Hello to my faithful few. I find myself with nothing else to do for a little while except care for a baby, who is currently happily kicking and talking on the floor beside me. No better time to lie here on the floor beside him and write. He occasionally surprises himself by rolling over now, and if he is being held, his legs must be straight and stiff as a board. While I don't like to use the word "good" baby, (because that indicates that there are "bad" babies), he has been an incredibly easy baby. Before making the decision to start trying to make a baby, there was a long, long list of things I had to get willing for- pregnancy, labor and delivery, recovery. Colic. Post partum depression. Losing the baby weight. No sleep. Foregoing all of my normal stress outlets in favor of a kid attached to my boob. If I was even able to breastfeed. Isolating not one person, but two people's food sensitivities. Stinky diapers. Massive amounts of stuff to pack up every time I left the house. Stepping on legos at midnight. Potty training. Terrible twos. Preschool and school and strict schedules (which I can't manage to save my life). Having to be nice all of the time. Teenagers. Puberty. Drivers licenses. The fear or the horrific reality of teenage drivers and the stupid stuff they do that gets them killed. The thought of losing said child.

Well, most of that stuff, from legos on, is still ahead of us. But the rest of it, I have to say, has not been too terrible. Actually, the hardest part of all of this process was the early miscarriages and the pregnancy. It was emotionally and physically exhausting. So many shots and blood draws and panicked moments in which I was convinced I was carrying a dead baby. From the moment my water broke, things sped up and I began experiencing the reality of it and it was not as hard as I had thought it would be. Yeah, labor hurt. A freaking lot. But I never hit my threshold, because I was still able to assess my pain level and give an amount of time I thought I would still be able to last at this level before taking them up on the offer of an epidural. (Granted, my threshold is fairly high. But I expected to hit it and then some.) So in the end, while I would not exactly be in a hurry to repeat the experience, I have good memories of it. Everything that I had prepared myself for- needing pitocin, needing a c-section, baby being posterior, none of it was an issue. No sooner did I get situated in the labor and delivery room, but I was in full fledged labor with contractions hard enough to max out the monitor, and every hour or two, came a report that things were moving exactly on the schedule the hospital staff wanted to see, and in nine hours, right on schedule, I went from 1 cm dilated to pushing out a baby. Which was not a tiny or weak baby, considering that he was born a month early. His APGARs were 8 and 9. He woulda been an eight and a half or nine lb baby had he stayed in until full term. And he was happy. He didn't cry for several weeks after he was born. He grunted, he squirmed, he kicked and punched the air, he hollered and talked, but he patiently put up with us learning how to handle a newborn, hardly noticing when we scratched him with our fingernails, pinched him with snaps on his sleepers, folded him up like a pretzel trying to dress and undress him. Our lack of sleep the first week or two came from our paranoia, not from his sleeping patterns. Every grunt woke me up in full panic mode, if I had managed to drift off to sleep. I literally could not sleep unless he was close enough to hear, smell, and see. Which meant I couldn't sleep with him next to the bed in a bassinet and I was too paranoid to fall asleep with him in our bed. But then sheer exhaustion took over and I slept for several hours before he woke me up to eat, and I realized he could, in fact, function apart from my consciousness.

I went off of dairy and his squirming and grunting and projectile vomiting all but stopped. And it wasn't hard, since I have spent years being more or less vegan, given the availability of health food wherever I am at any given time. I know where all of the pitfalls of being dairy-free are hidden. I even know which incredibly unhealthy cheater foods are dairy free (hello, Oreos and Hershey's Special Dark Chocolate Syrup). At the moment, I am in the process of isolating which foods make him break out in an adolescent-sized case of baby acne, and have so far discovered that I cannot eat citrus or tomatoes. I live on eggs and avocados and other fruits and veggies, and grass-fed beef that my mom sells me, and occasional chicken and fish.

My problem with breastfeeding has been oversupply, not undersupply like I feared. Which is not nearly as much of a problem. And this has made the baby weight come melting off at a rate that has shocked me. I scarcely even remember what it was like to be a walking house, as I was three months ago. Sure, there were issues at first, you can't just expect a baby born four weeks early to come out knowing how to latch on and suck as well as one who stayed in that extra four weeks, but around the time of his original due date, he got it. And I had the luxury of being able to just be home with him and patiently work with him. I had the luxury of being able to fight for 20 minutes every single feeding until he remembered how to do it, then sit there another 45 minutes while he ate.
I fully expected that the same hormonal issues that caused the miscarriages and that would have made this pregnancy impossible even 25 years ago would also lead to a massive crash and a dark bout of post partum depression, and have been extra vigilant because I know I am a bit predisposed to issues of this nature, but nary a storm cloud has threatened. I have been freakishly buoyant and calm and incredibly happy ever since having him.

