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June 16, 2004
10 Months
This is a hard entry for me to write. It took me a lot longer than I would have liked to finish the 9.5 Month update, because I haven’t felt like writing lately, but more on that later. It is still hard to write, but is vitally important for me to write this and keep a dialogue open with me and the world. Firstly, there are some things I want to write about first before I delve into the personal stuff. So here goes.
My fitness routine of late has really slacked off. It has been hard in the morning to get in my Pilates, for a number of reasons. I have not been able to get out for walks, for a number of reasons. So, last week, Simon and I both resolved to get back on the bandwagon again. I think that it is important to include some sort of exercise in your life, but more important still, to resume it if you realize that it has fallen by the wayside. So, I am trying to do more Pilates. And I am trying to get out for walks, even just twenty minute ones. We’ll see how this goes!
Some great news now, we have sold our house in Halifax, to a nice couple it seems. We sold it for the same price that we would have gotten with our first decent offer with our previous real estate agent, but we aren’t paying $15,000 in commission. :-) So, it feels a lot better. We were surprised at how quickly after we listed with the new agency that we got the offer. It was quite a bit lower than we wanted, but we countered exactly half-way between our asking price and their offer, and they accepted it! The other reason why we countered so low is that on the offer, we saw that they are applying for a 95% mortgage, so they clearly don’t have a lot of dough to throw around. They are probably trying to buy their first house and have just enough for a deposit and the down payment. So, we didn’t really want to push the point with this couple. The offer is conditional of course on them getting the mortgage papers in order, and we have just found out a couple of days ago that it is a done deal, the mortgage was accepted and we have, officially, sold our house! Woooohooo! The closing date is July 5th, and we are going to go out to a nice dinner to celebrate. :-)
Simon has been really stressed about how long the house has been on the market, and about our finances. We don’t really know where we stand with any of our finances right now. I think we have four lines of credit open actually, only one of which doesn’t have a balance. So, yeah, it’s been a little stressful. I know for a fact that Simon hasn’t purposely checked the balance on our accounts in any of our two banks since we moved here, perhaps even before that. And this is for someone who is almost always thinking of ways in which to put a little money in this account each month, a little over here, this into RRSP’s, this into the GIA… He is almost constantly thinking of balancing and re-balancing our funds. So, I probably don’t even know half of what he is going through, it is probably the proverbial iceberg situation. Add to that that we are in a new house, with all the things that new houses require, like window coverings, but that is an obvious one. How about, re-stocking the pantry, new kitchen cloths, baskets to store things in new situations, a power-vacuum head because the builder didn’t supply one… the list is seemingly endless. So, it will be great to have the money in the bank from this sale. One of the lines of credit will HAVE to close, as it is secured on the house that we no longer own, so that will be simplified, and we will pay off another totally, and close that one hopefully, leaving only two, one of which we don’t use. And since interest rates are going up in September and our finances are somewhat more simplified now, we will be going in to negotiate on a mortgage and lock in those low rates while we can. Whew, now THAT feels a lot better than it did even two weeks ago. Amazing how a little good fortune can go a long way. :-)
Other house related news, we officially have new neighbours! A couple came by last week and were looking around in the house for an hour. They then came by the following night for another hour. You don’t do that if you aren’t really, really serious about buying the property. When I got a look at them outside as they were leaving, they seemed great, closer to our age than our other neighbours, which is nice, maybe they’ll have kids when they get in the house. Simon met them just this past weekend, they were on their way somewhere with another couple and stopped by the house. He said they were slightly French, and again, seemed really nice. He told them to feel free to stop by the house as I stay at home, so hopefully I’ll get to meet them soon. Don’t know when they close on the house, although they did meet with our builder and had a home inspector working outside one day as I left to pick up Simon. Now, who knows if this will put more pressure on the builder to actually complete the last things on the properties.
As for this aspect of our lives, we are getting a little closer to resolution, but not from the direction that we initially wanted. We have started legal action against our builder. :-( Initially, I had talked to the lawyer about how to approach our builder to even get dates on when he was going to complete items still to be done around the house and property. He emailed back a list that had items scheduled until the end of July. Do you know what that means around here? Summer is over by then. And Iain and I, let alone Brook, have not even been out into our OWN yard. The builder keeps saying that we can go out to the park across the street, but excuse me, I paid for a HOUSE, with a yard in the front and back, not a condo, thank you very much. I have literally been trapped inside of my house since we moved here, initially because we had so many trades still to complete work and I needed to be home to supervise, but then after those were all done, I had no where to go. :-( Our front porch is two steps long, nowhere to sit on it really, and our nice French patio doors out the back have a 4.5 foot drop to the soil below. Yeah, that’s right, we don’t even have a back deck yet. Secondly, he told us that we had to make a decision as a group as to when we all wanted him to do the sod. A group? Excuse me, did we purchase our houses as a group? NO! We purchased as individuals, meeting only after we had all moved in. He is again trying to screw with us. Lastly, he is going on vacation for THREE weeks in July. And his wife’s family is from Venezuela. He might not ever come back, and we’ll be on the hook for all the remaining work to be done! We still have the $15,000 holdback in our lawyer’s trust, but don’t know yet how we get access to that money to use it to complete items.
