My Motherhood

Being a mom is kind of like being hung-over all the time, only without being drunk the night before. I basically go about my day in a kind of cloudy haze getting things partially finished or partially started because either a wee munchkin interupts me somehow – usually with crying, screaming, puking, etc and/or I completely forget what I’m doing and/or I get distracted. Laundry gets halfway hung up, food gets lost, I can’t remember if I wrote the email I was planning on writing or if I just dreamed that I had written it. A lot of this happened under the influence of pregnancy as well, so I’m pretty used to it.

For me the hardest part of being a mom is the constant feeding. My nickname around the house has become “the diner”. “The diner” is apparently open for business 24/7 for Isabella and boy does she take advantage of that! She gets hungry about every 1 ½ - 2 hours and it usually takes almost an hour to feed her because she falls in and out of sleep while eating and its impossible to keep her awake or she eats too fast and has to be burped constantly. I’ve finally given up on trying to feed her faster – when I try it only seems to make matters worse. However, this feeding schedule only gives me a small window of opportunity to get anything done, especially since things like burping the Iz and changing her diaper are part of that tiny opportune window. The Doctor said that she’s just going through a “growing phase”. Funny how this phase has been going on since the day she was born. People have said that I should try to make her wait longer between feedings, but that’s really impossible. She screams like bloody murder when she’s hungry. I’ve never heard another human scream as loudly and as painfully as she does. She takes the term “Drama Queen!” to a whole new level. Personally, I think she will be an actress when she grows up.

Feeding her isn’t bad at all. I actually kind of enjoy it, except it makes me hungry all the time. I’ve turned to Scrubs to distract me during her feedings. I can’t believe I never watched this show before! Yeah, it’s silly, but I like it. I’ve successfully completed seasons 1 & 2 and am currently halfway through 3 thanks to my friend Ben for lending me his DVDs and surfthechannel.com (for the DVDs he is missing). I know I should be reading and working on my thesis during this time, but turning my mind off is so much better.
Luckily, she often sleeps for 3 whole hours at a time at night. Not always, but it’s great when she does. She sleeps in bed with us, which is a very controversial subject, but at this point I can’t imagine not having her sleep with us. It would be awful to have to physically get up in the middle of the night to feed her every time she wakes up. Instead I just kind of scoot over before she starts crying and everyone is happy. I know a lot of people say not to do this because then your child will never leave your bed, but I figure that will be a problem anyway. Both Nick and I LOVED sleeping with our parents in their bed and neither one of us started out life sleeping in the same bed as our parents like Isabella is doing now, we both had to sleep separately. So, we figure we’ll jump that hurdle if and when we come to it.

Okay, I change my mind, the worst part about being a mom is the hours long crying marathon that occur basically every night. It’s horrible. I now fully understand the definition of “colicky”. It’s absolutely terrible. She screams and screams in agonizing pain and nothing we do comfort her. I’m sure that part of it is acid reflux that she has and that I’ve been trying to tackle with my own diet and keeping her up right and so on, but still. She’s a little angel most of the day, but then at night my ears and heart bleed in pain as she screams and screams. They say colicky babies turn out to be incredibly smart, thus I’m pretty sure we have some kind of Einstein on our hands. I mean really, I’m just waiting for the neighbors to call the police because it sounds like we terrorize her for hours each night. This kid must be a genius.