Sunday snuggles

Zoë and I skipped church on Sunday. I considered going, I honestly did, but then I remembered that I just had a baby like a week ago and should probably avoid hordes of people. So we stayed home. I'm sure Andrew was happy to have Uncle David's help wrangling the kids during sacrament meeting!

Daddy was ready for some cuddle time when everyone got home. When I walked into the bedroom and saw them at first I was like, "Awwwww..." and then I was like, "What are you doing to that poor baby's face?!" Zoë was completely smashed up against his chin.

Andrew obligingly moved her away from his face. She stubbornly wiggled back right where she'd been. So they cuddled like that—face smashed into face—for quite a while.

Swimming with Uncle David

The forecast for this week is unfortunately rather dour—nothing but rain, rain, rain—so making plans is difficult. It hasn't even rained very much; it's just threatened to rain a lot. We've mostly stayed cooped up in the house, which is a cozy place to be when you've just had a baby, to tell the truth, but on Monday it was warm and sunny in the morning so we went to the pool before lunch.

The kids wore Uncle David out within an hour. They kept begging him to throw them around and give them rides on his back. Meanwhile, Zoë and I just sat in the shade and relaxed.

Zor, Lord of Babies

It's no secret that Zoë has had a bit of a perplexed/annoyed/grumpy/terrified look on her face since birth. Really though she's been warming up to the idea of living with us for the next 18 or so years and is relaxing into her environment (though she still tends to stress sleep through the day and does her best awake time just after Benjamin goes down for the night (he's a little overwhelming for her)).

Last night I was stroking her face and she was loving it. She kept giving little hints of a smile, which is all she needed to do to completely melt my heart.

I put a picture up on Facebook and Andrew's aunt, alluding to the "McKayla is not impressed" meme (I think), said, "Finally...Zor is impressed!"

I liked her post because I knew what she meant. The E key is right next to the R key.

She wrote back saying, "ZOR? Who the heck is ZOR? I mean Zoë of course!!!"

And Andrew said, "ZOR LORD OF BABIES."

And, well, I liked that, too. I was handing out likes like pretzels today. Little baby smiles will do that to you, I guess.

It's been one week since you looked at me...

I tried to get breakfast before Zoë woke up this morning but I had hardly managed to walk out of the bedroom when she started to fuss. So I sat down and made Andrew bring her to me.

"She's a little escape artist," he said.

Oh, Baby Zo!

I believe I mentioned earlier that I found Anne of Windy Poplars in a long-neglected diaper bag. Well, I finished it before Zoë was born and even started in on Anne's House of Dreams during the non-stress test I did at the doctor's office a few days before she was born (only to realize that I was impatient and read that book on my kindle so I was just rereading, which wasn't as exciting because I actually wanted to be reading Anne of Ingleside but...it was fine).

Various lines kept jumping out at me, so I put little bookmarks in so that I could find them again (and I did find them and I'm going to share them all). They all seem to share a common theme; it's like I was thinking of babies and "the future" a lot while I was reading this book. I really think that if I could meet L.M. Montgomery that we'd be "kindred spirits." She says things so beautifully and when I read her words—whether in her books or quotes from her journal—I always think, "We could be friends."

Without further ado, here are a few quotes from Anne of Windy Poplars:

"Babies are such fascinating creatures," said Anne dreamily. "They are what I heard somebody at Redmond call 'terrific bundles of potentialities.'" (p. 157)



Thanks for making me cry, Maud. Look at my bundle of potentialities! I'm so in love it hurts!

Rhubarb

I remembered the other food story I was going to tell! My visiting teacher made rhubarb crisp for us.

Andrew, as you probably guessed, turned up his nose at this.

"Do people really eat rhubarb?" he asked.

"Yes," I said. "It's good. It's super sour. And this stuff has strawberries with it, too!"

"You can't just combine anything with strawberries and call it good," Andrew said.

He might have had a point. Just the day before Rachel had bitten the top off a grape tomato, sucked the guts out, stuffed it with a plump blueberry and ate it.

"Well, that ruined that blueberry," she declared.

You really can't just combine anything with blueberries and call it good. The same holds true for strawberries and just about anything delicious.

"But rhubarb and strawberries is good," I assured him. "It's like lemon and strawberry. It just works."

He wouldn't try it so I did the only thing left to do: I ate his piece for him.

We were still talking about rhubarb at bedtime (it was light-hearted and probably falls under the category of "fake fighting" that our children insist we do).

"What even is rhubarb?" Andrew asked.

Zoë's homecoming: May 25

It's hard to believe we've been home for four days already and that tomorrow Zoë will be a week old! We actually went in for her one-week check up today and she's already back up to her birth weight so—hallelujah!—we don't have to go back in until her one-month check up.

