Just Powers

Emma and EJ discuss what might be lurking in the hole in the tree. Or maybe they are just sharing ways to drive their parents crazy.

Today marks the end of Will’s first month as a member of the world. Up to this point he has proven to be incredibly mellow and laid back, but lest the karma gods think I am mocking them, let me say that I am sure he will start crying inconsolably any minute now.

He is incredibly snuggly, and spends most of his awake time staring with big bright (blue?) eyes at whatever enters his field of vision. He really only cries when he is hungry and often makes snorting/trumpeting noises that remind me a of a tiny little pachyderm.

He eats A LOT, which is good for him, if slightly tiring for me (and also makes it really hard to finish thank you notes…). He was 7 lbs. 3 oz. at birth, 7 lbs when we left the hospital, 6 lbs. 13 oz. at one week and 7 lbs. 6 oz. at two weeks. No doubt the constant eating will translate into a big weight gain at his one month check up this Friday, I will keep you posted.

We got what really really looked like a smile at about 3 weeks and he already has crazy-good head control and an iron grip. He loves lights and just in the last couple of days has started tracking people and objects with his eyes.

His sister seems to still be pretty fond of him, and we of course adore him. He’s a keeper.

As a result of Mike’s obsession mad skillz with the internets, he scored us four tickets to yesterday’s White House Easter Egg Roll. Since Emma “hearts” Sasha and Malia, and Mike and I *heart* their dad and mom, we were all really excited to hang out at their house for a couple of hours.

Emma talked about going to “Sasha and Malia’s house” for a week before we went, and seemed to have a good time once we were there - although I think she felt there had been a bit of false advertising, since we never actually went INTO the house itself. She did get to ride Metro, meet Curious George, and show off her new Ladybug dress.

William’s adventures were a little more low key, but he still got some good stories. First he got to freak out the Secret Service guy who reached into the stroller to check it out and got the shock of his life when the “doll” started moving. Then he got to nurse on the grounds of the White House. Really, there can’t be too many people in the world who can say that, right?

When we had Emma, I was totally prepared for that first month home with her to be the worst month of my life. I figured I would be sleep deprived, hormonal, in physical pain and generally confused about my new role as a mother. It turned out that actually it was much better than I predicted - I was pretty good about sleeping when she slept, Mike and I got to hang out just the two of us as we got to know our new baby and I didn’t feel nearly as stumped by motherhood as I thought I would.

This time around I didn’t prepare myself for much of anything, mostly because I was so wrong last time, and I couldn’t quite get my head around how life would be with two anyway, so why waste time worrying about it?

I have to say, 3 weeks and 3 days into this adventure, that things are much more challenging this time than I could have ever imagined. Sleep is… oh pthltpt, who needs sleep anyway? Mike and I are getting really good at splitting up to attend to one child each, but this means we don’t get to do a whole lot of hanging out “just the two of us” - although thank god there ARE two of us. The emotions connected to raising two kids is enough fodder for an entire month of blog posts, so I won’t even go there. And holy mackerel - the sheer logistics of managing two kids is completely overwhelming at times.

Case in point - it took us forever to get to the grocery store this weekend. Every time we planned to go something came up - Emma was melting down, Will needed to eat, the weather was too nice and a trip to the park seemed like a much better idea - and we didn’t actually get to the store until 48 hours after we had initially planned to go. It made me realize two things - 1) Going to the store by myself with both kids is not going to happen for quite a while and 2) I am in serious trouble when Mike goes back to work in a week.

Peapod may become my new best friend.

Emma turned 28-months old yesterday. In the last month or so, we have seen an all-new, not necessarily improved, Emma. It’s as if someone reminded her she is two-plus-some and she really needs to do her part upholding the image that two-year olds have around the world and get crackin’ on that “terrible twos” thing.

Maybe the arrival of a sibling is partially responsible for sparking the newfound ornery-ness, but I kind of think we would be experiencing similar changes with or without the new baby. The difference would be that Mike and I would not be distracted, exhausted and hormonal as we try to deal with her.

