My Arms Feel Like They're Ready to Fall Off
Mikef told me early on in Baby Dog’s life that when you have kids, you get really strong arms. I saw pretty quickly what he meant, lugging the child around in the carrier seat and all – the seat adds a whole bunch of extra pounds, and you just can’t take the infant anywhere without it. Somewhere along the line, though, a comfort zone got attained. Baby Dog outgrew the carrier seat, and as she started to spend time on the floor, there was less constant carrying involved. When she outgrew shushing and graduated to being rocked to sleep, the arms got a break too.
In recent weeks, though, the rocker has lost its efficacy, and in a strange little regressive twist, the only thing that gets her to sleep at night is being rocked in my arms. When she weighed ten pounds, that got tiring after a while. Now she’s almost 23 pounds. Rocking her to sleep entails holding that 23 pounds in front of me with my arms locked at chest height for ten, fifteen, however many minutes it takes to get her to doze off. It’s like one of those Final Three Survivor challenges where they have the players stand on one foot on a fencepost until one of them falls off. Now there’s an idea for a reality show – Survivor: Newborn. Lock a bunch of childless singles in a house and make them take care of an infant. Last one to flee is a millionaire.
Changes will continue to abound. Tomorrow is Baby Dog’s first day in daycare. Halmonie is still here to smooth the transition, but we’re going to treat tomorrow morning as a dry run to see how we handle a new morning routine. We’ve drawn up a schedule for the hours from 6 a.m. to Mama Dog’s 8 a.m. departure time. The schedule is probably wildly optimistic, but we’ll see how it goes in practice and make refinements as necessary. Every week a new adventure.
In recent weeks, though, the rocker has lost its efficacy, and in a strange little regressive twist, the only thing that gets her to sleep at night is being rocked in my arms. When she weighed ten pounds, that got tiring after a while. Now she’s almost 23 pounds. Rocking her to sleep entails holding that 23 pounds in front of me with my arms locked at chest height for ten, fifteen, however many minutes it takes to get her to doze off. It’s like one of those Final Three Survivor challenges where they have the players stand on one foot on a fencepost until one of them falls off. Now there’s an idea for a reality show – Survivor: Newborn. Lock a bunch of childless singles in a house and make them take care of an infant. Last one to flee is a millionaire.
Changes will continue to abound. Tomorrow is Baby Dog’s first day in daycare. Halmonie is still here to smooth the transition, but we’re going to treat tomorrow morning as a dry run to see how we handle a new morning routine. We’ve drawn up a schedule for the hours from 6 a.m. to Mama Dog’s 8 a.m. departure time. The schedule is probably wildly optimistic, but we’ll see how it goes in practice and make refinements as necessary. Every week a new adventure.
posted by PapaDogDuvalier | 9:58 PM
1 Comments:
Hope everything went smoothly this morning with the daycare and all!
My younger son loves to be held when he's going to sleep - all 25.5 lbs of him. Ugh. Talk about a bad back!
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