Deer Reese,
Our condo cools to sixty degrees by the middle of the night. That space heater I set up has your room at seventy-two, and I had put you in extra layers, so I freak out about it being too hot and unplug it. The room cools again. We play out this drama around 3:30 am when you wake up unhappy, a little hungry, and difficult to soothe back to sleep. Eventually, I leave you, still whining, but that does the trick after a bit. Post-bottle, my presence was more of a distraction than an aid (unless I intended to rock you in my arms until morning).
Someday, you will not care much about how much you slept each day and night, but it consumes me. Seven months into your life and I have every day recorded in Huckleberry. Bottles, sleep, diapers, baths. You take a bath every day now for the joy of it and I put it in the app. On daycare days you come home with a sheet that logs your day and I enter it faithfully each evening. Today you had 2 hours and 52 minutes of naps and had 31 ounces of formula. This is a level of micromanagement I will have to interrupt for both of our sanities. Eventually.
For the first time today, I had a day off work and still took you to daycare. There was a moment of guilt, but it passed quickly at the opportunity to grocery shop, clean out my closet, scrub my bathroom, and wash my sheets all while listening to a D&D podcast (currently, The Rotating Heroes Podcast). At some point in adulthood, self-care became time to do chores for hours uninterrupted. In the afternoon, I work on more worldbuilding for a future D&D campaign while sitting at the kitchen counter, space heater blowing at my feet. I didn’t get to as much baby-proofing as planned, but we made good progress yesterday. I did, however, put latches on the bathroom cabinets. (Tonight, it looks like that was just in time.)
You are missed when you’re not here though. While I make the bed I find myself talking to my cats, making “whoo” noises to entertain them while I float the sheet up and over the mattress. It takes me a minute to remember I can be silent. I have become so used to narrating every motion for you and it brings me joy later when I bring you inside and up the stairs, sing-songing as we go.
The house is still cold. I keep feeling the vents to make sure heat is coming out and it’s trying but the “extreme cold warning” we’re under is no match for this 1979 ventaliation. I move the space heater around with us this evening — the kitchen, the living room, your bedroom — and then spend more time trying to distract you from going after it. Space heaters and humidifiers look like teddy bears to you. You pout when I put you back by your baby-friendly blocks.
I get you to smile again when we play “Where’s the fox?” on your bed. I take the little stuffed animal and say “bye-bye” and put him out of sight before asking you “Where’d the fox go? Where’d he go?” and then having him pop up from different points on the bed. You love that. And then I realize the stuffed animal is a deer, not a fox, and I’m laughing too. We decide to name the deer, Fox. I’m sure I’m going to confuse the hell out of you later with that.
As a new parent who has not spent much time around infants as a whole, sometimes I’m not sure what’s universal behavior and what’s uniquely you. Like how, after fussing with your bottle while sitting on my lap, you reach for it while on your stomach on the playmat. You push up on your arms, lean your head back, and drink like a gerbil from a water dispenser.
It is adorable.
Love,
Mama