papa’s gonna buy you a mockingbird
November 3rd, 2008things are a whirlwind – they need to slow down, because hazel looks like a completely different baby than the one that i birthed a little over two weeks ago. i can’t believe how much she literally changes every day. i thought maybe it was just me, but my grandparents & mom said that she definitely changed and got bigger from the time they arrived on thursday till when they left yesterday :)
let’s see… she had a checkup last week and had gained almost double the average weight-gain for a newborn – her appetite and my boobs make a good team! she also passed her hearing test, which i wasn’t worried about because she reacts to noise (except paisley barking, which has been constantly imprinted on her brain since her hearing developed in-utero). i’m guessing she is at least eight pounds right now, but we don’t own a scale and she doesn’t have another checkup until next week. she is still basically on the same “schedule” that she’s held since birth – sleeping well through the night waking up two or three times, lots of awake time in the mornings before lunch and two really long naps though the afternoon and evening, with more super-awake time around 9 or so. i took her alone in the car to meet my family and lead them back into the city and TOTALLY freaked out – mikey couldn’t get out of an obligation, and i was terrified of getting a flat tire or any number of minor catastrophes. nothing happened of course, and we had a great visit with them. she loves her ma & pa & grannie annie & can’t wait to go home in two weeks and meet everyone else. things my mom declared at the border coming into canada: dog food, diapers, mister bee potato chips, and a huge bottle of whiskey.
we went out to eat twice and she did really well both times – slept mostly, waking up to eat with minimal fuss. yesterday after they left we both napped and then went to meet scott & alex and see chris do a solo show at dinnertime at a nice quiet, warm pub with yummy food. best idea ever – it’s the perfect time to take her out, the perfect place, the perfect baby music, and he’ll be doing these shows through at least january (except for this coming sunday – boo). she wore her banjo onesie (which only fit because it was layered over a long-sleeved shirt), also got to meet max, who she’ll get to hear sing the saturday after thanksgiving, and got a song dedication as soon as we sat down and got her un-bundled – a version of “hush, little baby” on gourd banjo, which she appeared to love because she promptly went to sleep. chris did a version of dylan’s “shelter from the storm”, a song he wrote about old dogs, and between his two sets the bartender played the flaming lips’ song that we all sang for mario & jenn’s wedding – all three made me cry a lot. chris held her for awhile and professed his fear of soft spots, which i think mikey found comforting.
twice in the past week the song prison on route 41 by iron & wine and calexico has made her stop screaming in the car.
we broke down and gave her a pacifier (or soother if you are canadian) last wednesday night, which i wasn’t sure if we would ever do, but i’d bought a package for “desparate measures”. i’m not quite sure why i tend to balk at pacifiers – maybe because i see so many babies parked in their strollers or carseats, pretty much being ignored, content with their little piece of plastic instead of a human. mikey and i were at a wedding reception once where a baby near us NEVER left his stroller, and never made a peep because he was “plugged” – even he was bothered by it, and typically didn’t noticed these things before our own kids were imminent. anyway, we didn’t know if we’d ever want to give her one, but last wednesday i think her tummy was bothering her and she was fussy and she just REALLY needed to suck on something. i knew she wasn’t hungry because she’d nursed until she just started messing around (luckily she is toothless – these would not be fun times for my nipples), but she was trying to go to sleep and getting really frusturated trying to cram both of her fists and my nipple into her mouth all at the same time. she wasn’t crying or upset, just really frantic with her eyes darting back and forth and limbs flailing and clearly exhausting herself. so we popped a pacifier in her mouth to see if it would help her get herself organized and she was asleep in three minutes. i wasn’t worried about it messing up her latch by giving it to her so early because even though she’s a pro, i know that one or both of us could get lazy and have to start from scratch no matter what else is going in her mouth… i’d rather have her be able to get to sleep. it’s also been good for mikey to be able to give her that if she doesn’t want his finger and i’m in the shower or something. and while right now i have all the time in the world to lay in bed with her and read the entire new issue of mothering while she sucks until her little heart is content, we can’t always do that (hello, 8 hour car trip home in two weeks!)… and since there have been times over the past few days where she CONSTANTLY needs something to suck on, one of my parenting “ideas” is already down the drain. it’s pretty liberating, although i am still kind of inclined to hide the pacifier in public. paisley has her eye on them too – bets on how many of them the dog will manage to steal and destory before hazel gives them up?