A few days after that email from the builder, we got another. We had just had a huge rainstorm and noticed that we had a lake forming beside the house at the back. The ground had sunk over a foot from the rain, and why? Because the builder didn’t backfill properly after the foundation was poured. :-( So the second email said that because of the sinking, he probably wasn’t going to do the landscaping or sidewalks or fencing until August or September, but maybe not until NEXT year. Hello? Simon and I were literally seeing red at this point, we were so upset by this email. And of course, he always emails on the weekend, leaving us to fester about it until Monday. So, we sent off an email to our lawyer, attaching the builder’s two previous emails and I phoned him first thing on Tuesday morning, after he didn’t get back to us on Monday. He drafted up a Demand Letter, which is the precursor to launching a civil suit against a person. In the letter, it states that the work deadlines suggested by the builder are absolutely and completely unacceptable. Also is the proposition that he is going away for three weeks unsatisfactory, because of his trend to fall behind on items already. If the items are not completed by June 22nd, two full weeks after the letter is sent, we are pursuing legal action without further notice.
We have not had any contact with the builder since the lawyer sent the letter out: no phone calls, no front door meetings, no emails. Furthermore, no work has been completed since the letter has gone out. :-( All the things that were in the ‘schedule’ that he gave us for this time period have not been done, save one: the doors and windows for the garages have been installed, one week later than they were supposed to be in. I don’t know what the next step is, we shall see in this coming week, as the June 22nd deadline comes up. Both Simon and I didn’t particularly want to go this route, we paid close to half a million dollars for this home and are being screwed by a builder who seemed nice and easygoing initially. It makes us both really sad that it has come to this.
I went down to Jenn’s house last week to have a visit that was sorely needed. We had a great time, the house she is living in right now is brand new, she is renting it until their house is finished in September, when they will move, again. Sam was a little better with Iain this time and Jenn said that he was saying he was going to see Iain earlier that morning. Isn’t that sweet? They played with all of his toys for a while and then because it was a spectacular day, we decided to go down to the park to sit and chat while Sammy played in the playground. How nice it was to sit in the dappled shade and just chat! And while I don’t agree with everything she says, if we only made friends with people with whom we shared the same beliefs with, life would be SO bland. One thing I do like about her is that she is real, she says what she wants to say, which is something that I really like in others, and try to do myself in my own life. Honesty is so nice, even if it doesn’t jibe with your own values. We left at noon, when Iain needed to go down for his nap, and because she is going away for three weeks, it will be awhile before we have another visit.
One thing that we did talk about was how I had been feeling so lonely in this new city, but also how I have been feeling so lonely over at iParenting. Now, I know that this may sound strange, but it is how I feel, and since it is my diary, I can write about anything I want. So, I have been feeling lonely. For one thing, I used to have a lively TTM Board and now it is pretty quiet. There are several reasons for this, one of which was my absence for so long, entirely my fault, but I have been posting regular entries for about 6 weeks now and still, the board is pretty quiet. Another reason is that I belong to Mom’s Today and there are SO many other writers that I think some of us are really being lost in the hugeness of the choices. Which is unfortunate. The other reason why I feel lonely is that there is no one else of the Mom’s Today Diarywriters that is close to where I am as a mother. What I mean is, all the other mums have children much older and are not dealing with the things that I am dealing with with Iain. There are two other mums that I know of that have kids Iain’s age, but they have either one more child, or two, and their lives, because of the extra children are SO different. It seems so silly, but it’s how I feel, and it’s important to talk about how I feel. Also, with the four new births of four other of my iParenting friends (if I may be so forward to call them friends!) so close to each other in terms of birth dates, this has really brought it home again for me that I don’t have anyone to talk to like they do. Again, it may seem silly to you, but please don’t post and berate me for these feelings: they are real, I feel that they are valid, but most of all, they are mine.
