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Should I have told the cop who pulled me over tonight that, really, I had no time to listen to him explain that someone has apparently stolen the vehicle-registration sticker off of my license plate? Thank goodness it turned out that I hadn’t forgotten to pay my vehicle-registration fee. But I just didn’t have time for license-plate-sticker questions anyway, not on a Wednesday evening. I had to get home to Sophie.
I was already running late because my students just wouldn’t stop asking questions. Why did I ever think it was a good idea to inspire them?
I didn’t get home tonight until 8:10 pm. Anyone who’s not a single-parent to an early-sleeping baby may not understand the significance of that last sentence, or my guilt.
It wouldn’t have been a problem, back in the days when I signed up to teach my Wednesday-evening class, confident that Ben could put Sophie to bed on Wednesdays. But now Ben has gone to Europe. I hired Raquel to pick Sophie up from daycare on Wednesdays, feed her, play with her, bathe her, and put her to bed. Last Wednesday, Sophie resisted that final step of going to sleep, but that was fine because I had let my class leave early, so I got home at 7:45 pm, in time to kiss her and hug her, read her one last good-night book and get her to bed. She’s normally asleep by 7:30 pm, but a few minutes later isn’t a big deal.
Tonight, at 8:10, after waiting many additional nerve-wracking minutes for me, Sophie was shaking with the effort to hold in her tears. Raquel’s seven-year-old daughter was valiantly squeaking Sophie’s squeaky-dolphin puppet, trying to help Sophie forget that she was scared and felt abandoned by both her parents now. Poor little girl almost melted into a puddle of relief when she saw me. For more than half-an-hour, she just wouldn’t stop hugging me.
She needed me to feed her another dinner (of which she ate three bites), then read her not one but three goodnight books (Good Night Moon has been supplemented by Good Night Gorilla, and also the truly lovely En Los Piernas de Mama), then sing to her, then get her some milk, and only then tuck her in. Even with that gentle treatment and 30-minute hugging, there were still some body-shaking sobs that Sophie just couldn’t hold in anymore.
Poor Sophie.
Poor Raquel.
And, I guess, poor me. Working momhood doesn’t work with single momhood, not when my job requires me to work until 7pm and my work is 70 miles from home. I guess I should be happy that I got home at 8:10, even with a traffic-stop.
The semester is over in just three more weeks. Then I can get home earlier to Sophie. By then there will be lots of new things to feel guilty about, but for now, this is it: that a stolen license-plate-sticker infraction can cause me to be extra-late on a night that’s already too late, and can cause my poor baby to feel so profoundly abandoned.
Every time Sophie sees an airplane, she asks if that’s the plane her daddy is on.
I don’t know whether I’d like her to forget that she misses her daddy so much or keep remembering it.
Meanwhile, Ben spent his first full Saturday in Britain exploring the bookstores of Cambridge, where he ended up buying way too many children’s books for Sophie. He’s also been exploring pubs, sampling all the local beers, settling in, fighting a cold, and biking through the British countryside — but he’s missing Sophie so much that I’m almost not resentful that he gets 6 weeks baby-free time in Europe.
This morning when we skyped Ben, Sophie tried to push her legos through the computer-screen to him, so that he could play with her.
Really, she and I are fine — just a bit lonely. Yesterday we spent the whole morning at the park. In the afternoon, we went to a friend’s house for a few minutes and ended up staying four hours. Today, we went with some other friends to the sunday-morning farmer’s market that I hadn’t yet been to, and it turned out to be wonderfully better than the sunday-afternoon market that I do sometimes go to. Better food, but better yet: a playground next to the food stalls, which the kids loved almost as much as they loved the jazz-band next to the picnic tables. Watching Sophie dance to live music is one of the most wonderful things in the world. She does this butt-wiggle-crouch-thing, in addition to twirling and arm-waving and clapping her hands in a sideways motion. She turned her tupperware of dried cereal into a drum. She did not want to leave, even though she had been almost falling asleep on my shoulder.
She’s been taking long aternoon naps, lately, and when she wakes up, she’s been in the kind of good mood that makes her urge me to open the curtains quickly so that she can enthusiastically shout, “Hi flowers!” It makes my single-parenting task almost do-able.
I had a flu this week and 127 papers to grade, so my first week of single-parenting should have been really hard. But it actually wasn’t bad. I still have 24 papers to grade, but at least that means I finished 103 of them in less than a week. I have finally accepted that I need to take flu medicine, too, and throughout all this week Sophie has been in the kind of good mood in which she keeps taking my cheeks in both of her cute little hands in order to more deliberately kiss me.
