Skipping Town

Dear Littlest One, You are two months old, and such a roly-poly sweetie that you’re already filling out three-month outfits and stretching to the end of your three-month sleepers. You are smiling now, small, pleased, toothless grins, and staring intently on whoever is holding you. You are sweet and adorable and my favorite part of my day is when I bring you into bed with me for a half hour or hour in the morning, where you sleep in the crook of my arm until your sister wakes up. And yet you are a restless baby, often unable to settle yourself; you are still snorting and grunting and straining, though not as badly as before, and it often seems that you are just uncomfortable. This may be just a baby thing, but I’ll of course ask your doctor about it. Just like your diaper rash—that you had for days and days before your checkup, and which actually required a prescription—I sometimes feel like a first-time parent with you, fumbling and not doing everything I should. For the most part, you...

It’s amazing how many hours there are in a day when you really need them. My agent has asked for revisions to my novel, hoping to turn the current trend of editors saying It’s great, it’s lovely, but no, into It’s great, it’s lovely, here’s an offer. And she wants those changes by January 10. When she asked what my schedule was like, I just told her I’d make it work. The truth? I have no time. Days, evenings, and nights are occupied with caring for one or both children. Even naptime, a measly one hour each day, has been decimated by my cherished new child who often stays awake while my cherished older child is asleep. Evenings, once my own after 7:30 when Lucia was asleep, are now usually Greta’s fussy time. And then I go to bed, where I alternate sleeping and nursing until I get up and do it all over again the next day. And yet—this project has forced me to find time. I quickly revised my laissez-faire attitude of letting Greta sleep whenever and however long she wanted to during the ...

Dear Little One, A quick letter this month—it’s late and I need to get to bed. For once it’s not you who’s exhausting me. You’re pretty easy these days, though you certainly have your moments: refusing to have your diaper changed, refusing to lie still during said changing, insisting “Own. Own.” to put your own shoes on when we’re in a hurry to leave the house (this one’s cute, of course, despite the frustration). You are starting to show signs of realizing that Greta is here to stay, and that Greta tends to take up quite a bit of my time. Though you’re unfailingly gentle and sweet with her, in the past couple of days you’ve often come up to me when I’m holding her and said, “Baby office.” This means I should go put the baby in her bouncy chair in the office, which is where she takes her naps. When the baby is sleeping in the office, you have all my attention. Sometimes you also say “No milk” when you don’t want the baby to nurse. The other morning when Daddy was holding Greta you chan...

Little time to blog these days. I often find myself composing posts in my head, or noting something that should be a post, but then the day ends, and another day, and the posts don’t get written. So here are a few brief bits, more for my own desire to make sure things get written down than for any interesting reading for you all: You Lucia’s language acquisition is just careening forward these days. Today she took out some blocks and said, “I have blocks. I’m making a stack.” Just insane. What she’s having trouble with, however, are the pronouns me and you. Whenever a picture of her surfaces, we always point it out and say to her, “That’s you!” So now when she sees a picture of herself, she says, “That’s you!” I think she understands that it’s a picture of her, but she doesn’t understand that she should say “That’s me.” She does the same thing with the word “yourself.” “Do you want to do it yourself?” Andrew asked today, and then she kept saying, “Yourself” when she wanted to indicate ...

Friday morning, I woke up in a pool of milk. The front of my shirt was as soaked as it would have been had I dunked it in the bathtub. My sleeve was wet. The sheets, top and bottom, were wet. Then I sat up to nurse Greta and sat in the milk so my pajama bottoms were wet. It was not the best way to start the day. I recount this as an illustration of why it isn’t easy returning to Infantland. I thought this time around would be easier, since we’d done it all before and knew what to expect. And in some ways it is easier: I’m worried less about details, mostly because I don’t have time to worry about them, and I don’t have any time at all to read baby books and wonder if I’m doing things “right.” What’s harder is the return itself. With baby #1, I expected things to change, even welcomed those changes as we entered A New Phase of Our Lives. I expected and looked forward to milk-soaked sheets and all the rest of it because it was all part of Having a Baby. With baby #2, it’s harder to welco...