Taking a note from Tara’s last entry over at BF Today, I am going to have a little chat about my hair. Currently, it is just brushing my shoulders, quite a bit longer than it has been of late. It is still curly from the perm I had, even though it has grown out considerably since I had it done, it appears that the curl is working even with the hair that wasn’t permed. Which is nice. The colour, too, is growing out, so I want to re-colour it. The thing is, I have just found my very first grey hair. Just one strand, but isn’t even one strand too much when it is your very first? We were driving in the car and I was putting on lipstick using the little mirror in the shade-thingy, and caught something glinting in the sun. I thought it odd and tried to isolate the hair. I did manage to get it alone, examined it as best I could and demanded to Simon that he look at it. Well, he was driving, but he managed to look at it for a moment. I asked him if what colour it was and he said ‘not brown.’ That was enough for me. I started to lament the fact that I had a grey hair and what was I going to do about it, and he just laughs. Yeah, well, you can’t see HIS grey hair because he shaves his head! Not fair! :-) I yank it out, it doesn’t hurt too much and I examine it very closely. It is definitely grey. Halfway down, it is brown, signifying when I had my hair coloured last time, just after Iain was born. Does that mean something? I refuse to acknowledge the fact that perhaps it is because of Iain, my baby boy, that I have this very first grey hair. I will not think about that. So, I am going to colour my hair, and I think I’m going to go a nice red this time. I haven’t been red since I was going out with Simon, early in our relationship, almost 5 years ago now, so it is time again. And, I have also decided to let it grow and see what it does in this climate with longer hair. Who knows, I may like what my hair does here. If I don’t, well, I can always perm it again, or cut it short. Hair is wonderful that way, it always grows back and you can almost always cut it. :-) I will make sure to post a picture on Iain’s site if I am having a good hair day and remember to take a photo!
I had a talk with my Mum just a few days ago and she said some really amazing and complimentary things about both me, and Simon, and us together. It was one of the nicest conversations that I think I have ever had with her. She acknowledged all the work that Simon and I have done since we have met each other, to become financially independent, make smart decisions with our money and our lives, and not to be afraid to take that road and go with it. I was sincerely touched by what she was trying to say. She also acknowledged that my childhood was not easy, and that she wished that she could have taught me things a different way, an easier way than I had learned them. I don’t think she has ever said sorry to me for the things she did to me as a child, and I think that this is the closest I will ever get to an apology from her, and I accepted it.
The other thing that she shared with me was that the pneumonia that she caught from me when I was only eight was actually a gift. She thought of it as a gift, not a deadly disease. I was eight years old and had contracted pneumonic bronchitis and was very, very sick. I don’t remember much from that time period, actually have very few memories from my childhood, but one was watching my mother being carried out on a stretcher down the front stairs and out into an ambulance. I watched this all from the couch in the study, where I had lived for almost three weeks. I was too weak to get up without fainting, too weak to chase after her and tell her I was sorry for making her so sick. I can’t remember how or when I found out, but she almost died in the hospital, she was that sick. And I have lived my life up to this conversation with my mum, thinking that I had literally almost killed her. Isn’t that a terrible weight to carry? She told me though, that she remembers lying in the hallway and was alone for a moment. And in that moment she thought to herself that she could just go and give up, and let herself die. But then she thought that she didn’t want to do that yet, she wanted to live. And so she views this illness that I gave to her as a gift to wake herself up from the sleepwalking that she had been doing in her life up until that point, and to actually LIVE her life from then on. And she complimented me on being able to live my life, because from her perspective, the choices that I am making are consciously made, whereas many of the decisions that she made up until that point were not consciously made. I can’t tell you how much weight has been lifted off my shoulders with this sharing that she and I had. I told her what I wrote above, about my guilt as a small little girl, and she apologized to me for letting me think that for so many years. Things aren’t completely hunky-dory between my mother and I, but after this conversation, they are getting better.