Our sleeping arrangement is one I don't exactly advertise, except just now to the entire Internet. And I decided to because I have, by now, done a ton of research and feel comfortable with it. We share our bed with the little guy. This has saved us. I think he sleeps through the night now, but in reality, he still awakes at least every three-five hours to nurse. I just don't register this as disruptive to my sleep anymore. We have a king-sized mattress on the floor. On B's side, it is as it always was- pillows, blankets, dog, etc. But on my side, there are no blankets. I sleep with a small round bolster pillow under my head and a pillow between my knees to prevent an unintended rollover in my sleep, wearing long sleeves, long pants, and socks. Little D sleeps on his back in the large space of bed I leave him, and some sort of mama-son spidey sense inevitably wakes me up a few seconds before he awakes. I roll him on his side toward me and lie there as he nurses and we both fall into a state of twilight sleep, then he falls asleep and I roll him away from me, back onto his back and am dreaming within seconds again. In the morning, it is almost as if I dreamed it. I couldn't tell you how often or when he ate, just that he did.

I find it almost amusing that while researching safe bedsharing, I realized that what we are doing is this crazy fringe parenting style known as "attachment parenting". Ya know, the babywearing, bedsharing, anti-immunizing, homeschooling, nursing-on-demand, non-weaning people. Apparently, wearing my infant son wrapped against my chest while I do housework and go for walks is not just a way to still get things done while keeping him calm and asleep, it is a parenting style. Apparently pulling out a boob for him the minute he cries, sharing our bed with him, taking baths with him, basically all the stuff we have started to do because it keeps him happy and relaxed and smiling, as opposed to fussing and stressed out, labels us as parenting extremists. But it seems exhausting to think of doing things any other way. He is such a happy baby, why try to force sleep training on him? And he never cries unless he needs something, so why let him cry it out? All of the stuff that I have heard other new parents complain of and pull their hair out over has just been such a non-issue for us. I feel so bad for them. I am not saying that we are better parents. We are just incredibly lucky to be able to simply absorb a baby into our lifestyle so effortlessly, thanks to the baby himself. Does this mean I will be nursing him until he is three? Probably not, but the one mantra I have lived by through this whole experience is "Flexibility in all things." Perhaps, if my body allows and he is loath to wean, we will carry on past the one-year mark. Maybe even well past it. After all, I do like the research that touts the benefits of doing so. Will we refuse to immunize? No. While I admit a bit of distrust in our current system, in the additives and extra ingredients that go into the immunizations that are dumped in such large amounts with such glee by the medical community into such tiny bodies, I have no desire to see the world stop immunizing. And if I do not want the rest of the world to stop, then I have no business thinking my child is any more special than the child next door, that he gets to rely on the fact that the child next door is immunized so that we do not have to. Will we homeschool? Most likely not. Although I would like to for reasons of maintaining a flexible schedule, there are many reasons to give a child the experience of a wide variety of peers from an early age.

I have read several studies that say that confident, relaxed parents tend to report that their babies sleep better, cry less, are happier and easier than parents who are prone to depression or anxiety, even though when monitored, these babies have the exact same sleep patterns and crying patterns. I would not exactly call us confident or relaxed parents, but on the other hand, we went through a lot to get here, and we are not about to complain or get worked up about what minor issues we may have. Not sure what came first, here, the chicken or the egg- did we create an incredibly happy baby by putting his security first from day one? I wish we could say that was the case, but let's be realistic. More likely, we had a baby who just didn't see the need to sweat the small stuff. Which made it easy for us to create an environment in which his needs are met promptly. And by that, I mean that 90% of his cry-worthy needs are met by simply changing his diaper, then shoving a boobie in his mouth until he goes to sleep. The other 10% is temperature or gas related.

On the farm, this is a completely different sort of spring than last year. This spring is loathe to let go of winter. It keeps calling it back for an encore. This spring, my early crops are in already, thanks to my parents coming over and taking over babysitting and helping me dig up my garden patch, plant, and lay out hoses for irrigation. I do not have any photos at the moment of the irrigation system my mom built, but it is going to be amazing. I foresee all of my irrigating issues of last year being a thing of the past. It is simply a long hose, cut into many two-foot-long sections. These sections are then rejoined by a three way coupler, from which sprouts a short hose with a shut-off valve at the end. So it is basically a switchboard for water, each row has it's own hose, the flow from which can be individually regulated. To each of these short hoses, we have attached either a dripline or a soaker hose. Once I get them all dialed in to water at a rate appropriate for each crop planted on each row, I plan to put an electronic timer on the hydrant itself, so that it can be self-sufficient if we need to leave.
And the most exciting thing happening on the farm right now is that one of our neighbors is moving to town, and unable to take their chicken coop with them. It is a raised structure with an attached run, so in one compact little structure, it contains a run, a coop, and shade. It is not terribly movable, but I am scheming about somehow putting it on wheels so it can roll around the yard and if the local coyote, bobcat and fox population does not allow my chickens to be truly free range, at least they can be "free-ish range", able to dig and scratch in a new area every few days. B does not know yet that I am going to make him move it to our yard as soon as his truck and loader are home and available.

And now my Very Happy Baby is Very Unhappily requesting some attention and I have sat here long enough. All the best to my faithful few, til next time.