Since any clothing that I wear these days is destined to sop up impressive quantities of milk and spit-up, I’m placing an order online for a couple of pairs of slightly less threadbare sweatpants to share the burden of absorption and the subsequent frequent washings.  And since my body is in a state of postpartum flux, and it’s hard enough to navigate the world of pants size even when said pants have an elastic waistband and are made of soft cotton jersey, I grabbed my tape measure from my knitting bag to see what my current measurements are.

I was shocked to find that my waist-to-hip ratio is now about 1:1, and that I’ve got over ten extra inches encircling my waist these days.  Shocked, you see, because I actually feel pretty great.

Here’s the thing: I spent the previous nine months slowly packing on pounds and slowly increasing in circumference.  Every few days I’d look in the mirror and think “… more?  Wow,” as I just kept swelling.

And sure, birth leaves you with all kinds of floppy skin and a jiggly round toddler-esque belly and a whole host of other indignities.  But you also drop a chunk of that extra weight and fluid and size during the following weeks — weeks, as opposed to the months that it took for you to gain it.  So even though I’m far from my pre-pregnancy size or weight, and I’ve got weeks to go until I’m cleared to exercise (and I’m under no illusions about how difficult it will be to get said exercise to return my body to its former state), I’ve still undergone the most dramatic weight loss that I’ll ever see in my life.  Thanks to, you know, giving birth.

One of the highlights of my day is now the brief period between when Pete comes home and I start the seemingly unending cycle of constant evening baby feedings, when he takes on baby duty and I eat dinner and have a leisurely shower.  (Even when running on next-to-no sleep, the shower!  The shower does so much to make me feel like a human, and I will choose it over even the most badly-needed 30-minute nap.)  Sometimes I’ll glance at myself in the mirror as the water’s heating up and scan my reflection, in its stretch-marked, floppy-skinned, round-bellied, and saggy state.  Damn, I’ll think without a shred of irony.  I’m looking pretty good.

Here’s hoping that I can hold on to that uncritical eye even as I continue my relationship with maternity pants.

Until two-odd weeks ago, I’d been pretty resistant to hormonally-induced mood swings.  Fertility drugs?  Left me equipped with my standard, fairly muted emotional range.  Pregnancy?  Still entirely myself; no unpredictable cravings or crying jags to report.  But since delivery, I can feel waves of unfamiliar, gut-level emotional responses bubbling up from some previously unused part of my frame to do battle with my normally more dispassionate self.  It is disconcerting, to say the least, and turns listening to the squawking of a random unhappy infant at Target into an entirely different experience.

In the hospital, I achieved an unprecedented level of delirious exhaustion because every little squeak and murmur coming  from the hospital-issue bassinet sent my heart pounding and my nerves twanging.  But when Theo was sent to the nursery for one of his twice-daily wellness checks, I’d fret guiltily and groggily until he was wheeled back into the room.  “Is that my baby?” I slurred to the nurse who came in to check my vitals, who was wheeling her small cart of pulse- and blood pressure monitors.  (She was also really amused.  Come on, like I was the only sleep-deprived patient in the postpartum recovery ward.)  After we went home, I (in the classic style of new parents everywhere) abandoned my plans of having him sleep in the nursery at night in favor of placing him within arm’s reach of the bed, because every little creak and half-cry forced me bolt upright, and I figured it was at least easier to be able to crack open a bleary eye in his general direction umpteen times a night instead of trudging down the cold, dark hallway.  Never before have I felt so dominated by my own visceral responses.

And when it comes to Theo, the absurdly easy baby, the other shoe has indeed dropped — in the form of pediatrician-diagnosed acid reflux.  (“Wow, he’s so talkative!… Actually, hear that sound that he’s making?  That’s not normal; that’s him wheezing.”)  For something that so recently made its appearance, it’s also remarkably acute: my sweet, easy kid was swiftly robbed of the basic pleasures of sleeping and eating, screaming and clawing his way through feedings and waking himself out of a firm double-swaddle doze to emit inconsolable blurts of red-faced fury.