I had a dream last night. It was SO vivid that after I woke up, I had to check out my body to make sure that it didn’t really happen. In the dream, I was pregnant. Very pregnant. I went into labour naturally, I remember that, but then the next thing that I remember is that I was lying on an operating table, having a caesarean. It gets kinda fuzzy at that point, time passes in the dream faster than it should have. What I do remember is that I didn’t know if the baby was a boy or a girl. I kept asking and finally, was told that the baby was indeed a girl. And the feeling that I had as I was told it was a girl was SO strong that it literally woke me up. So, I woke up with the feeling that I had just had a caesarean and that a baby girl was born from me. I had to check my belly to make sure that it had not happened, the feelings were so strong, it was eerie…Perhaps there is a little girl waiting for me in the future…
Speaking of babies… Simon and I have talked about when we will start TTC for the Little One, Second Edition. There are a lot of ‘ifs’ in this scenario, but I am hoping that they all work out. Firstly, my Mum is taking us to Belize for Christmas. She does big family get-togethers during the holidays, last year it was Puerto Vallarta, and we didn’t go because it was just about as far as you can fly from Halifax and we had a 4 month old. We were dedicated to NOT fly with Iain until he was a year old. So this year, it is Belize. She flies us all down there, we stay in a fabulous resort or private villa, and then flies us back. Incredibly generous, but this is something that has come around more since her mother and brother died. It is her way of making sure she spends time with her family each and every year. So, we were thinking that we could start TTC there, that it would make it really special. BUT, and that’s a big but, there are some conditions that need to be met first.
Okay, I have to be down to the weight that I want to be at first. I don’t have to be down there and stay there for a certain amount of time, I just have to get down there. I was in that process when we got pregnant with Iain, I gained very slowly with him, only in the last few weeks did the weight pack on with my body swelling up with water. This time, I want to be 20lbs lighter than I am right now. I probably would be closer to that goal if we hadn’t had to live like how we’ve been living the past couple months as both Simon and I have gained weight with the stress and inability to cook properly lately. But, we are getting better and have already started to loose weight again, both of us. Second thing is that I have to get my period again. Nope, don’t have it yet, and only pumping three times a day. Third thing is that I have to stop pumping, and that obviously goes hand in hand with getting my period back. So, here is the plan. IF I am getting down in weight around the end of October, then I will stop taking the birth control pills (Micronor if any preggos wishing to breastfeed are reading this). At that time, I will also drop to two pumps day. I will continue on two pumps until the end of November. Also at this time, I will be dropping my domperidone dosage down as well. I am currently taking only 40mg, down from 80mg. I will drop to 30mg for two weeks, then 20mg for two weeks, and see how not taking the drug to increase my prolactin levels affects my milk supply. If I find that my milk drops off dramatically with decreasing that much, it just means that I won’t have such a problem weaning from the pump. There will be nothing TO pump if it drops off dramatically. I will then go to one pump a day at the beginning of December, moving that one pump to every couple of days to just pump off the engorgement and voila, I will be weaned from the pump.
Iain will continue to have breastmilk in his bottles, it will just be from my freezer stash. While we are in Belize, I don’t know what he will have, I don’t know if I will be able to take frozen milk or if he will just have soy milk for that time and then go back to breastmilk when we return home. We will have to make that decision later. I am hoping that my period will return in November, so that I will have one cycle before I leave, but of course, I have no clue as to what is going to happen. So many BFing mums have wonky cycles when their period returns, so it is hard to say what is going to happen in reality. My cycles were short, 27 days, with a very short LP, the longest one was only 11 days, so it is possible, if I return to that, that I could have almost two cycles before we leave… Oh, there are so many ifs, maybes, buts… That is the plan, we’ll see how it goes.
As for that freezer stash, it has grown to over 30 days of milk for Iain. 30 days! That is about four chicken boxes, by our measurements. :-) I have close to 140 bags of 6oz bottles for my little guy, and won’t use them up until they get close to their expiry, which won’t be until next October and November, by the early expiry date. I am still able to put a bottle away every couple of days, so it is growing, but not by the leaps and bounds that it was just a couple of weeks ago, because as I mentioned above, I have dropped my domperidone dosage down. I just don’t need to be producing that much milk is all, not when we are running out of freezer space for things other than Iain food. :-) After all, I still need room for muffins, loaves, stews and soups. You know, nourishment for Simon and I, so that I can then produce the food that Iain requires… Vicious circle it is :-)
Okay, time for the personal stuff. As you may have noticed through this entry, my tone has been more subdued, and I haven’t really been writing with the same amount of enthusiasm as I usually have in my entries. And as I said in the beginning, the last entry of Iain’s was also difficult to write. Time to stop beating around the bush on this issue. Just today, Simon pointed out to me that I am in a depression. Again. I had my first post-partum depression when Iain was three weeks old, and two other depression episodes previous to that, so this is not new to me. That I have fallen again into the mire and darkness and anger and frustration and deep, deep, deep sadness that is depression has really hit me hard however. Much of the next few paragraphs may not make much sense, or may seem incredibly silly to some of you, but to those of you who have had to deal with this, it will ALL make sense, and will make you remember those times I think. To those of you who think it is silly, perhaps to someone who is NOT in a depression these simple little things really are silly. But to someone who has sunk into that pit of despair, these simple things destroy a day, destroy a week, can destroy yourself. These simple things have brought me to the brink. I am trying to claw my way back to Laura, to the person that I was before, to the mother that I was before. I miss her.
