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Friday, August 8, 2003: Dinner and bedtime
It just occurred to me that rather than play yet another futile game of Spider solitaire, I should write an entry. (Is there any way of winning that game with more than one suit? Anyone?) It's almost 10:30 in the evening, and we just finished dinner. I'm eating two-bite brownies and a tasty soy milk-cow's milk cocktail, and Blake is in the rocking chair with a sleeping baby. We're watching the last half-hour of Conan the Barbarian on CityTV. Ten thirty is a little late to be finishing dinner, I agree. We always end up eating really late, because Blake usually doesn't come home until eight or eight-thirty, and then it takes half-an-hour to an hour to get dinner on the table (that would be the coffee table in the TV room). I'm beginning to wonder what we'll do when Delphine is a little older and a) is eating real food and therefore will need to have dinner at a sensible time, and b) is getting all of her sleep (but for a nap) at night, so presumably will be need to go to sleep a little earlier than ten. So two problems I need to think about: dinner and bedtime. What time do normal people have dinner? Around six, I guess. But Blake works an eight hour day, at least, and then usually works out or plays squash, which adds another two hours, plus an hour of commuting. So for him to be home at six he'd have to leave at seven in the morning, so he'd have to get up at six. Blake's not a big morning person... Even if we moved dinner to seven, he'd have to get up at seven, which is a little more likely but still unpleasant to contemplate. Furthermore, that assumes that I make dinner and have it ready to eat as soon as Blake gets home, which is both unlikely, because I'm too busy looking after Delphine to focus on cooking, and unfortunate, because Blake really enjoys cooking. What do other people do? I don't know; maybe I'll ask the Suspects.
I think at the moment we're just fucking up the bedtime thing altogether. Like I said, we eat dinner at around nine or later, and we take turns eating and holding Delphine, because she's fussy at night and doesn't like to be put down. Usually Blake eats first and then he takes Del and sits in the rocking chair while I eat. At some point, she falls asleep, and then at around 10:30 or 11:00 we change her (waking her up, of course) into her overnight diaper and nightgown, and then she and I go to bed together and I nurse her back to sleep. Here are the things we're doing wrong:
They say you're not supposed to rock or nurse your baby to sleep because then they won't learn how to fall asleep by themselves and you'll be faced with the spectre of nursing your 13-year-old to sleep, or something. I shouldn't sound so snotty; I do buy that a baby should be comfortable with the experience of falling asleep alone so that they don't panic when they wake up alone in the middle of the night. I'm just not sure how to go about establishing a proper routine and putting Delphine down to sleep. I'm not sure she can fall asleep without us, and I'm pretty sure that if we did put her to sleep at, say, nine o' clock she would wake up sometime in the next couple of hours and cry because she was alone; she doesn't like to be alone in bed. The other thing we have to work on is getting Delphine to sleep in her cradle; I'd like to get her comfortable with sleeping alone before October because we're going to visit my parents then and the bed we sleep in there is cheap and soft and not at all suitable for sharing with a baby. I guess moving Delphine to the cradle isn't rocket science; we just have to put her to sleep in the cradle instead of the bed. Of course, the first problem with that is that she falls asleep nursing. The second problem is that I'll be sad to not sleep with her. And the third problem is that it's going to suck; she is going to wake up in the night and she is going to cry, and we'll have all those problems that normal, non-bed-sharing parents have. Poo. I don't wanna.
I was about to apologize for writing baby stuff in the not-baby-journal, but I think that's just what's on my mind right now. Furthermore, I'm pretty sure I'll write about baby stuff again, so it would be disingenuous to apologize for it now. I expect I'll write straightforward, descriptive stuff in the baby journal for the consumption of relatives, and I'll write thinky stuff and about things which are troubling me here. I find this journal useful for thinking things out.