This morning, I was trying to turn on the computer to skype Ben, in the one part of the day when we can talk to each other despite the time difference. We’ve gotten the skype video-phone thing to work on the computer twice this week, and it makes Sophie dance in front of the computer while she repeats “Hi daddy!” and then attempts to feed her cereal to his video-image. Yesterday they even played peek-a-boo through the video-phone. It’s been adorable, but I couldn’t get skype to work this morning. I couldn’t even get the internet connected this morning. I kept running our repair-wifi-program, and turning the laptop off and on again, and even trying our other laptop. I was tapping out computer commands while also trying to get Sophie dressed, cleaned, and fed; and do the dishes & clean the kitchen; and also, eventually, get myself dressed, cleaned, and fed. Eventually I got to some program that told me to disconnect the router, wait 60 seconds, and start it up again — and those are commands I can handle much better than the “broken IP address” stuff I had been getting.
While I was doing all this computer-fiddling in between cereal-pouring, Sophie asked me, “Momma, sing?” So I stopped all that electronic fussing and morning-hurrying and, instead, I sang Sophie “Wishy Washy Washer People.” We danced around the living room, twirling with each “Oooh, ahh” and “la-di-da-di” in that song. (Is it even a song that anyone else knows? I learned it way back in Yale Children’s Theater, and now can’t get it out of my head.) Sophie liked it so much that she asked for it 3 more times. And after that, it didn’t matter that I couldn’t get the skype working. I couldn’t show Sophie her daddy, but at least I could sing and dance with her, and that was all that mattered.
That’s my favorite thing about Sophie: her capacity for relishing the present moment.
This evening, when I picked her up from daycare after enduring two hours in Friday-afternoon traffic (and leaving my departmental meeting early, because I knew I had to get to daycare by 5pm, when it closes), Sophie asked for the “Wishy Washy Washer People” dance again. It’s a great new tradition now.
Single-parenting is a lot of work, but it’s not impossible. I’m the only one around to do the dishes, take out the garbage, keep the household running – but then again, I’m also the only one around who is dirtying the dishes (other than Sophie), so some household tasks are easier. Still, it feels like there’s no down-time. It feels a little like college: it’s an impossibly busy few weeks, but eventually the semester will be over and I’ll get to rest again. I hope. I’m a little old for re-living my undergraduate days, but I know that I can do it. Even though yesterday I spent five minutes looking for the top to the milk-bottle, before finally realizing that the top was already on the milk-bottle.
For a long time now, Sophie has been referring to herself as “Baby.” She likes to name the towels in the bathroom: “Daddy towel, Mamma towel, baby towel.” It actually took a while to teach her that her name is “Sophie,” not “Baby.” But this morning, we were talking about something while she got dressed — pulling on her own pants almost without help and almost without a struggle — and I think I mentioned that her socks were “Sophie’s baby socks.” She looked at me, frowned, and announced, “I big girl.” She repeated it a couple times for good measure, pointing to herself and emphasizing, “Big girl.” She can’t say a completely grammatical sentence, but that’s okay, she has made her announcement, and she’s right: she’s a big girl now.
And parenting a big girl means that my single-parenting task isn’t as onerous as it would have been a few months ago. Sophie is a big girl now, and she has adapted unusually well.
On Wednesdays, I work late, so Ben usually picks Sophie up from daycare, makes her dinner, and eventually puts her to bed. Now that Ben’s gone, I had to hire our friend Raquel to do the wednesday-evening childcare for the next month. Sophie was startled to be leaving daycare with someone who wasn’t Momma or Daddy. She cried in Raquel’s car, but once they got here, to her familiar home, Sophie was actually okay. Raquel’s two elementary-age kids fussed over Sophie, building her a lego-house, drawing her a rainbow, reading her every book on her shelf. I got home by 7:45, just in time to give Sophie her last kiss goodnight, and to hear Sophie say so sweetly, “Bye bye ‘quel.”
She truly is getting to be a big girl now.
After dropping Ben off at the airport, Sophie and I went to Trader Joe’s for single-parenting supplies: frozen tamales, frozen meatballs, frozen fish, frozen berries, dehydrated berries, extra cereal, pasta-sauce, korma-sauce, and mac-and-cheese. Of course we got the basics, too, fresh fruit and milk and yogurt and what veggies we could find at TJs, but we also got more packaged food than usual, because I’m going to be a single parent for the next 6 weeks, until I finish teaching the spring semester and then Sophie and I will join Ben in Europe.