I have been deeply, deeply lonely since I arrived here and despite my baby group that I go to, have not made any mum friends. And not having Simon around is a 6 to 1, half dozen to the other. It was hard having him around all day, every day for the first six months of Iain’s life, just because it was hard to get into a routine when everyday, there wasn’t much to do. But I miss him now, and we hardly see each other now. The mornings he wakes up, gets ready for work while I pump, he eats and is out the door. Most mornings we don’t even get a hug. And then at night, I make dinner, we eat and feed Iain, watch an hour of TV, I feed Iain and pump and come to bed, with him already asleep most nights because it is so late and he gets up so early. Anyway, that’s him and I. I don’t have any friends here, my best friend is 5000kms and a three hour time difference away, and because of the time difference and her going to school twice a week, she is often not home or it is too late to phone. And so I spend my day at the house, doing laundry, cleaning up, putting away groceries, pumping, taking care of Iain and working on my thesis in the remaining time.
I have literally been stuck inside my home, first because of the trades that needed to get in and do work, and then as the depression started, I didn’t want to go out. But where would I go if I DID go outside? My yard is a muddy mess, I have no lawn, no back deck, no fence for privacy. My only entrance in and out of the house is the front door, because there is the deck and stairs there. Do you know how hard it is to push a stroller over uneven and muddy ground to get from the sidewalk to your front door? It’s a lot of work and then what do you do with the muddy stroller? So, I didn’t leave the house except to go shopping or to the baby group. The thing with going out for me is that it is still part of my depression, it is part of the routine that I had built up that I plod around with. The stress of trying to make the builder finish up all of the remaining jobs, fighting him to do it has also been a strong contributing factor in this depression, because it has been two and a half months of dealing with this every single day.
Then trying to deal with selling our house with our terrible real estate agents who didn’t appear to be doing anything over in Halifax. Then trying to ignore our finances while still going out and buying the things that new houses need. Then trying to deal with Simon’s family, who have been completely terrible since before we even moved closer to them, something that they have wanted from the day that we moved away from them. Dealing with and taking this all in, with no outlet for me to unload some of this. And the huge, gigantic amount of guilt that I feel for making Simon move here and us having to deal with all of this. It may not be my fault, but another sign of depression is taking on responsibility and blaming yourself when it truly was not your fault. I do this, blame myself, already as part of my less-than-great attributes, but adding on everything else to that tendency made me feel like I should just crawl back under the rock where I came from. I must be a really despicable person for making my family and my best friend undergo so many difficulties. This is my train of thought many times a day. I blame myself for anything and everything that goes wrong in the day, or even Simon’s day. And I truly believe that it is my fault. That somehow, it is always, always my fault.
It has gotten so bad that all I want to do is lie in bed, in my dark room, under my down blanket, either with Iain or without him and sleep and cry. I have to fight myself not to do that, it takes almost all of my energy to resist that overwhelming urge. I am so sad that I actually almost hear my heart crying as I go about my day.
So I am sad, along with that sadness is a vicious anger at everything as well. I am so tired of taking care of everything, phoning the builder, the realtor, the moving company, the utilities in Halifax to make sure they keep the power on at the house. So I go through the day filled with this anger that covers up the sadness. I am angry at everything, the tradespeople, the other drivers on the road, our builder, our stupid realtor here who has yet to come by with his ‘thank-you’ basket that he has phoned about eight times now, at our neighbours for being so complacent about the fact that we still live in a construction site after 2.5 months of living here. And I have been angry at Simon, for which I am almost ashamed of. But in my demented way of thinking, he has left me in this house, alone, while he gets to go out and work. It is all twisted up and strangled in my mind, one thing on top of another, intertwined with another, surrounded by yet another…
I am sleeping soundly through the night and waking up completely and utterly exhausted, only wishing that I could sleep more and more. I am not waking up when I hear Iain, only when Simon wakes me up after he has been fussing for awhile. I am the one who always goes in to settle him, so it is my job to do that, and I have been ignoring it subconsciously. I am ashamed to say that I haven’t been as good a mother to Iain as I could be lately, because of this all. I have been getting upset at him more easily when he gets into things that he shouldn’t be getting into. And that is my fault. I should be putting those things away, but I am too tired to. I am getting angry at him if he doesn’t settle down and stop being fussy when he is in my arms, but he is probably picking up on my emotional state and is fussy because of that. So it is my fault that he is fussy. And I am angry when he doesn’t go to sleep when he is supposed to, so I either can’t pump or can’t go to bed until he is asleep. But when I pick him up and hold him in my arms, my heart melts still and I know there is hope. I just can’t get to it. The only thing that saves me is holding him and kissing his sweet little cheeks, or the back of his neck, where it is so soft.