I had a pretty good week. I relaxed, really relaxed, for the first time I can remember. I have been living with a low-lying tension for so long that I didn't realize it was there until it lifted: I'm not worrying. I'm not worrying about work, I'm not worrying about money, I'm not worrying about my parents. I'm not sure why I've suddenly stopped worrying about everything -- we certainly haven't won the lottery -- but it's nice. I've relaxed into my life, into my routine, into being a mom. Maybe Blake's unnatural sanguinness has finally rubbed off on me. Blake had Monday off, as well as the previous Friday, so we had a lovely lazy weekend. I don't think we did anything, really. Tuesday Blake was back at work and I didn't do anything exciting. Some laundry, maybe. Grocery shopping. On Wednesday I went downtown to the chiropractor, and then I visited my office and said hi to my work friends; there weren't many people there because lots of people were on vacation. On Thursday my friend Ellen came by with her little guy Dexter. I got to be friends with Ellen back in 1994 when we both worked at BNR. We hung out on and off until we both graduated, and then we lost touch apart from occasionally running into each other at parties. Then I had Delphine, and I found out Ellen had Dexter just eight weeks later, so I hooked up with her, and we've seen each other a couple of times since then. We get along well and we have a lot of things in common, both materially and ethically. Little Dexter is five weeks old and it was remarkable how much happier and quieter he was at five weeks than he was the last time I saw him, at three weeks. Last time, all he did was cry and sleep, but this time he spent a lot of time awake and alert. He's cute, kind of goofy-looking. I hope we stay in touch and he and Del get to grow up together. Ellen came over for lunch and then we went to Starbucks and then to the park. Our babies are too small to play, but it's still the thing to do; you sit in the park and watch the kids and other moms come over and ask how old your baby is, and if she's good, and if she sleeps through the night, and how much she weighed when she was born, and what colour her eyes are, and how do you like that baby carrier? It was a change for Ellen, who lives in the suburbs where the parks are empty and there apparently are no other people, let alone moms. We met an eighteen-month-old named Mariah and a eight-month-old named Kira, and their moms who don't have names. Today my friend Lou came over; she lives in Marmora and comes into the city every so often to buy music for her piano students, or write Royal Conservatory exams. When she comes in we get together. Today we just had lunch and hung out for the afternoon. Lou isn't a baby person, but even she had to grudgingly admit that Delphine is a pretty nice baby. She also brought some really good gifts, considering she isn't into babies: an Avent sippy cup (my baby is almost old enough for a sippy cup!), a beautiful stuffed dinosaur (dragon?) and an Oshkosh one-piece which will be perfect this winter. It's fun being social. I thought it would be really hard and annoying, but it isn't; you just call someone up, or email them, and plan to get together and do something, and then you go and do it, and it's fun hanging out, and you talk about your babies and stuff, and then you go home and you write email saying how much fun you had and how you'd like to do it again, and you feel good because you like people, and people like you, and yay. Pretty simple, really.
Well, it's 11:30. Blake and Delphine are already in bed, which means that Delphine can go to sleep without nursing, although I bet that I'll wake her up when I get into bed, and she'll nurse back to sleep. We have a pretty quiet weekend ahead; all I have planned is to pick up some dry-cleaning and to go for a big grocery shop at Loblaws -- we're out of diswasher detergent and laundry detergent, which we usually buy in vast quantities every few months. The last time we bought them was before Delphine was born, in April. Apart from that, we'll probably work on the cryptic, go to Starbucks a lot, and have a family dinner on Sunday night. A nice, normal weekend.
Last year we saw people in the
neighbourhood.
Ten years ago, I wasn't writing a journal, but I thought it would be neat to try and remember what I was doing. It was the term I didn't have a job so I hung around campus. I think I must have taken a course, but I don't remember what it was; maybe CS 2-something? The exam would have been around now. I hung around with Jill and Shar and Amy Fong, my brother's girlfriend. She's kind of insane, and is now living with Zygo in Ottawa, and I bet one day she'll Google herself and find this page. Shar is living in Toronto, and I never see her because at some point I decided I hated her and that was the end of that. Jill is the same Jill I gave my job to. It's funny how some friendships die and some carry on. Online, I hung out on alt.kids-talk. There I met my friend Sascha, whose wedding I am going to in New York in November. I had other friends there but they're all long-forgotten now, except for Dee Mike who I might see in November too. I was living on Albert Street with my then-boyfriend and some random housemates. It was kind of a shitty house, as student houses are wont to be, and we were collosal slobs. I pity anyone who had to live with us. He was working that term, I think, and we had a pretty good time, going to restaurants and going shopping and stuff. It was probably the funnest time I had ever had in my life up until then. |