I realize this is nothing like what true single-parents do, or what, say, any military spouse has to do. But it’s my own little marathon.
Day 1 of single-parenting was actually fairly pleasant, to my surprise. There was some traffic on the way to the airport, so we got to watch planes coming in for a landing right over our heads. This excitement meant that Sophie truly understood where we were. All day long, Sophie kept announcing, “Daddy airplane.” She said it with enthusiasm, like it meant, “Daddy’s having an adventure.” She’ll probably get moody in a couple days when she realizes quite how long this adventure will separate him from her, but, for now, she and I had a pleasant day, and she seemed to understand that he misses her, even though he’s gone.
We invented new games with her tunnel and her flute. We hid and then found her plastic easter-eggs, again and again: a week since Easter, that game still isn’t old. We went to the park, but it was 86 degrees, so soon enough we just went to Trader Joes for all that packaged food.
Then I actually did manage to cook dinner from scratch because I propped Sophie in front of her 21-minute DVD of Elmo in “Musics Works Wonders.”
This is the only thing that Sophie watches on television. I bought it a month ago at the used-cart at the library, for 75 cents, and I’m embarrased to admit that Sophie has watched that Elmo DVD at least four times a week since then. On the plus side, she lived almost 23 months without seeing any tv, except for an occasional surf-video glimpsed in fleeting moments. She’s still not interested in tv in general: I tried a Dora DVD and some other underwater-adventure-thing that I borrowed from the kid’s section of the library after this Elmo DVD became such an obsession for Sophie, but really all she wants to watch is Elmo. Occasionally she’s even managed to turn on the tv and video on her own. I know every word in that darn blessed 21-minute Elmo video. I don’t think those songs are ever going to come out of my head.
The video is actually pretty well-done, even if it does start to grate on adult ears after a month of repetition. Every time she watches it, Sophie sits on the couch with her tambourine, triangle, drum, and kazoo, eagerly making music with Elmo and his friends. She sings along. She chats with me about what she’s seeing. She says “bye-bye,” when it’s over, and then she wants to make up new music-games like the ones on Sesame Street. It’s not as passive as tv could be.
Today, after the video was over, we invented the game that I would dance ridiculously as long as she played the recorder, then freeze in some crazy dance-pose whenever she stopped tooting. This made her giggle so hard she almost couldn’t play the flute enough to get me out of a few contorted moves.
Watching her clap and dance and even try to snap her fingers every time I play music in the car has made us both enjoy our recent car-trips much more. I credit Elmo for teaching her all this relish for music that she’s had lately.
Still, I feel guilty that my baby has become a tv-watcher.
We started with the rule of One Elmo a Day, but it turns out that Elmo-in-the-morning is a wonderful way for me to take a shower and get dressed. Then Elmo-in-the-evening is a great way to get dinner cooked. And it’s just so hard to resist when Sophie exclaims, “Elmo! Elmo!” while scrambling onto the couch and then concentrating furiously on pushing the buttons of the remote-control with one hand, while grasping her drumstick in the other hand, eager to play along with Elmo’s concert.
I’m less intimidated by my next 6 weeks of single-parenting because I’ve got Elmo. How sad is that?
And yes, more Sesame-Street DVDs are in the netflix queu. They should be arriving shortly. We don’t actually have tv reception, only movie-watching capability. That and frozen tamales and good friends should get me through the next 6 weeks of single-parenting fairly well. I’ll see. I’ll keep you all updated, of course.
My experience of parenting veers between feelings of isolation and connectedness. Not isolated from Sophie — she’s sick this week, and wants me to hold her absolutely all day long — but isolated from adults, from anyone who can speak more than three-word sentences.
I live 70 miles from my work and the biggest problem with that is not the long commute (a prius, a pleasant drive, and plenty of podcasts of ThisAmericanLife make my twice-a-week commute almost bearable). The biggest problem with that 70 miles is that it precludes socializing with my coworkers. Nobody wants to commute 70 miles on the weekend, no matter how much we like each other. Thus, I’m relegated to finding friends on the playground or at yoga class and I’m not too good at that. I’m still nostalgic for the activist community I left behind in New Haven.