I would like to write about what Iain has been up to lately still, so the rest of this entry will be news about him.
Simon started sharing his bananas with Iain several weeks ago, he would take a bite and then let Iain have a bite. Iain started out just sucking the banana, but then started biting into it with his strong little gums (remember that he has no teeth yet) and taking pretty large chunk out of the banana. Well, as soon as he sees a banana now, he will spit out his soother and start mouthing like he is chewing on something, eyeing the banana with a shrewd look. I gave him a banana for dinner last week, a giant one actually, and we call them Simon-size bananas because they are so huge. He ate the entire thing. This fruit was huge, and he happily consumed it all, plus his 6:30 6oz bottle. Is he hollow? I didn’t notice any seams along his sides…Seriously, I don’t know where he fit it all.
Iain did something really cute the last time I was at my Baby Group. It was at the end of the session and I had come up to the nursery to collect my little guy. I walked in and asked where he was, but before anyone could answer, I saw him. He was standing at the toy chest on the far wall and he had already stopped what he was doing and was looking around for me. He heard his mummy’s voice and was looking for his mummy! Is that not sweet? I continued to talk to him, calling his name and asking if he can find me. There were other mums walking into the nursery and picking up their babes too, so he had to look at them, realize that it wasn’t me and continue looking. He is so smart! :-) Okay, I would hope that he could find me, I am after all, his mum, the one and only. All through the searching for me he hadn’t dropped his toy that he held in his hand. However, once he saw me, he dropped it immediately and sat down and started to crawl for me. There were other legs and babies in the way and when he got to me he used the garbage can to stand up and hold onto me...except that it fell down on him and he crashed to the floor, poor boy! He calmed down as soon as I picked him up, he was just happy to be in my arms again.
Iain had not been going to sleep on time for a few nights in a row there, and it had me a little freaked out. He and I would sit together, as always, in the nursing chair and he would drink his last bottle of nice warm milk and drift off. Or seem to drift off. As soon as I laid him down into his crib, he would sit up. Wide awake. So, there were quite a few late nights there for a while, as I would stay up with him, or he would watch his video while I pumped and then I would go down and get him as he had fallen fast asleep in his Megasaucer. Thankfully, by the weekend, it had worked itself out and he was going to sleep again as usual, and I was able to pump without worrying whether I needed to stay up even later with my baby boy, or if I could join my husband in bed and spoon. For a while there we thought for sure that he had decided that he was going to go to bed later. We even woke him up early from his naps with the hope that he would go to bed earlier, but even that didn’t work. He just decided, on his own, that he wanted to stay up late for a bit. :-)
Speaking of bed, Iain’s hair is SO thick now, he is getting bedhead! It is really the cutest thing. What he does when he wakes up is he will either sit himself up and rub his eyes, or he will squirm around on his belly, snuggling deeper into his crib, if that is possible. If he doesn’t have his soother in his mouth, often his hands will shake as he searches for it in the crib, like a little caffeine addict waiting for his morning coffee. Once the soother is in, the shaking stops. And his hair sticks up in all different directions, particularly the top of his head, where it rubs up against one of his stuffed teddy bears in the crib while he sleeps. So he is rubbing his eyes, soother in mouth, sitting up and his hair is all sticky-uppy. Too cute. :-)
Iain is stubborn, that is for sure. He will be quite upset, crying, because I am not in his line of sight, I have walked away for some reason. Instead of just lying on the floor where he is, he will cry and crawl, looking for me. It is so incredibly sweet. I mean, he can really be upset, really crying hard, and still he will crawl (albeit very slowly). You have got to have one giant stubborn streak to be able to do that while that upset, right? He will often pause for a few moments and just be on his hands and knees, crying, and then he will start up crawling again. When he finds me it is like, ‘finally, Mum, I have been SEARCHING everywhere for you, where have you BEEN?’ And I pick him up and snuggle him and he gives those little snuffles that kids do after they have been crying, and everything is fine again because he found me.
