Semi-patient sighs
May 1, 2004 Parenting
Baby is sleeping after a restless night. Actually she’s a good night sleeper — still gets up a lot of course because she’s only a month old — but settles back right quick once she’s had her nip at the bottle and been settled back in my arms. During the day, however, she’s a tiny bit fussy. Now I wouldn’t curse her by calling her a “fussy baby” but I will admit that she’s a baby who is prone to fuss.
Madison is already establishing a personality — she likes things the way she likes them and if they aren’t the way she likes them, she gets mad. Problem is she’s just a wee bairn and so she’s not so hot at letting us know what she does like but she can certainly holler when we’re screwing up. She likes to be held this way not that way unless the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter’s aligned with Mars and then she’d rather we do it this entirely different way. She likes pretty near constant movement — walking or patting or rocking or bouncing. She likes to be on her tummy (no, not for sleeping though she’d probably like that, too) except when she wants to be sitting up so she can look around. In the sling, she likes both hands held when she’s feeling fretful. This kid, she’s a lot of work.
At least there’s no colic, no major spitting up. In fact, she rarely spits up although our whole world smells like sour milk because of how she controls the flow of the bottle. We’ve got the newborn Avent nipples on but she still suckles and spits as she goes if she’s wanting just a bit of a snack and not the whole darn thing. Not sure what to do about that. We’ve tried positioning her differently and switching out a binkie or my pinky finger when she starts to spit but she’ll get mightily annoyed because what she wants is the bottle AND to spit out 25% of the formula as she goes. I guess we could try a different bottle system but dangit, this one was expensive and I’d hate to throw it out. Besides she doesn’t do it every time. This kid, she’s unpredictable.
Everything else is fine. She’s hale and hearty and definitely cute but my gosh, demanding. I hope this bodes well for her future. I hope this means she’ll be a strong-minded person with great expectations. See, that’s me being positive after jouncing, bouncing, patting and rocking her for several hours last night before she reluctantly settled into sleep. By the end of it all, Brett and I were barely on speaking terms because when you can’t punish the baby for being a baby, you can always punish your partner just for showing up.