When I can look at the situation from FAR FAR outside of myself, and think of this phase as her job, something she has to do to develop appropriately and move to the next stage of person-hood, I can feel almost proud. “Man, she is so good at finding opportunities to be independent!” “Wow, she is really skilled at questioning authority and finding her own way of doing things!”

Unfortunately, I am very rarely FAR FAR outside of myself these days, and when that little stinker puts her foot up on the table during dinner – despite my REPEATED warnings not to – my eyes begin to bug out of my head and I begin to speak in tongues and she smiles at me as if it were the funniest thing ever and then announces she would like to go into a time-out… well, those are the moments I have trouble feeling especially sane, let alone proud.

But she is very proud to be a big sister, and every morning comes into our room and wants to see her “baby bruvver”. She especially likes to hold him “on the sofa” and always offers to hold his hand during a diaper change. She loves to give him sweet gentle kisses and lots of hugs. The good news is that she doesn’t seem to hold Will responsible for his arrival at our home, the bad news is that she does hold me responsible from time to time. A few nights after we got home from the hospital she threw a book at my head – an act she seemed to find as shocking and upsetting as I did. As things start to settle down, though, she seems to be forgiving me, and our relationship is getting as back to as normal as possible. When she isn’t putting her feet on the table.

Oh – and she can now count to 11 (before she skips to 14, 16, then back to 6) and can ALMOST sing the entire alphabet, although she likes to jump to the “Now I know my ABC’s…” part after the letter L or so, so we sing it with her to keep her on track.

There are times when Emma does something particularly, shall we say, rebellious? independent? – and she gets a little twinkle in her eye. Sometimes I swear I can see a 14-year-old version of herself in there somewhere, and it completely terrifies me…

William James Carvalho joined us on Thursday, March 19, 2009 at 5:32 pm. He weighed 7 pounds 3 ounces and was 19 3/4 inches long. Like his sister, his labor was uneventful if pretty short - 6 hours of very light contractions that allowed me to drive myself to the hospital, ending with the doctor breaking my water which brought on 40 minutes of very very hard labor before Will entered the world in one push. We had the most amazing nurse in the world who made the whole experience the polar opposite of our experience delivering Emma.

One week later, we are all doing great. Emma is going through what seems like a pretty typical 2 year-old adjustment period, requiring extra patience and love from us, Will is sleeping and eating and doing everything else newborns do (no prediction here about his temperament, lest I jinx it), and Mike and I are just beginning to figure out how to juggle it all.

One of the hardest things about the whole bedrest thing during this pregnancy has been asking for help. It isn’t that I haven’t needed help, it’s just that asking for it is difficult for me, it always has been. I will happily accept help that is offered, but reaching out and being proactive about getting it when I am having a hard time is not in my nature. I just assume that people who have the time or ability to help me will offer, and if they don’t offer then they must not be able to help so what is the point of asking? This has been frustrating for lots of my family and friends who have let me know that they want to help, but don’t know how and need me to guide them. I have been trying to get better at this, but it is really hard.

When Emma was sick with the stomach flu a couple of weeks ago, she spent two days throwing up. Every time she threw up she would say “I’m ok, I’m ok, I’m ok” through her tears, to the point that Mike and I would cry with her as we watched her be very not ok.

As I watched her working so hard to convince us - and more importantly herself I guess - that she was ok, I wondered where she learned the “I’m ok” mantra. Certainly as grown ups we insist we are fine all the time when we clearly aren’t, but how does a 2-year old pick this up and start doing it? Then I realized that our usual reaction whenever Emma gets hurt or cries is to say to her “You’re ok, you’re ok.” Like a lot of parents I think, we do this in an attempt to calm her down as quickly as possible, and to reassure her - and perhaps ourselves - that she really is ok.

Now I am wondering if we are doing her a disservice by insisting she is ok, when maybe she doesn’t feel like she really is. Are we teaching her that it is more important and acceptable to be ok than it is to experience bad feelings? Certainly bad feelings aren’t comfortable, but if there is one thing I have learned over the years it is the importance of experiencing and “sitting in” the downs of life as much as enjoying and cherishing the ups. Maybe we should be trying to figure out a way to comfort her when she is hurt or sad, while still validating the bad feelings she might be experiencing? Because it really is ok to not be ok sometimes.