Iain loves straws. When we are out and having a meal from a restaurant that gives straws with the drink, we have been letting him ‘suck’ on the straw. To date, he hasn’t been able to figure out what exactly to do with the straw. However, Simon got some Barq’s rootbeer at Costco one night last week and offered it to Iain. Well, Iain chose that moment to put it all together and suck. He loved the Barq’s! I’m standing there shaking my head at my two boys, Simon is laughing and Iain is earnestly sucking, trying to get more. Simon only gave it to him because he was getting so upset that Simon was eating and Iain was not (yeah, he still gets upset like that, although the cuteness of it all is wearing off quickly). Simon tried to take it away to have some himself and marvelled at how much Iain had already drunk. After taking a long sip himself he gave it back to Iain because he was getting upset again, but when we got to the van, I took it away. Barq’s has Bite, you know! Iain was going to be all hopped up on caffeine for the rest of the night :-) When we were all unloaded, Simon polished off the rest of the pop and gave the whole thing to Iain. Well, Iain took out the straw because he figured that it was the thing delivering the good stuff, and played with it all the way home, trying to figure out how to get more of that good stuff. Now, whenever he sees anything with a straw, like my little Rubbermaid container with a straw, he gets really worked up and wants some. I had filled mine with water, as I was thirsty, and while Iain didn’t want water out of his own sippy cup in a previous attempt, he happily drank THIS water. Go figure. I literally had to sneak sips out of it so he wouldn’t go into his ‘throw his head back and arch his body and make the whiny sound.’ So, now, whenever I have a drink, even at home, with a straw, I have to be extra careful and sneaky when I drink it so that I don’t have to share with my 10 month old son! :-)
Lastly, Iain was sick last week...with chicken pox! Let me backtrack to the beginning of the week when it all began. Also, let me preface this by saying that we have chosen to not do any immunizations with Iain. We are delaying them until we feel it is the right time. However, there are many, many cases where children who have gotten the chicken pox vaccine (forget what it is called off the top of my head) still got chicken pox, and the vaccine doesn’t last forever, putting the child, now an adult, at risk of getting shingles, a much more painful sickness, if the adult didn’t get chicken pox as a child. Anyway, on with the tale.
Monday night, Iain fell asleep in my arms at 7:30. We thought that he was just all tired out from the day, and so I carried him upstairs to his crib and settled him in for the night. Well, at 9:00 he woke up. Simon and I thought that we were in for another late night, but he was super cuddly with us and fell asleep just after 9:30, again in my arms. I noticed that in addition to him being really quiet, he was a little warm, but the house was really warm that evening, and so didn’t think about it twice. That night, he woke up at 4:00 am, and wouldn’t go back down to sleep. What I mean is, he didn’t settle down like he usually does, but continued to fuss and cry. We tried to leave him to see if he would just cry it out a bit and relieve that energy and go to sleep, something that worked in the past, he usually calms down after 5 minutes or so. Well, half an hour later, he was still crying. So, I brought him into our bed, where he did fall asleep and slept with us until 5:30, when he started to kick and squirm in his sleep. I put him back into his crib, he slept for half an hour and woke up again. I got up at that point and pumped, there was no point trying to sleep for another hour or so and listened to him crying until he exhausted himself at 6:30 and slept. Simon went off to work, and Iain woke up around 8:00. I took him into bed with me and he drank his morning milk and we snuggled and dozed from 9:00 to 11:45. During that time, he was still restless, waking up with a little cry, but settling down again with my soothing. I noticed again how hot he was, but he is always a little furnace when he sleeps with me, so I again didn’t think twice about his temperature. I got up at noon and we did things around the house, but Iain refused to be put down, he wanted, NEEDED, to be in my arms, quite unusual for him. On the drive home after picking up Simon from work, I told him about the day and we decided to take his temperature when we arrived home. We took it and it was 38.4 C! Well, no wonder he had been acting that way, he had a fever! That temperature is very hot for Iain, he usually is in the low 36 C range. I phoned the doctor and got an appointment for the next morning. We dosed him with Tylenol, the fever went down a bit, and he slept in my arms from 6:30 to 7:30, woke up again and then at 8:45, went down for the night. He slept through the night on Tuesday night, thankfully. He needed his rest after the previous night. The other thing about Tuesday was that I noticed that he didn’t have any poops all day, when he usually will have three. Clearly his body was fighting something and needed to concentrate on that rather than on digesting etc. We made sure to give him lots of milk on Tuesday night as well, instead of solid food.