This week, though, was a week when I felt connected. T came over Tuesday evening with her daughter and the two girls played together so long that they ended up taking a bath together, which was adorable. Then after the girls both went to sleep, Ben had a great little good-bye party. It might have been the simplest party ever: I got him apple pie, he got pizza, someone else brought donuts, and lots of people brought British beer. It was the perfect low-stress say-goodbye-to-America-for-a-while event. It reminded me that, actually, I love my new San Diego community almost as much as the old New Haveners.
Then on Wednesday, my mom-friends astounded me.
Short story: On Wednesday, Sophie was too sick for daycare but I had to go to work.
Longer story: I realize that “have to go to work” is a relative term. I could have called in sick; no one will die if I don’t teach them American Studies. Still, on Wednesday, I had four one-hour meetings with grad students that were important to each of those students, and had already been overly-postponed. I also had to teach a once-a-week three-hour-class that I hate to miss. I have a work ethic. And I also have a need to get out of the house.
Usually, when Sophie is sick on Wednesdays, I take the morning off from work, then Ben takes the afternoon off. Almost every other day of the week, I can take the whole day off, but not Wednesdays. This Wednesday, Ben couldn’t get the afternoon off. It was his annual performance review meeting, it is three days until he leaves the country for six months, it just wasn’t a time when he felt he could miss work for a child’s cold.
So I emailed my mom-friends. They emailed their mom-friends. It was too early for phone calls, but email alone launched a web of support. Between 7 and 8 am on Wednesday morning, Jane’s nannie’s friend, Tori’s daycare-teacher’s-daughter, and Raquel’s sister-in-law all tried to rearrange their schedules to watch Sophie on Wednesday afternoon. Jane even offered to leave her two children with her husband, to cover the last hour before Ben got home, when the nannie’s-friend couldn’t.
Eventually, Sophie’s daycare-teacher also offered to take in Sophie, since Sophie had already spread her germs to everyone anyway, and afternoon is mostly nap-time. So I chose to leave Sophie in the most familiar space. She sat in a chair by herself, sleepily watching the birds, coughing and staying separate from the other daycare kids, calling out for Momma & Daddy. I feel terribly about leaving Sophie there, but grateful that Sophie’s daycare teacher allowed it — and I am beginning to recognize that most of parenting entails feeling guilty for one thing or another.
And my Wednesday classes and meetings were the best they’ve been all semester. Exhausted, getting sick myself, but still able to teach, perhaps because my haziness made my students step up their thoughtfulness.
Then all day Thursday, I got to hug Sophie, and procrastinate grading the 127 midterms I ought to be working on. I felt lonely again on Thursday, so it’s worth remembering how many folks are there to help me, even at 7 am.
Ben leaves on Sunday, and Sophie and I will have six weeks alone together, until we join Ben in Britain. In the next six weeks, I think, we’re going to be needing that network of help even more.
We went to the perfect birthday party this weekend. No goodie-bags, no expensive fuss, none of the current commercialized competimommy hoopla that seems to make contemporary birthday parties a giant headache for everyone involved. There was just nice food and good company, with simple celebratory homemade decorations. A half-dozen babies were there, far outnumbered by adults, and everything was calm enough that the kids were well-behaved. My friend’s apartment is small enough that all the guests stayed congenially close together. The birthday-girl took her time opening presents, casually, whenever there was a pause in the other openended, unchoreographed playing. This is the kind of party that I hope to have for Sophie next month when she turns two.
This month’s edition of Parents Magazine has a cover article on “Birthdays that Wow,” but, you now, showing off in a way that wows my friends is not my goal. Making everyone feel welcome and comfortable while celebrating a child’s development: that’s my goal. Weird that that feels radically against the grain.
We have been to too many headache-inducing birthday parties lately. I actually don’t understand pinatas: why would we encourage children to wait around for their turn to whack at some creature, then greedily scramble for candy? I don’t understand Easter-Egg hunts, either, come to think of it, so this concern with the overly-structured chaos of rushes-for-candy isn’t limited to birthday parties alone. I don’t understand goodie-bags: it’s generally useless plastic stuff for children who can’t just enjoy a party for itself, and for hosts who already have enough else to worry about. I don’t understand the whole emphasis on themes. When a friend asked me what theme we were having for Sophie’s first birthday party, all I could think of was, “We survived the first year,” and “She didn’t die of SIDS.” But now, I have been to enough other parties that I’m thinking I should choose a theme for Soph’s second birthday. Still, I have yet to meet a toddler who cares about the decoration of the invitation. Does this make me a grouch?