Maybe the drugs are slowly kicking in, or maybe it’s the fact that we have resigned ourselves to basically never being able to place him flat on his back for any great length of time — more often than not, diaper changes still involve a sudden cascade of milk leaking out of his nose — but Theo’s slowly getting less outrageously burpy and less uncharacteristically angsty.  And thank goodness — not just because it’s hard to watch him suffer, but because the alien force of those postpartum hormones made it such that I could only stare blankly at him, quivery-lipped and liquid-eyed, as he fussed.

But the advice to keep the baby upright or inclined at all times has given me a new sense of agency, as has my (highly uncharacteristic) decision to throw money at the problem.  (I mean, we’re talking about something that can take a year to improve, and it’s not like life with a newborn involves a high baseline level of sleep and relaxation to begin with; also, with all of the hospital bills coming in, it seems like a drop in the bucket.)  So behold, my weapons in this particular pitched battle:

• The Large, Plasticky, and Ugly: one remarkably unattractive baby swing (with pages of glowing reviews about its ability to soothe the refluxy beast on Amazon) with variable incline and the ability to move side-to-side as well as back-and-forth
• The Crunchy-Granola: one large fabric wrap carrier for keeping the baby both upright and content as I putter around the house
• The Hail Mary: one obscenely overpriced Swedish bouncy seat, also with adjustable, close-to-upright angles of operation

Important Swedish safety advice: always stare daggers into the top of your baby’s head.

• The Not Pictured: one janky-looking jacked-up pack-and-play topped with a donated vibratey seat in the bedroom (deliberately left unphotographed because, while surprisingly stable, I don’t wish to invite a smattering of well-intentioned emails gently lecturing me about safety risks)
• The Jury-Rigged Sleep Wedge Alternative: one crib mattress elevated via cardboard box, which I’m pretty sure is the nursery equivalent of putting your car up on blocks in an overgrown patch of crabgrass in your front yard

Perhaps I should cover the boxes with decorative wrapping or scrapbook paper?  Actually, that’s not a bad idea.  Hmm.

Like I said, I can’t report magical success yet, but I’m optimistic about Theo’s slow return to form.  And maybe — just maybe — my one-time sleeps-like-a-log self might someday be able to successfully snooze through a light case of baby hiccups.

I’m relishing the final days of my postpartum Big Lebowski period, where I exercise my prerogative to do Very Little and wander around the grocery store in my bathrobe if I so choose.  (The other day I uttered an unironic “… what day is this?”, which made me realize the similarity.)  Theo continues to be an unbelievably cooperative baby, last night’s unending bout of gassy angst notwithstanding, so I’m trying to enjoy the fact that even though I don’t get much sleep or do much that’s productive, he still prefers naps to being entertained.  While I appreciate that he’s gradually spending more time opening his eyes and staring blearily at the shadows on the wall, that’s fine for now.

Non-pregnant life these days is filled with other unexpected perks, too, like:

• Sleeping with only one pillow and experiencing no heartburn
• The ability to effortlessly bend forward and pick up objects
• Cats’ evident delight that we have now decided to become nocturnal
• Squatting without knee pain or scrambling for support on the way back up
• Old t-shirts not exactly flattering, but can at least now be worn and expected to reliably cover the navel
• Renewed access to my toenails
• Sleep deprivation really enhancing my viewing of Twin Peaks over the weekend
• Slowly demolishing the freezer / pantry stockpile instead of, you know, cooking
• Lots and lots of time to read and surf the web on the Kindle.
• Awakening Sebastian’s latent guard-cat instincts: never before has the household glitterball population been so rigorously patrolled and relentlessly herded
• Regained access to the top shelves in the kitchen cabinets
• Being able to sleep flat on my back.  (“You were snoring pretty loudly last night.  I think the baby found it soothing.”)
• Official clearance to eat delicious unpasteurized cheeses (would be more helpful were we still living in Montreal).  (Slightly less exciting: official clearance to clean the cats’ litterbox.)
• Baby not terribly expressive yet, but able to display some impressively fierce poop faces

So!  Parenthood!  Here we are!  A totally new and original subject to write about!  Sleep when the baby sleeps!  Surf Facebook while the baby eats!  (I’m not sure why the latter hasn’t been formally added to the annals of trite-but-sensible infant-care lore, because I’m now incredibly well apprised of every event taking place in my friends’ lives.)