Wednesday was better, although the fever was back in the morning. He had a little morning nap before we headed out for groceries before the doctor appointment. His temperature was still high at the doctor’s and she said that he appeared to be fine, it was just a temperature. We headed home and I dosed him again with Tylenol. He went down for his nap and when he woke up, the fever was reduced and he happily played and was Destructo in his room. He had had three little poops up to that point and then he had a giant Stinky, and I was so thankful for it, it showed me that his body was able to divert some energy to digesting from fighting whatever it was that was giving him a temperature. He was still happy that evening, chatty and crawling around, much different from the night before! We tried to put him down without giving him Tylenol, but after waking up three times, we dosed him and he went straight to sleep. Again, he slept through the night.
Thursday morning I had to drive Simon to the plant instead of the office, so on the way home I stopped at this spectacular park to have a little walk. Iain drank his bottle in the Chariot, I had set it up so that he could lie down in it, and he dozed throughout the walk after he was done his milk. He had another nap when we got home, we had a shower together, I fed him and he napped again and I also gave him another Tylenol dose, because his fever was again pretty high. When he woke up two and a half hours later, he was my happy, chatty boy again, with the fever quite reduced. He was happy for the remainder of the day and went to sleep fine to sleep all through the night.
Friday he woke up with no fever, and I thought it was all done and over with. We went out to the mall as I had a ton of errands to do there and he was happy and content in the stroller. On the way home I stopped by Shopper’s Drug Mart and passed by the first aid aisle. I look specifically at the calamine lotion for some reason and thought that we ought to really have some of that in the first aid kit, just in case. Well, I got out of Shopper’s and when I got into the van again and looked back at Iain, I saw two spots on his left cheek. I thought it was odd, they weren’t there earlier that afternoon even. When I picked up Simon just a half hour later, there were four spots on his cheeks. I told him about them and we talked on the way home that it might, just might, be chicken pox. We got home and Simon stripped Iain down to his diaper to look at his body. He also read up on what the symptoms were. We were pretty sure that Iain had chicken pox. I phoned up my doctor, but they were closed for the night so I phoned up this Health line where you can talk to a R.N. She confirmed that the symptoms I was describing matched what she was reading for chicken pox… Iain had tiny little spots on his legs and arms when we examined him really closely, and had gotten two more for a total of six on his cheeks.
As I made dinner, I watched them appear like little mushrooms on his face. Soon, his cheeks were just red with the little spots. A couple appeared to almost blister over like how they were supposed to. I returned to Shopper’s after dinner while Simon took care of Iain. I bought every single Aveeno oatmeal product that they had: bath powder, lotion, concentrated lotion with calamine, and also some Benedryl for if the itching got really bad. The antihistamines would cut down on the itching and would soothe him. We changed him for bed and noticed that they were all over his lower legs and forearms, his cheeks were just flaming with them. We taped on socks over his hands in case he started to itch and scratch over night and he went down pretty well, and slept through the night.
On Saturday, he woke up with only two spots on his cheeks. None had blistered over and crusted like they were ‘supposed’ to. There were none on his forearms or legs when I changed his diaper. Simon left to go do some home improvement store shopping, we had a large laundry list that needed to be bought, and I stayed home with Iain. Throughout the morning and early afternoon more appeared, but after he had his nap in the early afternoon, they were gone again. Again they appeared after his nap and throughout the evening, he went down really well that night and slept again until morning. He woke up with none on Sunday morning, and didn’t get any through the day. The chicken pox was gone!
So, here is what we are thinking. I have amazing milk, because it has protected him and given him a fantastic immune system to fight off this illness. Breastfeeding works! :-) Okay, it also might have been a pretty mild variation of the pox, but it was definitely chicken pox, it fit all the symptoms except that the poxes didn’t blister over and then crust over. Another thing, I am SO glad that he got it now, instead of later. There are many reasons for this. It is so much easier to deal with a fussy baby than a fussy two year old, or five year old. You can just tape socks over their hands and they are fine. Can’t do that with an older child, that’s for sure! Now I don’t have to worry about him getting it again as well. The other thing, when his siblings get it, I will have a little helper who already has immunity, and how great is that going to be? So, it all worked out for the best.
**Talk to Me**
Did you have post-partum depression, how long did it last, what did you do to finally kick it? Please tell me your stories.
Have you ever had a breakthrough conversation with your parents (or close friend) about something and how did it change your relationship?
What big childhood illness has your little person had, and how did you deal with it as a parent and as a care-giver (meaning the person who gave the baths, dosed the Tylenol, rubbed the back)?
Namaste, Laura and Iain
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