My own childhood memories don’t include all this birthday-party hoopla. My childhood birthday parties never had themes. A few of my friend’s parties had destinations (we went roller-skating once, memorably), but even that was rare and didn’t start until late elementary school. There were never goodie-bags for the guests. Isn’t getting cake and company enough?
At last weekend’s party, the birthday-girl most enjoyed having the “Happy Birthday” song sung to her. She just beamed and wiggled her toes, so the guests sang it many times. That was wow enough. It turns out that Sophie really likes singing “Happy Birthday.” Sophie kept singing “Happy Birthday,” over and over, even in the car on the way home. It was all very cute and admirably non-materialistic.
Embarrasingly, Sophie was actually the worst-behaved guest at the whole party. She tends to throw an overly-dramatic tantrum whenever someone takes what she thinks of as Her Toy. But the tantrums are brief and distractable, and she also exhibits a generosity that we can try to steer her towards. Sophie earnestly works to make sure that everyone gets to hold their own balloon or taste the tasty pizza. We had selected some of Sophie’s favorite books as a present for the birthday girl, and after Sophie got over her panic that we might be giving away her precious copy of Goodnight Gorilla and Red Hat Blue Hat, then the two of them loved reading these books to each other. Maybe that’s what made the birthday party so enjoyable: Sophie and the birthday-girl share similar tastes. I and the birthday-girl’s-mom share similar tastes.
It’s been surprisingly hard to find that kind of mom-friend. Maybe I’m just not good enough at switching from playground small-talk to true friendship. Or maybe I and the birthday-girl’s-mom are just too unusual. Both of us are worried for the upcoming loneliness of my summer away.
Yesterday, Sophie started pretending to read Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady, I suspect because it’s the pinkest book she could find on the shelf. She narrated it to herself, turning the pages, muttering, “Momma, daddy, baby.” Apparently, according to her, it’s a family story. It sort of is.
A little later, we went to Barnes & Noble, where she looked out over the hundreds of display books, picked one out, and announced, “Momma’s book.” She was right. It was the only book on display that I have read recently. It was The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which has a picture of a bloodstained wound partially covering the title. I guess that cover illustration is dramatic enough that Sophie remembered it. But I read that book back in December and gave it away when I finished it.
So how can Sophie recognize this book? She is remembering a book-cover that she saw only briefly, one-quarter of her lifetime ago.
The obvious answer is that my baby is brilliant.
This is actually slightly disconcerting. Did my book-cover disturb her enough to make her remember it that long? Do I need to be more careful about what I let her see?
Sophie’s brilliance is a visual one. It’s not the reciting-the-alphabet-early kind of brilliance. She can’t get much past D, but then again I don’t care about reinforcing that anyway. She can’t count past 2, either. But she can spot a bird a half-mile away, often before I myself see it. She can even see in the dark better than I can. She knows which car is mine in a parking lot, and she knows when we’re driving within 2 blocks of home or 2 blocks of daycare. She recognizes the train station, too, and yesterday she remembered that Barnes & Noble has a model train-set even though she couldn’t see it yet, and we’d only ever seen it once before. Still, she knew to ask, “Momma, choo-choo, please?” She has a brilliance of sight and memory.
Then yesterday when we went out to eat, she informed me, “Momma, no nurse.” It’s her new slogan. I don’t know where it came from, because it’s not a phrase I ever used much, but she picks things up like that, and I’m glad she understands that we are weaning this week.
For good measure, she added, “Daddy, no nurse.” Then she turned to the strangers at the next table over and told them sternly, too: “No nurse.” One of the strangers was a nanny, it turned out, who guessed that Sophie must be about three years old, from all of Sophie’s chattering. This nanny was probably simply flattering us, or perhaps is accustomed to working with a child who doesn’t get chatted at quite so much as Sophie does — but still, I was flattered.
My child is starting to show useful abilities, useful beyond just the genial generosity that makes her bring her Daddy his slippers in the morning. She’s starting to be so much smarter than a dog. Perhaps I shouldn’t label that more-than-canine ability as “brilliance,” but, you know, I’m a proud Momma.
I’m also wondering, how long until she says something more embarassing than telling a stranger not to nurse?
Sophie put her own pants on this morning. It began with her pulling her current favorite pants out of the laundry hamper. They’re brown with pastel polka-dots, and they’ve been worn three days in a row now, and I think that’s a sign of maturity: Sophie can actually keep her clothes clean enough to wear them more than one day in a row.
