Chris has been out of the country for 5 days. That meant I had to take care of our little 4 month old daughter alone for four days.

Children are meant to have two parents. MOTHERS are meant to have a back-up.  It’s not that I mind taking care of her. The holding, the rocking, the changing of diapers and feedings–these are not SO bad. I can carry her forever as long as I have someone to carry me.

The bad part? The awesome alone-ness. The quality of being alone, by myself, is a totally different quality than being alone with my baby. Faced with the prospect of being alone with her for five days had me quivering in my socks.

So I lined up a social activity for every day that I would be alone. It worked out okay, and I practiced my new mantra “I can handle whatever comes.”

The whatever could and did include a child who refused to go to sleep at night, a child who woke up every HOUR all night long, and a kid who decided she was hungry but wouldn’t eat.

But I could handle that. I am the grown up here, I can handle it. To borrow a stranger’s blog comment “It’s amazing what you can handle when you have no other choice”

What I cannot handle, is being alone. I KNOW that if I don’t have contact with the outside world, the wallpaper will start talking to me. And I don’t have wallpaper.

But Chris comes home tonight. 9 and a half hours from now.

So, it’s thursday and the first week back at work has gone okay. I can see how this will work out. I’ve gotten through the slightly less sleep (not too bad) and the handing off of child to her father (harder, but we’re doing it). I’ve managed the gauntlet of pumping and storing milk for the little one three times a day while maintaining my professionalism.

There is one more hurdle: hitting the road. My job requires that I travel. I have to figure out a way to do this. 9 o’clock and 1 o’clock I have to attach a milking machine to my mammaries and stay that way for at least 10 minutes. THEN I have to unattach and clean up.

All while maintaining my dignity and professionalism.

I really don’t want to have to pull over at gas stations and hog their bathrooms for 15 minutes. Not sanitary or comfortable. My thoughts right now are to get a big dark sheet and throw it over myself while I do setup and take down.

The DURING I have figured out and can maintain modesty if not dignity. But hooking up needs something.

It reminds me a little of when I went camping with my family, and had to change clothes INSIDE my sleeping bag.

Big dark sheet that allows me to move around to get set up…Deep breath….it’s just what I’ll have to do.

Today is Veronica’s 3 month birthday. ‘They’ say that after three months, she is no longer a newborn and graduates to being an infant.

She is so much more capable now, that seems right. She started out barely able to do anything, but now she can can barely do a lot of things. She very adept at crying, and also very good at smiling. For both, she’ll put her whole body into it.

When she is delighted, she’ll open her mouth into a big happy “o” and shake her head from side to side. Even her hands and feet get into the act, with her fists scrunching up and her feet kicking like crazy. All this because I tell her she’s a good girl!

She is a good girl.

So Chris is bottle-feeding little V for her one o’clock feeding. We are preparing for the hand-off. Bottle feeding gives him bonding time and begins to allieve my fears that my mammaries are starving the child. She’s so little and stringy, and bottles are so conveniently marked with quantities. He feeds her a huge bottle of milk from the frozen stash I’ve been collecting for the purpose.

When he was done he asked “Where should I put her?”

I usually want to start yelling at him when he asks me things like that because, after all, he is going to be taking care of her all by himself in very very few days and why can’t he figure it out on his own?

But then again, probably the reason he feels the need to ask is because I would tell him “She likes being over HERE, not THERE where you in your ignorance put her.” And who likes to hear that? so he asks.  And I bite my tongue and say “Maybe she would like to sit in her chair.”

She often likes to sit in her chair.

I was finishing reading a webpage when Chris said with alarm “Baby! Come here! She just spit up a bunch.”

Of course my first thought was  “Babies Do that and why can’t you handle something so ordinary?” He is after all going to be taking care of her ALONE without me to yell for in a very short time.

He kept calling, “It’s really a lot. I think she threw up the whole bottle.”

So I got up and went to see. She seemed happy, biting her bottom look and staring at Daddy with a wrinkled forehead.

“She’s fine.”

“You didn’t see it!”

Then I saw her clothes were all wet, so I picked her up to go change her, still thinking ‘you’re going to have to do this all by yourself soon!’ and then I realized her chair had a puddle underneath her. And dining table chair beneath her chair had a puddle. And so did the floor.

So I guess changing the baby was the easy part. Chris had to clean up all the milky spit up, making sure the dog (dogs can be disgusting) didn’t get there first. He also dismantled Veronica’s chair and ran it through the laundry.

Because it really WAS that much, and because I am still worried that I am starving my child with the primitive non-measurable mammary method, I thawed some more milk and fed her again. Now she’s stuffed and sleeping to her goodnight CD–Harry Belafonte singing “Jamaican Farewell”

Twelve weeks ago today, I was in a hospital counting. I counted from  when the start of the contraction hurt to the end, just to have something to focus on. In between, and there was less and less in between as time went on, I counted how many hours this could possibly go on.

