Progress

1. Clara is feeding much better and is back up to her birth weight as of yesterday. Hooray. We went to the breastfeeding clinic again a couple of days ago to try to get her latch fixed, because my nipples were on fire. There was another couple there describing their experience having a baby at Mount Sinai Hospital. The doctors refused to give the baby to the mother for the first hour (critical bonding time) because they said her (the mother's) blood pressure was too low. Then the night nurse, when the baby wouldn't feed, laid a huge guilt trip on them about how the baby was STARVING and was going to get JAUNDICE and needed formula RIGHT THEN. What a great idea: actively discourage a new mother from trying to breastfeed. Grr. Hearing this made me nearly incandescent with anger. (Everything is very, very close to the surface right now.) If I hadn't thought before that we'd made the right decision to have midwives... This poor couple. We talked to them and tried to reassure them that yes, it's hard in the first week(s), but if they really want to do it they'll be able to feed their baby the way they want to. It was weird feeling like the grizzled veterans already.
   
2. The family politics, never enjoyable even at the best of times, are taking their toll and, I suspect, are only going to get worse. Hint to everyone: now is not the time for deep discussions with me and it is not the time to grouse to anyone about my requests for only positive energy in the house. Sigh.
3. I need more sleep.
4. I don't want Mr. K to go back to work next week, even if my parents are going to be here. He's my rock.
5. For a while this afternoon, both Clara and Martha were asleep on my lap, baby's back smooshed up against the cat's. Hooray redux. (Now if only Charlotte would start sleeping at the foot of the bed again instead of spending all her time downstairs.)
6. Right now my life doesn't seem to have changed all that much from the way it was in the last month of my pregnancy: I'm home most of the time, I screw around on the Internet too much, I watch some TV, and it's hard to move around. The biggest difference is that I'm a lot more sleep-deprived, and there's someone small around who likes to munch on my tits all the time. She's not very interactive yet and even though I love her, I don't feel as engaged with her as part of me thinks I should be by now. But evidently this is normal too: falling completely in love with the baby takes time. Hard to believe she's two weeks old already.
7. I think part of me is still grieving the loss of the first baby two years ago. When I lost the pregnancy, we wrapped the pee test stick up with an amethyst (would've been a February baby) and a cotton cloth I'd knitted, inside a piece of paper that Mr. K had made. Something from his hands and something from mine. We buried the little package on A. Island, where his parents have a bit of property. (Our beloved James is buried there too.) Last night it occurred to me to put Clara's footprints on another piece of Mr. K's handmade paper; I mentioned the idea to him this morning. He said that he'd thrown the paper out during the Great Cleaning before the baby came. I went to pieces and cried for much of the day. Tonight, thank heaven, he found five pieces of it. Oddly enough, I don't feel that much better yet. Tomorrow we're going to hunt down some water-soluble ink.
   
8. Clara is stirring. Titmunching time again, I guess.