Newborn Reality

J.D. and I are officially 3 weeks out.  I am feeling much better c-section-wise, with only occasional aches and throbbing.  Three more weeks!

J.D.  is starting to accept us as a family a bit more.  Ha!  Can you imagine waking up to realize the people who brought you home from your cozy belly world is full of rowdy little boys?

Today John David took a two hour nap….in the dining room downstairs, with all three brothers, plus Nana and me buzzing around.  That was a great victory.  (All of his other naps have been upstairs, away from the crowd, since the return of the brothers).

The hardest thing about parenting a newborn, and this does not change no matter how many babies you have, is SLEEP DEPRIVATION.  You can learn how to soothe your baby when he cries, breastfeeding gets easier the more you do it, scars from delivery heal, and experience does make general baby care easier and less intimidating, BUT what can fix sleep deprivation?  I do not know.

 I once told Amy, Alan’s sister, that the third week is the hardest, but I couldn’t fully remember why until I lived it again.  Now I remember.

The baby is still waking up at night…which means you have to wake up at night too, but here’s the change.  See, in week 1 the mom is typically sleeping all day as well.  By week three, though, I feel better so I’m not sleeping all day.   I guess I should just stay in bed more, but I just feel so guilty to do that to my mom.  Plus I miss the boys when I do that.

Okay!  Enough about newborn life.  It’s just a phase that must be endured.

Here are a few other highlights from this week:

–Caleb started mini- swim team and is loving it.

–Daniel is seriously fascinated with John David.  He calls him “bobby,” as in baby.  I think it’s so cute that I call him Bobby sometimes too.

–Caleb had a friend over yesterday, and Joshua, Caleb, and Nicholas were running all around the house playing like they were hiding from vampires and “ghost’es.”  The boys were gathering things that vampires are afraid of.  Caleb grabbed Woody and said, “And they’re afraid of cowboys!” which of course went unchallenged by any of us.

–Mom said Daniel had a great time in Dothan at the water park, and she was surprised to see him flirting with girls.  I asked her if they were toddler girls.  She said they were actually teenagers.  Apparently the girls were talking about how cute he is, and when he realized they were calling him cute, he cut his eyes over at them with a grin and proceeded to splash them and splash them and splash them.  Much to his delight, they splashed him back.

….and thus begins Dan’s life of torturing girls, which is one of the things that boys do best.

–Speaking of torturing girls, it was recently brought to my attention, by Joshua, that Caleb has been “being mean” to one of their friends.  I was quite taken aback by this and thoroughly scolded Caleb for any rudeness that he had shown to his friend.  ….A week or so after this lecture one of my friends mentioned that she thought Caleb might like this particular girl I’d scolded him about.

I replied, “No, I don’t think so.  In fact, Joshua said that Caleb has been mean to her, and I…..  …Ooooh.  Right, the little boys being mean to girls they like thing.  You know I totally missed that.”

Jeepers.  Well, we all miss the point sometimes.

Do you remember the first boy that ever picked on you?  Or, if you are a guy, do you remember the first girl that you ever teased?

 I remember.

I was in the 2nd grade, and I had a good buddy named Justin.  Justin was my Apple IIe computer lab partner.  One day when we were in line, chatting as usual, Justin called me a “red-headed rutabaga.”

I was HORRIFIED.  How could my buddy Justin say something so mean, so untrue, and so…..well, I didn’t even know what a rutabaga was!  Plus, up to that point my hair was still turning from brown to brownish-red to the full on red that it is today, so I did not realize that my hair was even red.

 I told Justin that I was NOT, and I did NOT have RED hair!

 I went home that day and told this tale of woe to my mother.  She did have to break it to me that my hair was a  little bit red, but she assured me that it was a beeeeee-autiful shade of auburn.  She also said that rutabagas are just a vegetable, which I thought was weird.  In my head I had pictured a rooster– a red-headed rooster.  The horrors!

 My mother also taught me that boys only make fun of you if they like you, which made me feel a whole lot better.

I have four boys now.  I wonder how many little girls and their mothers I will feel the need to apologize to over the years?  Sigh.  Probably a LOT.