I'll be honest, most days have been tough lately, as Mia continues to regress in her nighttime sleep habits. While it's been helpful not to have to wake her further by pumping and bicycling her legs at each stirring since she had her labial frenectomy performed, I have still been dealing with pretty frequent wakings. It's all part of the fun of approaching four months, and the developmental leaps and bounds that will entail, I suppose.
Her naps have gotten a bit better, at least, as has her general mood. I've been having a bit of trouble retraining her in the proper use of her "new" mouth, but she's getting a better latch at least half of the time, which is a start. At minimum, she's swallowing a heck of a lot less air, and she's got significantly reduced gas issues to prove it. She must also finally be successfully extracting my hindmilk, as evidenced by the color of her diapers for the past few days, so I'm trying not to stress too much about whether her breastfeeding form appears perfect. It's the results we're both most interested in, I'm sure.
In the meantime, Tom and I have been diligently lifting up baby lips twice a day and applying vitamin E, and we can attest that some impressive healing has taken place in a very short time.
If only I had a magic ointment to apply to my soul-deep exhaustion and general level of irritability (I don't do well on not-even-close-to-enough sleep). As if the the big toddler defiance on the one hand, the little toddler insatiable mischief-making on the other, and the newborn fussiness being tossed between were not enough to be dealing with under "normal" circumstances. The cherry on top of it all, of course, is that it's at those moments where I'm feeling most harassed that I start obsessing over little things that I can't really change and letting them pour rock salt in the raw wound that was once my patience: the fact that the diapers won't seem to stay confined to the pack n' play now that not one, but two toddlers are either tall or innovative enough to get to them, the reality that I just can't keep the pages in the books, the binding and paper out of searching mouths, or even the books themselves off of the floor with any level of success, all culminating in the epiphany as I watch the copious amounts of my post-partum hair falling soundlessly to the shower floor and dragging along it to the sad fate that awaits at the bottom of a crusty drain that this is my life now, this seemingly-unending cycle of mess, chaos, and more mess... And that last, in the midst of what should have been the highlight of my day- just the sheer fact that I managed twenty minutes or so in the warmth and quiet of steaming water.
...
It helps to have a front-row seat to these smiles, though: they're looking bigger already.