After selecting her only-slightly-dirty pants, Sophie proceeded through 25 minutes or so of pants-wrestling. She kept shoo-ing me back with, “No, Momma!” but I was actually trying not to interfere — though I admit I did offer to help her untangle her pants right-side-out once or twice. I think her “No, Momma” just meant that she wanted me to notice that she was doing it herself. When she finally did manage to get both of her legs into both of the pants-legs, the whole pants happened to be fully inside out.
Then she decided that it was probably beyond her abilities to get a shirt on, and thus she reached the obvious conclusion: no shirt-wearing today.
Apparently, today was Sophie Independence Day. It just took me a while to clue in. I had been planning to leave the house early to go to the zoo when the animals are awake and the crowds are sparse, but even I was reluctant to leave the house with a shirts-less girl wearing three-day-dirty pants inside-out. After offering Sophie every shirt in her drawer, to no avail, we had to take a break from that frustration, so we played some other games, like pile-all-the-stuffed-animals-on-the-half-naked-baby-to-keep-her-warm.
Eventually, I invited her to help me sort the laundry in the drier, where she finally found a shirt she was willing to wear. We didn’t get to the zoo until almost 11. And that was fine: Sophie clearly didn’t need outside stimulation, the house itself was keeping her and I both laughing all morning.
The zoo was good too: Sophie particularly liked the fish in the hippo-pond, a baby bear, and the lightbulbs lining the walkways. Also, the fried-chicken-strips at the zoo cafe. She came home and went down for a nap with no nursing, the first time since the Great Weaning that I’ve had to do naptime on my own.
Here’s Sophie’s other recent great leap forward: she has recently discovered my button box. It’s one of those little decorative boxes that has been sitting somewhere on a bookshelf ever since college, staying with me through every move, to Asia and back. Every time a new clothes-purchase contains a spare button or an old piece of clothes loses a button, that button goes in the button-box. I’m not sure why I keep them all. It seems a shame to throw them out, but honestly I don’t really use them for anything, except to admire them in all their uniformity and variety — which I only do whenever I open the box to place another button in it. Whenever I actually need a button, I usually can’t find it in the box.
My mother and my grandmother each had a button box, I remember, and I used to love to swim my fingers through all those buttons. I think I kept my own button box because I assumed that someday, my house might have a child who might like swimming her hand in buttons, too. It’s the same reason I have had children’s books on my bookshelf for the last 20 years, and “Free to be you and me” in the CD-holder. You never know when a child might stop by and want to read Thousands of Cats.
So I was disappointed, when Sophie was born, that she couldn’t play with my button box yet. It was far too much of a choking hazard. I showed it to her once last year and she wasn’t even fascinated. Now, it probably still is a choking hazard, but she is long past the putting-things-in-her-mouth stage. Last weekend, when we moved things around to paint the bedroom, Sophie found my button-box again, and this time she was obsessed.
She likes to sort them into pink buttons, white buttons, clear buttons. She selects special buttons to show me: the ones that are unusually large or unusually small or unusually lilac in color. She scatters all the buttons on the floor, then earnestly helps pick up every last one. She asks whether we can take buttons off our clothes, to add their glorious variety to the button box.
To me, this is a milestone: Sophie is old enough to enjoy my button-box. She plays with it for almost an hour at a time. Ben thinks the whole thing is bizarre, some kind of seamstressy OCD. I think it resembles my own childhood.
Today I used the bicycle-trailer to bring Sophie home from daycare, hoping that slight change-of-routine-from-the-car might shake her out of her expectation of post-daycare-nursing. She cheered me up the last hill. Then when we pulled in to our garage and I picked her up out of the trailer, she looked me in the eye and said, sternly, laying-down-the-rules: “Momma, no nurse.” Just warning me, you know, just in case I wanted to nurse, just letting me know that it is now off-limits.
I think weaning is done.
Weaning hurts.
Sophie’s doing fine with it. She’s clingy and she woke up three times last night, but at her first waking she actually called for Daddy instead of Momma. I think she understands that nursing is over.
Now someone just needs to tell my breasts that nursing is over. It feels like I have two hot lava rocks on my chest. It hurts to even have a cotton t-shirt brush against them. I went to yoga class, I’m wearing a sports bra, I took a warm shower. Pretty soon I’ll try a warm-pack that Sophie’s daycare teacher lent me. But ouch.
The only comfort is that this really can’t last more than a few days, can it? Everyone talks about the pain of childbirth, but no one told me about this.