Of all the stages and responsibilities involved in having and raising a kid, the newborn period has always been the least engaging to me.  Because that’s just it — they don’t engage.  Can’t even focus their squinty little eyes on you, in fact.  Developmentally, they’re still completing their fourth trimester.  As I’m more interested in the care and development of a small person, the newborn phase always seemed like some nightmarish test of fortitude to be toughed out.

Theo, however, is a really great kid.  It’s been a week now, and we’re all settling in with one another.  I don’t want to presume that life will always be so simple and placid — for one thing, I’m being utterly spoiled by Pete’s being home and taking care of everything that isn’t baby-feeding, and by my ability to luxuriously spread my (albeit unpredictable and highly choppy) sleep intervals out between the hours of 7 pm and 11 am, but at some point things like work and leaving the house are going to have to enter the picture — but I want to be appreciative of just how good we have it right now.

And what I’ve finally discovered is that newborns’ mental and emotional incoherence is totally ideal.  I can handle (with generous assistance) the unending eat-and-sleep cycles.  Eat-and-sleep cycles combined with any kind of additional intellectual demands, though, would be torture.  Like, right now, I’m delighted that there’s no additional need for me to entertain the baby, or discipline him, or educate him, or chase after him, or instill some sense of morality into him.  All I need to do is to help with the feeding and the sleeping, and gradually grow more comfortable with manhandling a baby with a heavy little wobbly head, and I don’t need to feel bad about zoning out to the latest episode of Downton Abbey while I do it.  Here’s to the fourth trimester!

Theodore Rhys!

Born Wednesday, January 11th, 2012, after a labor that his mother didn’t think was a labor until after good 12 hours had elapsed, a whole lot of breathing exercises, two filled barf bags, two epidurals, and four hours of pushing.

8 pounds, 20 inches

a.k.a. Theodore, Ted, Teddy, El Tederino if you’re not into the whole brevity thing, T-Rex, Teo, Teddy Pants, Ted “Theodore,” &c.

We think he’s pretty great.

Pete’s been at home for most of the past month, making slides and writing out homework solutions for the start of next semester.  (He’s gotten the side-eye on occasion from other women waiting at my OB’s office, because father-to-be waiting-room protocol demands that one talk loudly and disinterestedly on a cell phone about one’s Very Important Business even while the nurse ushers you into an examination room, not pull heavy upper-level physics textbooks out of a backpack and start to annotate them with a pencil.  Clearly, if he cared about our child, he’d spend more time futzing around in utter boredom on a smartphone.)

Since he’s got some labs to set up with another department member and can carpool up to campus with one of his other co-workers, he’s going back to campus during the week to get work done from now ’til D-Day.  (Don’t worry, Mom; carpool arrangements have been specifically arranged with the caveat that, should I go into labor, he’ll, you know, get a ride home early.  Immediately, even.)

As I suspected, though, the problem with his going back to campus is that I now have two cats on my hands who have become very, very spoiled by his continued loving presence.  I’m no longer feeling quite so spry these days, and Pete has done a remarkable job of taking care of all household cat-chasing, belly-rubbing, and general feline harassment duties; as a result, they’re accustomed to virtually nonstop attention, and available laps.  Now that Pete’s not around during the day and my own lap has become so very incommodious, the acute emotional distress has begun.  I transcribed the following yesterday morning, as Sebastian walked up and down the hallway, yowling incessantly:

WHY DO YOU LEAVE THE SEBASTIAN

WHO LOVES YOU SO MUCH

SEARCHING FOR YOU
LOUDLY

THROUGH THE HALLS AND THE WINDOWS

LIKE A TINY
LOST
COUNTERTENOR

SINGING HIS ARIA OF WOE

ACROSS A DESOLATE SEA

WHILE HIS BROTHER JUST KIND OF LOOKS AT HIM FUNNILY FROM YOUR DESK CHAIR

WHY DO YOU LEAVE THE SEBASTIAN?

If only he’d just dye his fur black and carry around a notebook so he could record his words, I feel like maybe we could make some progress on these feelings of 9-to-5 abandonment.  As it happens, however, I think he’s decided to start a band instead.

