Brain power shortage

In pregnancy, occasional flakiness is brushed aside as 'Baby Brain', as if somehow being pregnant messes with your brain waves and slows you down. I didn't find this - I was just as forgetful and slow as usual. I did make use of the excuse, however.

What I want to know though is why no one talks about Mum Brain, because since having W my ability to hold down a conversation has diminished dramatically. And I don't just mean because I'm forever having to run off to stop him launching himself off/into/under hazards or being interrupted by screaming. I mean my brain moves so slowly that minutes pass by before I remember that conversations depend on two participants or that responses are required to questions. 

Similarly the number of times I have caught myself trying to make coffee by putting the grounds in the kettle or the cold water in the mug or - once - the hot water into the coffee grounds container is more than a little disconcerting. And I find myself stopping mid sentence to search around the echoing cavern of my brain to find the word for sponge or frying pan or something else equally mundane and presumably difficult to forget. 

I write all of this under the assumption that this is common to all Mums - particularly the co-sleeping, night nursing Mums out there - and not that I have early onset something-or-other. 

And, writing this, I've realised why no one talks about Mum Brain...

...They don't dare. 

wonder week my arse*

Figuring out what's going on with a baby - why they're being so darn fussy or why they're waking up every 20 minutes or why they categorically refuse to be put down (and yes that includes the baby carrier because clearly if your hands are free you're not trying hard enough) - is a bit like attempting to play pictionary with someone trying to draw a cat. Only they're blindfolded, using their left hand and have never seen or heard of a cat. You wind up just guessing all the guesses in the world. Where the simile breaks down is that at some point, the pictionary guesser will be correct whereas the baby guesser (aka me) might never be right because the answer may be 'all of the above' or 'just because'.

Apparently one of the reasons he might be being fussy and waking every 20 minutes and demanding to be held by my aching arms is that we're in a "wonder week" and he's secretly making some developmental leap which he's going to surprise us with when the crying aching fog lifts.

He better be able to speak in full sentences is all I have to say. 

*let the record show that this has been typed one handed while the other hand/arm supports a sleeping yet-still-nursing baby.

Giving up

There was a moment, when W was maybe 36 hours old, when I realised I had to stop waiting for sleep. Up until then, any time in my life where I'd been tired, sleep was just a wait away. True deep long uninterrupted sleep. I sat in the hospital room and felt this dawning realisation seep into me. He was ours. We had to take him home. Sleep as I knew it was a thing of the past.

Later, there was a moment when Jeremy left the house - to go to work or to see friends or maybe just to take the trash out - but I understood with a searing jealousy that when he leaves the house he really leaves. That he's actually able to just walk out of the house without a care. That his autonomy and independence is still wholly intact. I missed being solitary singular Me with an acuteness that felt physical. And I kind of hated my husband a little. 

At four or five months I had to accept that W was not a baby who suddenly slept through the night. People had told me it would change at four months - that it would get better - and I believed them. I was stupid. So we started co-sleeping because it was the only way I could get enough sleep to function during the day. And that is how we live now. 

I haven't eaten cheese since May. If you know me, you know that I alone do not have the will power to forgo cheese (or butter or cream or cake or curry or chocolate or ice-cream) for 24 hours. But W has a dairy sensitivity. I'm thinner than I've ever been, which is the one and only upside and I think I prefer eating cheese and having an arse. 

I've never been super well-kempt. But I'm down to maybe two showers a week and I let Jeremy cut my hair. And if you can't see the baby sick on my jumper, it was never there.

New mum hair