birth announcement

Maya 10 weeks

2/20/15

2/05/15

I was surprised at how natural the transition to two kids felt from one. I mean, it’s a bit more chaotic around here and I’m not the mom I was or want to be in some ways, but we’ve never wanted to send her back (even Shep). ;) We like her being a part of our family. Shepherd is always smiley and positive when he talks to her, even if he’s in the middle of a tantrum. At first he asked to hold her a lot but he doesn’t much anymore. Now he says “Hi, baby sister,” or "Hi, little girl" (which sounds a bit creepy) and gives her a kiss and a tickle. He’s not as soft as he ought to be with her yet, so the times where I’ve set her down and let him interact with her have been quite limited. Most of the time I’m carrying her. Lots of times she hangs out in the Moby wrap, and there she nurses and sleeps. She’s getting a little more resistant to being in there now and more particular about how she wants to be held and the positioning when she nurses. She likes to face out more now. If I bounce her on the ball while she’s in the Moby nursing, usually I can get her to be happy and stay in there for a couple of hours, though it's a bit unpredictable lately. She likes being set down sometimes and she likes it best when she can see someone in the room with her. I think I’m her favorite person right now. Sometimes I can see her staring and focusing on me and she smiles sometimes. She’s become lots more of a social smiler. More so in the morning, as was true with Shep, but also throughout the day. She smiles for Tim and me the most—she doesn’t seem to know what to think of her big brother. I think he’s gotten a smile out of her a couple of times maybe, but I think the largest association with his presence may be terror! He is very loud and sometimes he makes her uncomfortable. She sometimes still smiles involuntarily in her sleep. She’s pretty good at holding her head up. She’s rolled from her stomach to her back like twice I think! She’s pretty strong but she also seems delicate overall. I’m not sure how to explain that one, exactly. She’s sensitive but not especially particular, if that makes sense?

She got her first shots ever yesterday (March 9) and it was a rough go of it for a while. Well, she slept at first for a couple hours, and then she was super unhappy/in pain when she woke up. I gave her a dose of Tylenol sort of grudgingly because I hate putting all these things (including vaccines, let’s be honest) in my perfect little baby’s body when she’s so little and has had never ingested anything but the nutrition I’ve given her from my own body, but alas, it helped after several minutes and she got back to nursing and then fell asleep again for another couple of hours. So that was a new experience. I feel like the only time Shep has ever been sleepier than normal is the one time he got sick, like a month ago. Weird. Anyway, I took a bath with Maya later. She only likes the bath if I’m supporting her whole body. She’s sometimes okay to sleep on her own if she’s in a deep sleep already, otherwise she prefers full-body contact. She also sometimes falls asleep rocking or bouncing instead of nursing, so that’s new too. She wakes up more easily if she’s sleeping on her own. We haven’t left her swaddled all that much like we did with Shep. She seems to prefer not to be swaddled for the most part, although sometimes it does help her to stay asleep better. I don’t even wake up much during the night when she wakes up, so I can’t really tell you how often she wakes up. She was getting a good 4 hour stretch at the beginning of the night a few weeks ago, but she might be waking up more now? Or maybe she’s sleeping through the night practically and I don’t even realize it. I couldn’t tell you because I’m just not that conscious for any of it. She still has her mullet; her hair hasn’t really changed much. She likes the car seat as long as we’re going fast enough for her. It’s actually way nicer to have an infant car seat, why didn’t we get one of those for Shep? But they are a huge pain to carry around, I will say that. The instant we slow down or stop in the car, she starts crying as if on cue, unless she's really out and doesn't notice. She hates getting in the car seat.

She is not colicky like Shep was, either. What a blessing that is! I am not sure how I could handle being mom to the semi-volatile toddler that Shepherd is with a volatile newborn as well. Instead, we have a rather predictable little girl. She is such a sweetheart. I’m getting used to dressing girls, too. I put a bow/headband on her for the first time last Thursday and Friday for Whitney’s viewing and funeral and felt like I could handle it. I had tried to do it once before and felt like I just couldn’t take her seriously when she was wearing it. I’d called her Shep several times and just felt like it was weird dressing her in girl clothes sometimes before. I am not sure if she’ll be dressed super femininely while I’m in charge, but at least I can handle more gendered items. I don’t know if it’s because I’m better at parenting babies or if Maya is just an easier baby to parent, but beyond those first 3 days of her life when my milk wasn’t in and she was generally discontent, she’s been fairly consistently happy. There have only been 2 or 3 times where she was crying and I didn’t know why and I couldn’t get her to stop easily. I don’t think I could count how many times Shep was crying for mysterious reasons and we would try everything to get him to stop and nothing seemed to help. In retrospect, I feel like there might have been more of an underlying issue than I realized at the time, but hindsight is hard. It also may have had something to do with the way he was born and the general stress and trauma associated with it. I wish I could have done more for him. It’s odd, kind of, because I have left Maya with Tim for all of 2 hours since she was born and I’ve never left her to anyone else’s care. Shep was a different story. I had him in the nursery at the hospital for a while when he was in the light box for his jaundice because I just felt like there was nothing I could do for him. And I left him with Tim because I felt at my wit’s end and like there was nothing I could do then too. So Tim took him on lots of walks and such. It’s good that it was at a time where Tim wasn’t working and he had finished school. He was around a lot more! He feels like he’s missing out on this fleeting and ephemeral phase of Maya’s life because he’s at work a lot and even when he’s home he doesn’t interact with her all that much. She just likes to nurse mainly and I haven’t even pumped at all this time around. Pumping is hard for me and I have a toddler to nurse off my oversupply (if oversupply is even a problem with me, which I really don’t know that it is) anyway. Boo to the toddler nursing thing, but let’s not get into that. Maya’s stats are remaining pretty much in the same range as they have been. She’s about 10.5 pounds now and has grown a couple of inches too. Her head circumference remains around the 50% percentile, her weight about 30% and height a bit higher, though I can't remember the range. She is such a cute baby too. She’s getting eyelashes now. She has a nice round head and such nice proportional features, imo.

We love our little girl and hope she sticks around for a long long time!