The thing the experts don't tell you about newborns

I always feel badly for a new mom when I see her struggling to get the little one on a schedule. There are so many books (and friends, and grandmothers, and meddling perfect strangers) out there claiming that schedules are the answer to preventing sleep, feeding, discipline, and basically all other possible problems.

The thing I generally find lacking in the scheduling philosophy is a recognition that a newborn is
a) a newborn, and
b) an individual human being.

I hear a lot of astonishment from the new mom set that the baby sometimes wants to eat every hour all afternoon. Or that their first nap falls an hour after waking up in the morning. Or that if the parents don't pay attention to the baby's preferred schedule and the baby misses a nap, the baby will promptly come unhinged.

I know, I was astonished too, because I read the same books as everyone else. And I expected that I would be molding my baby like a little pink lump of play dough. What I actually experienced was that the baby shaped me. It was like being in a really loud Skinner box. She would freak and I would try stuff until something changed and allowed her to relax, or poop, or sleep, or eat, or whatever she was needing. And pretty soon, I got better at figuring out the puzzle.

It makes me sad to see new moms staggering along under a load of self-or-other imposed restrictions on their baby care. Some won't pick the baby up. Some won't feed the baby until it's "time", and then cut off the feed after a small, fixed number of minutes so the baby will feed efficiently during feedings and not at all in between. Some feel it teaches self-soothing skills to let the baby cry to sleep from a very young age. And so on.

I'm sure some babies are naturally easy to schedule, or tend to be self-soothers, and then this all works out fine. But many babies are, well, babies, and will resist with all their tiny might. So my thought is that the best course is to first go with the baby's schedule and figure out who this little person is that you're dealing with, and later on introduce your own preferences into the mix. The idea that we can tell a newborn when to be hungry seems as silly to me as the idea that we can tell them when to pee. We cannot ultimately control who our kids are, and the sooner we get used to that idea, the better.

Milk Guilt

I am currently breastfeeding a toddler with no firm plans to wean. I support and encourage breastfeeding for all kinds of reasons, but I won't drag out my soapbox right now. I just want to say that I find it sad that, no matter how much we do for our children, moms still feel guilty for not doing more. We seem to have a collective certainty that there is a such a thing as a perfect mom, and that we are just one step away from child abuse if we don't embody that perfection 24-7-365.

Case in point: I was at a local mall, in the kids' area (a carpeted hole in the floor that I refer to as the 'scream pit') and I noticed a mum with a three-year-old boy and a new baby. She was sitting at the side of the pit supervising the elder and nursing the younger. The baby reminded me so of the Bean at that age that I went over to chat. I asked the mom about her nursing experience, and she said that she had not had to wean her first to make room for the second. In fact, the boy was born with a cyst under his tounge and couldn't latch. She pumped milk for his bottles for nine (NINE) 9! months, and lost and regained her supply more than once before finally quitting. The part that raised my eyebrows was that she seemed somewhat embarassed to say that she had only provided the little guy with nine months of breastmilk.

Now, I've pumped, and let me just share with you that it's a pain in the ass. It can hurt. It is much less efficient in a volume-production sense than nursing a baby, so you end up doing massage and hot compresses and shaking the tree and so on to try to get more out. You have to sterilize the pump parts in addition to all the bottles and nipples. You can't hold the baby while doing it, and babies don't carry on conversations across rooms very well. This lady was pumping for 20 minutes, every hour and a half for months and doesn't know she deserves a medal?

Insanity.

The not-so-clever-ness of me

When I was setting up this blog, I thought of a number of oh-so-clever names for it. I felt somehwat less clever upon finding out that someone else had already thought of them, usually with multiple variations. I felt even less clever than that on finding that most of the owners of those blogs had set them up months or years ago, and then never written a single post. I stopped feeling at all clever when I finally found the long-stale blog of someone who did post for a time, and found that all the posts read like this:

so we went to the bar, right? and we played, but they threw bottles at us, so now we need yore help, charlie is in the hospital with stitches, and they wont let him out until we pay, but the bar owner wont pay us, so pass the hat people, next week we play another dive, and we need charlie alright

and so on.

At least he stopped, so I am saved the jail time I would have received for tracking him down and smacking him until he promised to use periods.

Wireless Buyout - Act II

I got a cryptic, automated message from my new wireless/cable company. It said "This is us. Call us back regarding your wireless service at X number."

So my curiosity got the better of me, and I called. I got another automated message saying that the payment on my overdue balance had not been received. Oh, crap. This is the end of our good credit rating. We really are going to have to eat cat food in retirement, it's not just some bad joke I make. Did I drop the ball on the bill? Crap, crap, crap...

Then the system asked me for my postal code, but couldn't recognize it. Then I got a live voice that couldn't find my cel number anywhere in the system. Then I remembered that the entire phone bill, which is for a home-cel-long distance bundle, is automatically paid. So I calmed down and realized that there is no late bill. The late bill is a red herring, sent to distract me, but from what?

I tried to explain this to the nice lady, but she caught on to the fact that we have a different bundle for cable and Internet through the same company. She latched on to the word "bundle" and hung on for dear life so she could shunt me to the bundle department while reassuring me that they would know much more. It should surprise no one at this point that the bundle department had never heard of me, either. So they shunted me to the same customer service department that my husband dealt with in Act I, where I held for 15 minutes. Then the Bean's nap ended before another nice, clueless voice could get on the line. I still don't know why they called in the first place.

And this ends Act II.

Wireless Buyout - Act I

So my wireless company has been bought out by my cable company, with some interesting results.

The voicemail on my cel phone stopped working. You'd think this would've excited a flurry of nasty phone calls from other subscribers to the new company, and that by the time I got around to doing anything the issue would have been long since resolved. Not so. I got at least three messages telling me that I might have to face the inconvenience of manually choosing the new network on my handset, or that the network name might vary. With an effort, I controlled my alarm over such prospects. But then the voicemail crapped out, and I tried to call the company.

Before, one of those numbers beginning with * would access the voicemail from the handset, so my question for the new company was simple: "What's the new number?" I sat on hold twice until the Bean needed me, and then my husband came home and he gave it a go. He wanted to call from the home phone, so he naively looked up a toll-free support number on the wireless website. He then held until the system hung up on him a couple of times, and finally got a live voice which informed him he'd been calling the wrong number.

So he called the right number and after holding again, finally got another voice belonging to a lady who had no idea about the old voicemail number ("Can't you just hold down the '1' on the handset?") or what its replacement might be ("I have a number for use from a land line... I don't know if it'll work from the cel. Most people use a land line.") . It turned out the land line number worked, and that concludes Act I.