In the end I suspect it is stuffing the bad feelings that leads us - ahem - to pretend we are fine and don’t need help, when in fact we do. If we felt as though our bad feelings were as valid as our good ones, we wouldn’t really apologize for them or hesitate to ask for help when we needed it would we? Aren’t we stronger when we are able to ask for help and get it, when we are able to rely on others in times of need without apology or embarassment? And doesn’t this also translate into being more empathic when others aren’t ok and need help?

So I will work on asking for help more, but I am also going to work on helping my daughter be ok with not being ok, with figuring out how to feel comfortable with bad feelings without wallowing in them and with knowing that it is ok to ask for help when she needs it.

After the first substantial snow of her short life, Emma went out to play. Her favorite things to do were to fall down on purpose, and climb this little hill in our neighbors yard. Next stop, Mt. Everest!!

At some point this week I thought to myself that I might talk to my OB about scheduling a c-section for me and that maybe she could just knock me out for it so I slept through the whole thing. This thought from someone who had no interventions or medications with the delivery of my first child (unless you count a nasty nurse as an intervention).

But the thing is, with my first pregnancy, I just sailed through. At the time I felt really sorry for myself for being really sick until about 18 weeks, and then at 32 weeks I started having some hip pain, and I was tired of course, I thought it was a tough pregnancy. Now, I know better. From the nausea that lasted until 20 weeks, the hip pain that started at 21 weeks, the pre-term contractions at 26 weeks and managing the “modified” bed rest from then on, to stressors that have occurred in the last few weeks that include bad news regarding my dog and my job, not to mention the stomach flu all three of us had this week, I now realize how easy I had it with my first.

Ok, I don’t really want to miss the birth of my second child, but honestly I am at this place right now where labor could actually happen at any moment, and the thought of that terrifies me. I spent months preparing physically and mentally for Emma’s birth, and I was successful at having an intervention free birth. This time, I have just barely read the chapter in my Bradley book that reviews the stages of labor, have done almost no physical prep for labor and barely even have my bag for the hospital packed. I am completely unprepared and find myself more terrified of the impending birth than excited, as I was last time. Since I am pretty sure that it was largely my preparation, mindset and mental state that allowed me to get through the pain last time, I am pretty sure that my lack of preparation and stable mental state this time will be my downfall. That, and I am just DONE. Done being pregnant, done with bed rest, done with the stress of late.

So really I think just going full throttle with the interventions and letting me sleep through a scheduled c-section is probably the best thing. Don’t you?

Last week, for our third anniversary, a box of flowers showed up at my door. As I walked up the steps towards them, I ran through the list of people who could have sent them to me. Included in that list was Mike - my partner of six years, three of them government-sanctioned.

For whatever reason, Mike and I have never been overly romantic in the traditional sense of the word, but however it is that we show each other that we care seems to have worked so far. Mike will randomly buy me gifts that he knows I will like and occasionally will pick up a bouquet of flowers at the grocery store, but I am pretty sure he has never sent me flowers - oh wait, there was that plant arrangement he sent to my office for my first Mother’s Day. That was very cool, and I have even managed NOT to kill it yet.

So, he has only sent me foliage of some sort one other time. This is not something that bothers me or that I find myself ever even thinking about. However, when I walked up those stairs and saw that box of flowers, and ran through the list of possible senders, I found myself thinking, “Oh please let them be from Mike.” When I opened the card, and they were from him, I cried enough that Emma asked “Mommy so happy?”

I felt like Meg Ryan at the very end of “You’ve Got Mail” when she is standing in a garden in Central Park waiting to meet the person she has spent the entire movie emailing and IMing with anonymously, and who she has convinced herself could be “Mr. Right.” As Tom Hanks rounds the corner, she realizes that her anonymous Mr. Right is actually a very real person she has known for a while, and who she has become best friends with. As they embrace and the music swells, she says “I wanted it to be you. I wanted it to be you so badly.”

My bouquet started out with most of the buds closed tight but with lush beautiful green leaves. When Mike came home that night he was concerned that they didn’t look more colorful, like the picture had looked when he ordered them. One week later, this is what they look like. They are stunning and I love them.

Thanks Mike. I love you, too.