is just not working for the very sensitive CC! He wakes at every little noise or light, so we found ourselves tiptoeing like thieves in the house. And he is not getting good sleeps, which makes him more cranky at night! At which point, we moved him into the new spare room and sleep on the futon. At night, we also took down one side of his crib and side-cart it to our bed, so it’s easier on me after night feedings.

By the third month, we realized the side-carting is difficult on our backs to put him back to his crib, and it’s not really saving me any effort at night. So we put his crib back to how it was, but left it in our room still.

This month, we finally had all our guests gone, so now officially turning the guest room into CC’s nursery. We’ve moved the portable crib, as well as all his clothes and supplies into the room. We’re waiting for when his sleep pattern strengthens a bit more, then we will move his full-size crib down and have him sleep in his own room at night too. Hopefully that will happen by next month.

There’s an App for that
[3M1W1D] Yes, there is an iPhone App for just about anything. I keep track of CC’s feeding pattern for a good two months on Excel spreadsheet on a laptop on the night-stand. It got too tiring after a while and I have given up since. However, now we know he has an solid feeding pattern, we are actually more curious about his sleeping pattern. And with the lack of sleep at night, Woz and I sometimes wake up wondering, “Did he wake up at X time last night?” Well, there is an App for that! A friend we met at the baby play date told us about Baby Connect, which not only tracks baby’s eating, sleeping, and pooping/peeing pattern, it also tracks things such as vaccination, growth, medication!

What’s more, instead of having to graph out the growth curve ourselves, it does all the computation and graphing for us, and we can even see things online! Seriously baby data mining we have going on here! And the best part is, all for $4.99!

No more laptop by the bed emitting radiation to my brain while I sleep!

Back to Work
[3M2W] At exactly 3.5 months, Mommy went back to work for the first time. Leaving not-so-solid-bottle-drinker CC with the nanny for 6.5 hours. Although nanny said I can call to check on him, I was too nervous that I would hear baby screaming his guts out and therefore worry for the rest of the day.
So I didn’t. I looked at his pictures, I showed off his pictures, I talked about him, I tried to catch up with work…anything but worry about him. And I went home to a slightly struggled but happy baby. Absolutely love my little guy!

Life is Fair…Or Is It Unfair?

Picture from: http://www.intomobile.com/2010/09/23/poll-how-do-you-feel-about-tiered-pricing-is-it-fair/

At 3.5 months post partum, I have a body that makes CC proud to wear, “My Mom is out of your league” onesie. Oh correction, it was 2 months post partum. With my 50-lb weight gain during pregnancy, I was very lucky that not much of those 50-lbs landed on me.

But, when you gain some, you lose some…or is it the other way around?

After a relatively easy pregnancy (and I stress the word “relative”) and quick labor (c-section, he was out in 10 minutes), we fought the parenting battle every second of our lives since. It was the jaundice, the acid reflux, the gassiness, the battle of the bottles, and now, the je-ne-sais-quoi.

Really, I don’t know what’s going on.

He wakes easily (just as easily as 3.5 months ago), and then he either goes into a crying fit, or he doesn’t want to sleep. He has absolutely no patience for anything, and again goes into a crying fit. He still has gas problem, and goes into a crying fit for that too. I can think of a million possibilities of how his physical being is affecting him, but I just no longer feel that’s the case.

So why is it so unfair that we get such a fussy little guy? Is it to make up for all the cuteness and the “easy” pregnancy? In that sense, life is fair.

Truth is, I hate to think of myself as a failing mother this early on in my baby’s life. But it is very very hard not to. Especially when I’m such a scientist by training, especially when I believe for every reaction, there must be an action that triggered it. Is his "bad” (and I’m using this term very very loosely) behavior a reaction to anything I did? I thought about all of it so much that I grind my teeth at night and have tight jaw muscles when awake.

It’s hard not to think there is no relevance. It’s even harder to read and hear stories of all these wonderful babies around us, or people say, “He’ll grow out of it.” but you see no light at the end of the tunnel.

Regardless whether life is fair or unfair, I truly love CC, but I also truly wish I know what is going on.