I’ve seen the Thursday Thirteen meme around forever, and have been meaning to play along. This is another one of those posts I’ve been writing in my head for days and pecking out in stolen moments over the last week or so.
Thirteen things I’d forgotten about newborns:
- How you start hearing phantom cries in the white noise of the shower or dishwasher or vacuum cleaner, and how you are always listening for them, even when baby is out of audible range — like, in the car with Daddy.
- How the three hours between feedings can seem like an entire day during daylight hours, and pass in the blink of an eye overnight. As in, “Oh my god, I swear I just closed my eyes – and you want to be fed AGAIN?”
- The way their feet, still reflexively curled as they were in utero, get stuck in the legs of the sleeper or curl up in the belly part.
- The way they gaze at you with the deepest and most intensely searching looks, and how you’re sure that you’ve just made an important cerebral connection with them, just before the biggest poops.
- How a fresh diaper acts as a laxative, stimulating the bowels to move almost invariably.
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How open air acts as a diuretic, and that baby boys love to make fountains.
- How much they hate it when you sit down. Under no circumstances may your butt come to rest on any piece of furniture. You can stand, you can sway, you can walk, you can dance and you can pace, but even if you maintain the exact positioning and orientation of your standing self as you ease your body into a sitting position, they will know and they will complain.
- That it’s HARD mothering a newborn. Intensely gratifying, but oh so very hard.
- That it’s easier to zip an angry cat into a wetsuit than wrangle a wriggling newborn into a sleeper, especially at 3 am.
- The endless loads of laundry. (I know, I’ve done nothing but kvetch about laundry and shovelling since the baby was born. But if I could eliminate those two things, I swear I’d have a whole extra day each week!)
- That they are fiercely strong little buggers. If a newborn doesn’t want to straighten his leg so you can bathe behind his knee, he damn well won’t do it despite the fact that you may be 18 times his size and 38 and a half years more experienced.
- The way the first smiles make it all worth while. You don’t realize how much you value an actual interaction with your kids until you start getting those first beaming, natural and gorgeous smiles. I’ve told Lucas that each smile buys him three hours of crying… lucky for both of us, he’s building up credit by the day.
- That it’s folly to think you have time to blog 13 things at all with a newborn in the house!