Hooboy, I’m starting to lose it. Last night went like the previous nights: I’d nurse her to sleep, I’d carefully and gently put her in her cosleeper (which we had modified: mattress on a slight incline, sleep positioner to make her feel snug), I’d lay down and close my eyes… and she’d wake up and start fussing, then swinging arms, then crying. Rinse, repeat. I slept for about 2 hours with her nestled against my belly after nursing, and then after the next nursing session and attempt at putting her to sleep I ended up putting her in her swing in the living room, pulling over the futon, and falling asleep there. I think I got about 3 hours of sleep on the futon before she woke up again.<\/p>\n
So I’m running short of sleep today again as we headed into another evening of crying and cluster-feeding for well over 3 hours. It’s not even just that I was exhausted, because while I’m tired I’m not falling-over exhausted. But the combination of tired plus constant nursing on sore nipples plus crying baby all ended with me sobbing gently and Den trying to save me. I told him there was nothing he could do, the only thing she wanted was boob, but he insisted I go take a nap and leave her. I have no idea what he did or how well she was, but I napped for about an hour before he woke me up to feed her again. Even just that felt great.<\/p>\n
Like I said, it’s not like I’m falling over with exhaustion – though that day will soon come if she continues not sleeping at night. It’s just so damn hard having an upset baby for that length of time. I almost couldn’t leave her with Den, because she was crying and it kills me when she cries. She not only looks sad, she sounds absolutely pitiful. It makes me feel like a horrible mommy and I just want to cry with her. The feeding non-stop doesn’t help, either; even though logically I know it’s normal to cluster-feed like this it still makes me worry that she’s getting enough. But she only cluster-feeds in the evening, she poops and pees plenty… but you know how it is. Mommy anxiety.<\/p>\n
This mommy anxiety is rough – and I mean, the “normal” stuff besides the weird panic attacks I was having. This is the stuff everyone warned me about: now that she’s here and safe, I still don’t feel “safe.” I worry about her suffocating. I worry about dropping her. I worry about her eating enough. Just like I used to check to make sure she was still kicking, now I check to make sure she’s still breathing. It’s not an obsession or anything, it’s not overwhelming… but I just have those flashes of worry. I’d love to believe they’ll go away, but from what everyone has told me this is kind of a parent thing and I’ll worry about her the rest of her life. One day she’ll be saying, “Mo-ooommm!” when I ask her to call me when she gets there, just like I used to do to my mom.<\/p>\n
Den said to me tonight, “So remember when you said you wanted her to stay this age forever?” Yeah, yeah, okay…. maybe it’s a good thing that this is just temporary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hooboy, I’m starting to lose it. Last night went like the previous nights: I’d nurse her to sleep, I’d carefully and gently put her in her cosleeper (which we had modified: mattress on a slight incline, sleep positioner to make her feel snug), I’d lay down and close my eyes… and she’d wake up and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/71"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2995"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2995\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2997,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2995\/revisions\/2997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}