Chris was reading to me from the newspaper, also to have something to focus on. I told him that he could ask things, but that i was not going to answer because I was focussing on getting through the contractions. He remained calm and did a good job of helping me through.

Now, I am counting the days until I return to work. And I am counting the ounces I feed her, and how long between her naps.

She will not be 3 months old for a few more days so I am counting those.

It’s barely three weeks before I go back to work. People tell me I’m soooo lucky to have my husband handle the child while I go away. But it is hard to hand off.

Thing is, I love my baby, but I love my husband too. And my baby requires all kinds of specificity. She needs things exactly so and exactly this way and exactly this time. My husband needs the opposite. I mean, I can’t be leaning over him and telling him to do things exactly exactly.

But Veronica needs it that way. At least I think she does. But maybe my way is not the only way that works.

So I have to let go and let Daddy figure it out. He has to “find his own path”.

Yesterday, the child didn’t go to sleep right away in her crib like she has the past several nights. I put her in her crib and went racing around to do all the night things I had to do so i could slam my head on my pillow and SLEEP. But the child wouldn’t sleep.

So I picked her up out of her crib and was wrestling her squirmy little body out of the contortions she gets into to try to calm her to sleep. I’ve done this before many many times but I was impatient and wanted to be asleep.

Chris offered to put her to sleep. So I handed her over.

I had put her in the crib at 9:30. Chris finally got her to be ASLEEP in her crib at 11. At first he sat with her, but when the game was finished he got up and walked with her and sang to her. And he came in to the bedroom to give me updates.

I was thinking, Aren’t you glad I did not give you updates this morning when she wouldn’t go back to sleep? But I didn’t say it. I stayed in my warm bed without sleeping while the child was calmed and finally put to bed.

I would like to say “Don’t look at her and sing to her when you are trying to get her to sleep. She thinks that is the most interesting thing ever and will stay awake for it. Just hold her and ignore her and she will drift off to sleep.”

But…maybe I wouldn’t have had any better luck getting her to sleep last night. Maybe it would have taken an hour and a half either way. I’ll keep my mouth shut and just be glad that Chris is going to keep on taking good care of her the best way he knows.

So today was so pleasant that I began to realize that I had nothing to worry about. My daughter is so grown up and cheerful. She is definitely thriving and learning all the time. She likes me, but she likes lots of people and will do fine with Daddy when the time comes.

Since her favorite thing now is to sit up against my tummy so she can see things, I thought it might be a good time to read her first book. I bought it a while back: “Good Puppy”

I bought it because the dog looks just like our dog. She got into it. The dog got into it. Lucy came up and Veronica petted the dog and the book as I was reading it to her. She seems to like the book:

So, It’s 8:20 in the morning, and my daughter is still sleeping. She woke up once, but with a quick re-insert of the pacifier went back to sleep.

We’ve set the day for my return to work. It’s earlier that I absolutely -have- to return, but it seems to make sense. Everything is going well, so it seems there is no reason to take the last 3 and a half weeks off.

But I am suddenly once again all nervous about it. She’s fine, but am I ready? In a way I think that going to work, driving away for 9 or 10 hours will be easier than taking care of her all day. But then, I will have to think about her and miss her.

I will leave her in Chris’s care, and he’ll do okay with her. He’ll do it differently than I will, but that will be okay. Especially if I am not there to hide around the corner and fret about it. But it’s hard work and I fear that Chris is not prepared for it. Until you experience the all-day-ness of it, you just don’t know how hard it is. I fear that he will resent her and me and I will lose him.

It’s 28 days, a span that is both immediate and an eternity. She’s still sleeping. It’s only when she is asleep that I have concentrated time to worry. She’ll wake soon and then will begin the round of incredibly small things that fill the days. And the days will pass.

I know it doesn’t pay to worry. I’ve done a good job so far, and she is healthy and growing well. It’s just me that has the problem.

After I gave birth I was laid so low. I didn’t expect to be so messed up. I could barely walk, and my body was going through all kinds of rehabilitation.

That was 10 weeks ago tomorrow. 10 Weeks! That might as well be a year. And yet. My body is not recovered yet. I am surprised again by how much time and biological effort it takes for my body to recover. My joints are not there yet; they still feel quite a bit like they did when I was still pregnant. And my muscles (particularly my back and tummy area)  seem to have started a new kind of soreness. Maybe that’s because they are hoisting themselves back into the upright position, which would be nice.

Even after I wake up fully rested and on my own–not by a baby’s cry–I am so sore and tired. Which surprises me. I thought it would be over now.