One Month of Two

Elsie has dubbed this, "The Snuggle Train"

From the frazzled but happy mom, a brief summary of Lucia's first month.

Lucia is strong and healthy overall, though she did contract a small cold before the holidays which culminated in a nasty thrush infection for the both of us: Lucia in her mouth and I on my nipples.  The candida put a damper on the MUCH BETTER start I had to breastfeeding this time around.  We are being treated and my nipples are healing.

Lucia sleeps well for an infant, but not as well as she did two weeks ago.  When I get two or three stretches that add up to 8 hours, it is enough, and when I don't, then I am exhausted and grumpy.  I'm getting better at making those 8 hours happen, which means I am getting better at everything else, too.

Elsie continues to impress me in her role as big sister.  I feared her welcome would dissipate with the frenetic excitement of the arrival, but it hasn't.  Elsie loves her new baby sister in a way I never dreamed possible.  In a previous life, before my struggles with pregnancy loss, I had wanted so badly to space my children close in age.  Losing the chance to build my family the way I had imagined it compounded each individual pregnancy loss.  Now that I see my family grow in this different way, I understand and appreciate the benefits of a larger gap and the family I have.  Elsie is ready for her little sister in a way she never could have been at 2. 

***

Sometime before Christmas but after the baby, Hub furiously knocked on the nearest piece of wood and said,

"We are really killing this parenting thing the second time around."  

Let me start over.

Sometime in the first few weeks of Lucia's life, full on a dinner of stuffed shells that Elsie and I had cooked ourselves and we had eaten together as a family, Hub and I sat nestled like sardines at opposite ends of our tiny couch.  Elsie was asleep in her bed, Lucia in her basket.  We parents were enjoying some quiet down-time, just the two of us, reading our magazines.  Hub looked up from his and said,

"We are really killing this parenting thing the second time around."

And how!

That is not to say that I cook dinner every night, nor are we guaranteed reading time in the evening.  Plenty of days, my patience plummets with my blood sugar and I text Hub to tell him to hurry home because I just can't handle another minute of my day and I need to throw a baby at him the second he walks through the door.  I shoot dirty sleep-envy stares at everyone in the house when I don't manage to piece together enough to feel human.  My nipples hurt today.  My parenting is far from perfect.  The difference, this second time, is that all this chaos is steeped in a sense of calm confidence that was entirely absent when Elsie was a baby.

I feared that introducing a second living child was going to make this more than twice as hard.  But I am a more skilled parent this time.  I have more methods and more resources (parent friends!) than I did four years ago.  Most importantly, these past four years have taken my inner perfectionist and beaten her beyond recognition.  Hub and I have done a great deal of hard learning since Elsie was born.  It is showing in our parenting and in our teamwork now that Lucia has joined us. 

So when we do manage to cook dinner and get the girls to bed and sit and enjoy some parent time, I'm not stressing about whether that pacifier is going to ruin my baby's palate.  I know I'll sleep more again someday soon.  I have confidence that breastfeeding will stabilize, and understand that if it doesn't, formula isn't poison.  I don't worry about the state of my marriage because I'm crabby and don't want to be touched.  Instead of stressing about all these things, I can smile back at Hub and give him a high-five.

We are really killing this parenting thing.