Finally, A Post...With Pictures

I have a spare minute, so here's some pictures...

Me and my daughter on my first Mother's Day


I love her in white.


She's feeling a bit frustrated with tummy time.


With Grandpa

All stretched out


Taken at one month.


This is why I rarely take pics of her. She always seems to be fussy.


Just hanging out.

My crazy little sleeper. This is how I found her one morning. Mind you, she's supposed to be sleeping on that white thing with the side supports, but somehow she wiggled her way down off of it.


My big Mexican baby.


On our stroll, when incidentally somebody mistaked her for a boy.


I found her asleep like this one afternoon.

It's come down to this. I position her with a pillow and the boppy, so she can think she's still being held. This works better on the bed than in her cradle.

Just to answer a couple of yall's questions...

Yes, I do swaddle her...sometimes. There's certain times when she just won't tolerate it, but there's others where she's ok with it. I know it helps, but sometimes I think it makes her hot, which only makes her more fussy, so I pick and choose when to use it.

Someone suggested having her sleep in my bed with me. I don't really like to do this and for two big reasons. One, I don't want to establish this habit with her. Two, I find that I don't sleep comfortable with her in my bed unless it's just me and her, and only because I can put her on the other side of the bed where she won't interfere with me, nor I with her.

And by the way, thanks for yalls input and advice. I really don't mind it all. It really helps to get different suggestions. Even when there's no advice, it's just nice to hear that some of yall have been in the same situation yourself. It makes me feel like less of a screw up mom.

Last week I had two big issues with her. I realized it's not that she doesn't like the cradle, it's that she likes sleeping in someone's arms. Every time she falls asleep, someone is holding her, so when she's set down she'll wake within 20 minutes because she realizes she's not being held, which is why I set up the pillow and the boppy like I did in the photo above. When I did this on the bed one night, she slept 6 hours straight. I woke after five hours and realized she had not woken. I quickly put my finger under her nostrils to see if I could detect her breathing. Of course she was still alive, but I was truly worried for a second. But let me tell you the feeling of getting five hours of consecutive sleep was amazing!

The other issue: she forgot how to drink from a bottle. For a week straight I breastfed, because I just didn't feel like messing with the pump. Because of that one week of pure breastfeeding the next time I offered her the bottle, Lucero fiddled around with the nipple not sure how to drink from it. It was a real struggle to feed her. So from then on I began giving her a bottle at least once a day, so she could get reacquainted with it. There were some days where she just wouldn't take the time to figure it out and would cry mercilessly, but I think she's finally getting re-used to it.

Here's a positive, she now takes the pacifier. For weeks I've been trying to force this pacifier the pediatrician gave me. Funny thing, she took it at the doctor's office, but since then she's never wanted in her mouth again. We offered her a different one that we happened to have hanging around the apartment (it was used as a decoration at my baby shower) and after a couple of tries, she finally took to it. This is a major victory for me, because I realized most of the time she was on my boob, she was mostly there for comfort. I was a human pacifier and my boobs were paying the price for it. So now when she gets fussy and I know it's not due to hunger, a dirty diaper or gas, I offer the pacifier and it'll usually calm her.

It's finally getting better around here with me and Lucero. Not every moment is bliss, but it's definitely not as hell-ish as it was before. Either I've gotten used to her or she's gotten used to me. Or maybe she's just not the baby she once was. There were times in the first month or so that I seriously wanted to throw her against the wall - not very motherly, I know. I don't think I was experiencing post partum depression, but I'm sure my hormones did have a play in it, as well as my extreme fatigue and the fact that it was just her and I together all day, day in, day out, with no one around to relieve me. (Did I ever mention that X is gone 2/3 of the day when he's working? You can figure what he did with the other third of it when he returned home.) Anyway, it's a tough thing to admit that I would want to harm my child, but believe me, that's how bad it was at times. Thank the Lord I had a stable mind and didn't harm her, but I just wanted to illustrate how rough it was. Funny enough, it's only after you have a baby that other mothers begin to step forward and tell you how their first couple of weeks were hell also.

Now that Lucero is a little over 7 weeks old, I can't believe how fast time has flown. I have one major regret though. I hardly have any pictures of her and I together or even of her and X and there's absolutely none of all three of us together. It makes me sad that those moments weren't captured. She was only that little for a short bit and now she's becoming a real baby BABY. I swear she gains a pound a day. Ok, maybe not that much, but still I can see that she's growing and it just makes me all the more sad that I'm losing my little newborn.

As far as I go, for the most part I've returned to the size I was before. This is mostly due to the breastfeeding and getting very few solid meals in. Most of the time I ate cereal or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Yeah, not very healthy, but the only time I seemed to eat real meals was when someone was eating with me and that's because they either made it for me or brought it to me. Most of my clothes fit again, although some still seem to be a little snug, but maybe they were always that way. However, some damage was done. In my last weeks of pregnancy, seriously like the last three, some stretch marks showed up, despite my efforts to fight them off. They're mostly concentrated around my belly button. Lovely. And even though I fit into my old wardrobe, I still have this really soft, squishy stomach. Sure, it was soft before, but not like this. Eventually I plan to rejoin a gym and take care of this. And as far as below the equator, well it appears to look the same - not that yall wanted to know, but I was pretty curious what childbirth would do to it. After about four weeks I finally found the courage to take a mirror and look at it. Did I mention that even with the episiotimy I still tore? Yeah, thanks Lucero with your big eight pound body. It just made me realize how truly remarkable the human body is especially when it comes to recovery.

Anyway, that's all for now. My baby is down for a nap, so I better get to taking care of some other things. Until next time...