Now that the holidays are over, I feel like I should send out a preemptive notice to all concerned family and friends: unless you’ve been otherwise informed, you may assume that I am fine and that I haven’t given birth yet. I’m still a few weeks away from my due date(s), first-time mothers tend to go into labor late as it is, and I’ve experienced no signs that this baby is particularly anxious about making his appearance.  Trust me, if I give birth, we’ll let you know.  Really, it’ll come up in conversation.

Happily (?), I still have plenty of work to do in the interminable meantime to keep myself distracted, and no major physical complaints.  I still sleep like a log, and feel only moderately creaky in the joints.  I have to say that I’m really looking forward to someday being able to bend forward again in order to pick up objects — I now regard the coffee table with a slight glint of animosity in my eye, because my drink is right there but my torso will come to a sudden halt whenever I try to lean forward and pick it up — and being able to sleep (even if only in 1-2 hour stretches) without the contents of my stomach, currently perched in an unnaturally squashed, elevated, and profoundly sloshy state atop my uterus, quietly trickling their way back up my esophagus.  That said, I find it amazing that pregnancy isn’t significantly more uncomfortable, when you consider the increasingly insane contortions that my internal organs have been forced into for the better part of a year.

One recent matter of no small curiosity has been my progressively more ridiculous shape.  Although I can’t get a good photo of myself these days to save my life — I am just too vain to want to put photos of myself with that many apparent chins on the internet without good reason — my torso is accommodating its extra charge by growing straight out, not side to side.  The only real stretch marks that I’ve obtained are located in an uneven splotch directly above my navel, which I regard with some alarm — like, there’s just not that much more room right there for outward expansion.

More to the point, I’m serving as a ready reminder of why we joke about smuggling beach balls or watermelons when we talk about pregnancy.  Because dang, you guys, I look remarkably hemispherical when viewed in profile.  I had Pete take a photo to corroborate this:

… and took it into Photoshop to prove my point:

It comes as no small consolation to see that my third trimester is so geometrically correct.

I’m not really one for superstition, or tradition just for tradition’s sake.  I like to use birthdays as an excuse to make a cake, but not the same cake.  (So many fine cake recipes in this world, so little time, you know?)  There’s not anything that I must always consistently do or eat on Christmas, or birthdays, or whatever.

But last year — as in, one year ago — was the first year that I made two New-Year’s-specific food items, in the form of pizza sfincione on December 31st and black-eyed pea dip on January 1st.  I can’t conclusively state that they caused good luck in 2011, but last year was also the year of job success! for Pete and pregnancy success! for me and moving 1800 miles success! for the collective Jejune household, and those are three sufficiently significant points of anecdata for me to keep making the same pizza and the same dip every new year.  More importantly, they’re both quite tasty.

The last third of 2011 was a pretty quiet one for us; I have to wonder if one of the reasons why people have children is because it gives you such a convenient way to lend your passing years deep significance.  (Not that I’m griping about that, mind you.  But I’m guessing that the arrival of my firstborn sometime within the next month will handily overpower my memories of 2012, without me really needing to do much about it.)  And then much of 2012 will be dominated by me just trying to find my equilibrium amongst all of the newborn haze, and trying to discover the meaning of my (new) life once its daily rhythms are being dictated by the wants and needs of a tiny, crabby force who remains stubbornly independent from my own control and who has no respect for my desire for a certain weekly ration of knitting and reading time.

(That’s the yet-to-appear baby, by the way.  But Garth and Sebastian, man — they can be needy little independent forces, if not exactly tiny.)

So my goal for 2012 seems pretty clear: not to just tread water, or to do okay, but to keep stretching my comfort zone.  Even when it means endlessly transferring a small child in and out of the infant car seat, or losing even more sleep while at the apparently sisyphean task of doing some dissertating while taking care of a small child, or grappling with all of the additional apparatus and mental baggage that traveling with a baby entails, or sending out innumerable job applications for positions that I’ll probably never get, or finding my new landmarks.  (Or at least interesting places that are within a day’s drive from Dallas.)  To keep trying to go places, in other words, even when there’s a greatly increased risk of failure or in-public diaper blowouts along the way.

Not to mention learning to enjoy motherhood, with all of the loudness and unwieldy bodily functions that such a thing entails.

Here’s to another goddamn new year!