These are the early days

Alex is 2.5 weeks old today. What have the last two weeks looked like? Well … we’ve all been in new baby heaven. Everything smells like talcum powder and fresh milk. We take turns cooing over his plump little cheeks and blue eyes and soaking in his adorableness. We tell Dominic to kiss the baby for the sheer pleasure of watching how gently he touches his brother. We wish Alex would spend more time awake, looking at us. It’s been bliss.

We spend most of the time lounging around on picnic blankets in the sunshine looking like this …

Or, rather, it’s been like that for, oh, ten minutes here and there. And the rest of the time …

I’ve spent 144 hours (give or take a few) breastfeeding. I’ve spent significantly less than that number of hours asleep. Breastfeeding has been (and I don’t use this word lightly) agonizing.

Alex has spent a good number of hours writhing and crying because of gas pains. I’ve systematically started to cut things like muesli, chocolate, and nuts out of my diet. I’ve rediscovered that sincerely frantic parental prayer that goes something like this: “Please, please, please, let him stay asleep. I’m not sure I have it in me to get up again and pick him up. God? You listening? I know this isn’t really hugely important in the grand global scheme of things, but it is really all I want right now in the whole wide world and that should count for something, right?”

On an intellectual level I know there’s something deeply flawed with that theology, but, well, I’m not exactly operating on an intellectual level at the moment. At all.

What else? I’ve had a crash course in how much less weight parental commands to your two year old seem to carry when you’re anchored to the couch with a small being attached to your body. Dominic has developed an affinity for all the things he knows he’s not supposed to touch – the fireplace, the television, the remote controls, etc. The fact that he’ll take himself to the naughty corner sometimes after committing the transgression is moot, because he just sits there with a little smile on his face looking rather smug.

And whenever I think forward I wonder how on earth I’ll manage the two of them back in Laos without my parents around, especially when Mike has to travel. Then I start to feel a bit pissy about how I’ve got the short end of the biological stick when it comes to this whole parenting gig, and fantasize about living with my parents full time for the next three years.

Mike doesn’t seem to think that’s a good idea, incidentally.

Neither do my parents. 

I feel that I am not my best version of myself when parenting a newborn. Or, actually, when parenting at all – especially when I’m parenting solo for more than 47.5 minutes at a time. I have no idea how this knowledge can co-exist with a firm assurance that I would never choose to undo the existence of my two little boys and I love them more than I ever thought possible, but it does. It’s all very confusing, exhilarating, amazing, upsetting, and exhausting in about equal measure.

No, scratch that. It’s definitely more exhausting than anything else right now.

And these, these are the early days.