Zoë had to go in for a check up the day after we got home and at the end of the appointment the NP who saw us said, "Ordinarily I'd have you come in for another weight check tomorrow but since you have so much experience with breastfeeding I guess we can wait until your one-week appointment, which you can make for this Friday."

I was floored. I mean, a two-day appointment is fairly routine. But they wanted to see me the day after we got home and then again the day after that and then again for a one-week appointment and then, in theory, again for a two-week appointment?! At what point does it stop being "support" and start being "harassment."

Support, in my mind would be a home-visit from a nurse. Dragging mothers and babies out of their house to sit in a germ-infested waiting room so many times in the first week of a baby's life seems...cruel. But maybe that's just me.

Anyway, thanks to my epic milk supply and Zoë's fabulous nursing abilities she was already back up to her birth weight when we went in for her appointment this afternoon. Our prize is that we can skip the two-week appointment (because in theory she has two weeks to get back up to her birth weight).

When she was weighed before we left the hospital she was 6 lbs. 11 oz.

She was 6 lbs. 13 oz. on Tuesday (and the NP was like, "Gee, I don't know if she's gained enough weight since coming home..." less than 24 hours ago...).

Now she's back to 7 lbs. 2 oz. and she's going to get rather chubby until around 4 months old when her growth will start to slow down and then doctors will start to get on our case about keeping her weight up. But that's just how my kids have all grown.

Anyway...we came home from the hospital four days ago and this is what Zoë looked like (we've since found the head support that goes with the carseat):

Disjointed stories...mostly about food

"You look like you're having an internal debate over this meal," I said about the perfectly innocent broccoli/macaroni-and-cheese casserole my visiting teacher brought by.

"How could you tell?" Andrew asked.

"I just saw you eyeing it as you piled your plate with salad. It's good. I don't think there's anything in here that you don't like," I assured him.

"Penso che ci potrebbe essere tonno," he said in Italian so the kids wouldn't hear his food fears.

Why you speak foreign language at me? said my I-just-had-a-baby brain.

"Tonno..." my mouth managed to echo.

"Un pesce di mare..." Andrew prompted.

Guess how many times I used that word in Italian 101. Zero. Zero times.

"Oh," I said. "Credo di no."

"Pollo?"

"La'a."

Wrong language. Whatever. He ate the casserole, which is more than I can say about the casserole we got the night before (which everyone else thought was delicious).

Zoë's life: day two

Andrew took the kids to church by himself on Sunday. Miriam ended up going home with her friend Lily and Rachel went home with her friend Carolina (and having her first sleepover, which she loved). In the afternoon Andrew brought Benjamin in to visit (and to watch Zoë so that I could finally take a shower). I spent the day napping and admiring this sweet baby:

Human again! I feel human again!

Holy cow. Literally. Holy. Cow.

Zoë has been a phenomenal nurser, right from the get-go. She latched on and nursed away for an hour and a half. For the rest of our stay in the hospital she'd nurse every one to two hours for a good twenty to forty minutes at a time, which meant, of course, that Mommy got very, very tired of getting up to take care of her.

I was in the hospital alone with Zoë for two days, which was both wonderful (so quiet) but also lonely (best hour: Face Time with my family—it was like having visitors) and taxing (Daddy wasn't there to help with diapers or fetching baby when I just didn't want to get out of bed...again). We had to stay the second day because I didn't have time to finish the antibiotic before Zoë was born (in our defense we did get to the hospital with four hours to spare; they were just slow administering the IV).

Anyway, she nursed well. Her latch? Beautiful. Her endurance? Amazing.

And then my milk came in and suddenly Zoë couldn't nurse for twenty minutes on each side every time she ate. Instead she'd nurse for two minutes on one side before collapsing into a milk comma.

Meanwhile, my body was like, "MILK! Milk for everyone!"

I can honestly say I have never been so engorged in my life. Not with Benjamin because I was pumping on a hospital grade pump so...I just pumped my mom's freezer full of milk. Not with Miriam because—I don't even know why! Looking back it's a huge blessing that I didn't get completely engorged with her because all we brought to Egypt was a dinky hand pump that didn't work well at all (I eventually tossed it). And not even with Rachel, although I did get mastitis a few times when she was little I don't remember ever being engorged quite like this.

To give you an idea: I weighed myself when we got home from the hospital, just because I was curious about how much everything weighed. I was down about fifteen pounds from my peak pregnancy weight, which makes sense. Seven pound baby, big ol' placenta, all that fluid and stuff. Sounds like fifteen pounds to me.

Then my milk came in and I was so engorged it would be comical were it not for the fact that it hurt so bad. I couldn't lift my arms to reach for anything, but I also couldn't put them down all the way. I had plugged ducts in my armpits, up by my collar bone, and basically everywhere else. I was waddling around like Anna in Frozen after she falls into the river...