2 months old already! Wow!

Where has the time gone? So sorry that I haven't updated in the past month... all I can say is preparing for Christmas with a baby is much more difficult than alone. The last month has been great, though. I think we are all three beginning to know each other and who we are as a family. Daniel's begun to sleep for three or four hour stretcches at night which is wonderful... I actually feel rested when that 7:00 am feeding comes along. I am beginning to lay the groundwork for sleep training him, unfortunately that involves having a consistent wake up time and since he usually has a feeding between 7 & 8 am, we've been getting up early... just like school! Late to bed and early to rise :(

Otherwise he is still acting very newborn-ish. He still pretty much eats and sleeps with very little awake and alert time in between. That said, we do usually have at least one time period a day when he stays awake from one feeding to the next (usualluy 2 - 2 1/2 hours). He's still a chow-hound wieghing in at a little over 12 lbs these days. We'll get the official weight at the doctor's office on Friday.

I'm beginning to feel more connected to Daniel and less like he is a complete stranger. I have decided that it is completely unfair to set new mothers up with the expectation that they will immediately fall in love with their new child. It seems like there are two extremes in the mainstream representations of new motherhood: on the one hand you fall in love with new baby upon sight and it's all cooey and gushy with a soft-focus lens; on the other hand you are post-partum depressive to the point that you want to kill your baby. So that leaves a new mom who doesn't have the first experience to feel like she cannot voice a sense of alienation or difficulty bonding or even moments of frustration without being labled depressive and watched like a hawk. As I've asked older mothers and other moms who've more recently had their babies, I've come to learn that a medium ground is pretty commonly tread. You lose who you were so completely and no one can explain how that feels until you are experiencing it. It's going to take a while to rediscover who I am now and if there is room for much of the old with the new. On a practical note, it has really helped me a lot to pull out my sewing machine and begin churning some creative juices once more. Hopefully I can eventually even think about my artwork! Hah! Not while we're nursing every two hours :)

Anyway, I'll post pics of the chunker later this week. Right now I'm off to make soup for our playgroup. We are meeting at our house today.... it's all boys so far (6) and then there's Rose... she'll have to keep them all in line!