Phoebe just had her two month check-up last week. She's doing great! And is big! 13lb & 8oz. Which just amazes me. We had a kinda rocky start with her losing a full pound in her first week. But after half a dozen trips to the lactation consultant those first few weeks we're now a nursing super duo and she's a chubby bunny to prove it. Our experiment has begun, one baby formula fed and one breastfed, we'll see which one turns out bionic ;)
I now know how people can go and have a bushel of kids...some newborns aren't terrifying. Phoebe does all those things I'd heard about newborns but seemed like myths when our colicky Oscar arrived...sleeps in the car, sleeps while you run errands, sleeps in a sling, falls back to sleep after waking up to eat in the middle of the night, she actually sleeps that 15-16 hours a day the books talk about! Not to say she doesn't have her fussy moments. At 7:00 on the dot every night she starts to howl. But the craziest thing, you pick her up and she stops crying. It's a brand new world! I'd always been a fan of older babies. Newborns scared me even before Oscar. I'd pretty much expected to tough it through the first four months until Phoebe did what Oscar did and turned into the most dazzling adorable superbaby ever, but now I've got newborn fever. I show her off to all the grandmas and moms of older kids at the stores and on the street. I stop and let them coo and touch her fuzzy hair. I'm paying it forward because now I'm hooked on the tiny baby action.
What I expected would be difficult about the new baby has turned out easy and vice versa. I'd really underestimated the reaction Oscar would have toward a new baby in the house. I thought he'd be pretty cool with it and in some aspects I was right. He's 3 1/2, a self-proclaimed big boy, he's not smacking the baby in the face or hanging on my legs or begging to be picked up. And he's actually very very helpful. Always running for a burpie or pointing out good places to feed her or replacing a spit out binkie over and over. It was far more insidious, his reaction to the new family member. He's gone on some sort of crazed toddler, multi-personality, power trip, tantrum freak out rampage. Digging in his little heels on all sorts of arbitrary nonsense and is completely impervious to any of our parenting techniques. I half expect to find a board book version of Art of War under his bed covers. He's kicking our ass. But we're digging in our heels just as much, trying our best to squash any unease he has with lots of attention and reassurances and calm, steady support.
I could write all night about what a shock to the system 2 kids has turned out to be. Some days I'm just in a spiral of guilt, not enough attention to one, oh no, not enough attention to the other, but this one needs me, no this one needs me more, etc. But most of the time I'm just calmly happy. Ok here we all are. The four of us. Like when I kept trying for days to get the perfect picture of Oscar and Phoebe, brother and baby sister perfectly happily captured. Then it sank in, every picture from now on will be Oscar and Phoebe, growing bigger and bigger, together.