at two weeks she reacts immediately to my voice or mikey’s. she never wakes up immediately crying – she is still really good with her precrying noises, and often wakes up and whimpers and puts herself back to sleep for another hour. my mom and i were showing her animal flashcards made for tiny babies and she was fixated on the sides that were black images on white backgrounds, but not so much the reverse. she’s always lookng at lights on the ceiling or lamps or windows with light coming in, or nearby faces. she’s effectively mastered the art of poking out her bottom lip and producing two tiny tears that break my heart all over the floor. she hasn’t had many baths but she mostly enjoys them. she still swims in most of her clothes except for her GIGANTIC feet, which fit nicely in socks made for 3+ months, and a few itty bitty onesies that jess sent with my grandparents (we didn’t buy any teeny tiny newborn clothes in case we had a big baby, and we actually didn’t get a lot of hand-me-downs because everyone we know up here is still having babies, so the smallest she has is 0-3 months and a little big). between those and a bag of cute clothes from grandma, she now has some pink things (and lots more brown!). she likes to suck on her fists but mostly the sides of her hands or my arm. i noticed lots of little hairs on her blankets last week and it’s noticably thinner, but i think it has pretty much stopped falling out now. her cord stump fell off on friday, so as soon as we get caught up on laundry tonight or tomorrow i’m going to see if she fits into her cloth diapers yet (she didn’t last week and you couldn’t fold them down far enough anyway).
i think the only non-baby news i have is related to Tomorrow. my absentee ballot never arrived. when they (tyler county) sent my application they put a regular US stamp on it, but i didn’t really think anything of it (sometimes they go through anyway)… so i was wondering if they’d done the same thing. not to give credence to stereotypes, but what do i expect from somewhere where my polling place is listed as “wick, bill monroe’s trailer”? a friend from home told me she’d called to check on her uncle’s ballot and they sort of just said “oops, we must have missed that one, your application got filed away”, whatever that means, and she’s guessing they did the same thing to mine. i was holding out until friday because mom could have taken it back for me since it would have arrived way too late to mail it in time, but no luck, and no mail on the weekends here. since we don’t have the paperwork we need to take hazel across the border that means i couldn’t just drive home to vote (and i would have), so i thought i was stuck and pretty upset about it. one of our fellow expats sent me an email with information about federal write-in absentee ballots, which i’d never heard of – if you are miliarty or otherwise overseas and your ballot doesn’t arrive in time, you can print some online paperwork and fax in that ballot, which is (supposedly) officially counted even though the paper copy won’t arrive to match with it until after the deadline. i don’t know if i should 100% trust it (i don’t 100% trust any of it, anyway), but it’s better than nothing. the night before hazel was born i watched bobby to try to get myself really excited about obama, but only succeeded in making myself sad that i’ve never had a candidate that i COULD get that excited about. my friends and coworkers here – who have no say in something that DOES vastly affect them – ARE that excited about him. and he’s the only intelligent choice that i could ever make on behalf of hazel and luca and all of my friends who have no say, who just have to watch us destroy ourselves and the rest of the world, or not. there has never been any question about who i would vote for, but i still feel like i could hope for something more… even though i am quite certain that anyone who ever wants that sort of power will make me uneasy.
anyway. i just wasted way too much of my hazel-nap-time blogging. etsy! dishes! floor to sweep! bathtub to scrub! oy!
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listening: chris in my head
reading: wicked; browsing some of the toy-safety websites mentioned in the new mothering
