First Day At Home

Today was my first day at home with the little Monkey.

It was rough.

I started out wrong-footed. The sweet potato gambit worked only too well last night. With a brief interruption for nursing at 9pm, the Monkeyboy slept from 6pm to 3am. That's nine hours, nearly doubling his longest stretch of sleep to date. Normally, he does a 7pm to midnite stretch, then a couple of 3 and 2 hour stretches that bring us to 7am face-grabbing time.

Unfortunately, he did not think to notify the Monkey Daddy of his new plans. So the poor schmuck stayed awake, expecting to give a bottle any time. As a result, I began my first day on the job with 3 1/2 hours of sleep.

He didn't nurse long before Monkey Mama left for work. (She teared up when she did, she later told me.) And the month-old frozen breast milk wasn't doing it for him. (Or was it the way the new bottles were cleaned?) And his tooth hurt. And he needed nap. And then he was too tired and frustrated to eat. Bundling him up to walk the dog in the freezing cold was fine with him, but then that didn't work out because Monkey Mama called and suggested a more recently frozen bag of breask milk. And the dog was whining.

The key to it all, as it so often is, was poop.

Now I promise you as readers and myself as a writer that this blog will not delve too deeply into scatological matters. If experience is any guide, new parents can spend hours and hours talking about poop without repeating themselves. But in this case, poop provides an actual plot point, and can't be avoided.

Anyway, that kind of unlocked the day for us. His mood improved -- he likes being changed, for the social aspect as much as anything. He ate. We had a nice walk. The dog was happy. Everyone napped. (30 minutes was short for both of us, but it was heaven sent.) We went on our outing to the Breastfeeding Center. All was calm. The snow was pretty. I plugged in the Christmas lights.

He refused the next bottle of milk (uh oh), but he ate some sweet potato and water (hooray). He settled in for a couple of hours of griping, teething, and uncharacteristic crying. I must have been stressing him out.

Anyway, Monkey Mama came home, saved the day, etc. etc. and I made broccoli soup while she nursed him to sleep by 7pm. I just gave him his typical midnite bottle, so it's off to bed with me.

G'night.