Jailbreak

Another first: I left the house, with the baby, without another adult, this morning.

The lady who taught our Lamaze course runs a first-time moms group twice a month, and this was the first opportunity for me to take myself and the B to it. (She was too young to venture out two weeks ago.)

As a side note, I know the baby loves me. I know this because she has developed sleep-related separation anxiety. She is having trouble sleeping apart from me or from the mister, so much so that even if I lay her down while she's asleep, when she hits a blip in her 20-40 minute long newborn sleep cycle, she wakes up enough to realize she's not lying on her mom or dad and she gets very uncertain and sad. It is lovely to be needed like this and I will miss this sort of desperate love and need she has for us when she is 16 and hates me, but it leads to me having very very little sleep as a general rule.

Given that, when it was 6:00 a.m. and I'd gotten about forty-five minutes of sleep (that is not an exaggeration) and I'd have to get up around 8:30 to get us out the door to make the group meeting, I really didn't think I'd be able to go. She went reluctantly to sleep around 7 a.m., and I fell asleep soon afterward, having disengaged the alarm clock. As it turns out, she woke up at 8:30 on her own and wanted a change and some food, so I ended up awake right when the alarm would have gotten me up had I not turned it off when I thought I'd have to call the trip off.

A shower and a little food later (for both of us) and I felt awake enough to drive, so I packed up the car with the nine thousand things you have to have with you when you have a newborn and headed to the hospital, where the group meets.

It was really nice to get out of the house, nice to have her with me, scary to have her in a rear-facing car seat where I couldn't see her, and REALLY nice to meet some other people in the same sleep-deprived, shell-shocked, still-getting-used-to-being-a-mom place that I'm in right now. I'm still tired, but now I don't feel quite so run over by life as I did at 5 a.m. when she just wouldn't settle down apart from me.

And in a little bit of serendipity, the speaker this session was a lady who was there to talk about sleep schedules, separation anxiety, and discipline problems. I picked up a few ideas that may help the B sleep by herself for a few hours at a time, or at least begin to help her not be so frightened or lonely when she comes out of one of her short little sleep cycles, which is the first step toward her being able to put herself back to sleep.

Also, there were some bigger babies there. I hear they get bigger than B is now. I'm not buying it. I keep looking at those 3M clothes in her closet and I can't imagine her ever getting that big. Her newborn stuff is still kinda loose on her, for heaven's sake, and she's really only supposed to be two weeks old right now.

Oops. Someone's ready for lunch.