I survived the trip to my mother-in-law's. It wasn't anywhere near as bad logistically as I feared, in no small part because my MIL was much more laid back due to her grief. It was a very sad trip, but little M was the one thing that gave everyone some hope and a reason to face forward.
And little M did great on such a long car trip. We spent two nights along the road to get there and again driving back. So it was a long trip but if we had tried to do it faster M would have driven us and herself completely mad. And it was nice to also get in a quick visit with my great aunt. She was so psyched about M.
M has only been sleeping 2-3 hours a stretch for the last 4 weeks. The times when she wakes and snacks and goes back to sleep within 30 minutes aren't too bad. It is the times when she has a hard time getting back to sleep that are the killer for me. She will fuss and fuss and get herself all worked up. I manage to get her back to sleep about 1.5 hours later but that mans that she wakes up 30-45 minutes later hungry again. I, a former insomniac, has developed quite a talent for falling back asleep at the drop of a hat. Although, I read somewhere that breast feeding hormones help with falling asleep again quickly. Not sure there is any truth to that as I would guess that just about anyone who hadn't slept for more than 2.5 hours in a row for the last 5-6 weeks would fall asleep virtually instantaneously too.
Saturday was the first day I felt kind of bad. Adrenaline had me going really well but I think the sleep deprivation is starting to get to me. I was in a bad mood all day and really needed a break from M. Honestly, I really needed the glass of wine I drank. M has been in kind of a bad mood for a few days now. She isn't colicky at all, but just kind of hard to please.
The lack of interaction is starting to get to me. I was feeling lots of good vibes from the fact that I had managed to keep her alive and feed her so that she is gaining weight like a summo wrestler (10.9 pounds on Friday, yowza). But that is starting to not be enough feedback. I could really use a smile.
Today I am feeling quite a bit better, in no small part due to three things that happened on Sunday:
1) I bought a couple of nursing bras that actually fit properly. It was really starting to get to me to always be so aware of my large, heavy and still somewhat painful breasts all the freaking time.
2) I bought a shirt that is really cute, big enough to cover my breasts, styled appropriately to draw attention away from their girth, and long enough to cover the top of the maternity pants I am still wearing. I am feeling very gross these days; I needed the wardrobe boost.
3) Dh decided he was going to lose it if he couldn't get a good night's sleep so he and the cat moved to the guest bedroom last night. M and I set up shop in my bed which seems to have resulted in a better night's sleep for all four of us. M only woke up twice and went back to sleep quickly. Funny thing though is that I have started to dream about nursing her, so sometimes I am not sure if I did or didn't...
Showing posts with label in-laws. Show all posts
Showing posts with label in-laws. Show all posts
Monday, April 18, 2011
Monday, April 4, 2011
Have you ever noticed that...
Women can accomplish other things while holding a baby but men can't (i.e., laundry, make lunch)?
Babies always wake up and fuss exactly when you sit down to eat?
A brand of the apron-like things you can buy to provide some privacy when you nurse in public is called "hooter hiders"? I kid you not.
Whenever I go through some experience that should win me lots of compassion and baby-ing, my Dh always one-ups me so that I have to suck it up and baby him instead?
My FIL passed away last Tuesday. We are driving down to be with Dh's mom. M is being really good, for a three week old. Because MIL hates when people spend money we can't stay in a hotel when we get there but rather had to pack sleeping bags and towels and all the baby things I thought we might need for a week so that we can stay in one of the empty trailers in this little mobile home community they live in. And I have to stock the kitchen and cook for a week. I have no idea what to expect in terms of cleaning. There really is a price for convenience and ease, which I would gladly pay given little M's age and my inexperience as a mom. But the woman's husband just died, so her dislike of our spending money on "convenience" trumps my new baby.
Oh, and Dh hurt his back getting M's carseat in the car the other day so I have to lift and carry everything, including the baby.
It is going to be a great week, but at least I have a hooter hider to make me laugh while all the old people scowl at me for nursing in public.
Babies always wake up and fuss exactly when you sit down to eat?
A brand of the apron-like things you can buy to provide some privacy when you nurse in public is called "hooter hiders"? I kid you not.
Whenever I go through some experience that should win me lots of compassion and baby-ing, my Dh always one-ups me so that I have to suck it up and baby him instead?
My FIL passed away last Tuesday. We are driving down to be with Dh's mom. M is being really good, for a three week old. Because MIL hates when people spend money we can't stay in a hotel when we get there but rather had to pack sleeping bags and towels and all the baby things I thought we might need for a week so that we can stay in one of the empty trailers in this little mobile home community they live in. And I have to stock the kitchen and cook for a week. I have no idea what to expect in terms of cleaning. There really is a price for convenience and ease, which I would gladly pay given little M's age and my inexperience as a mom. But the woman's husband just died, so her dislike of our spending money on "convenience" trumps my new baby.
Oh, and Dh hurt his back getting M's carseat in the car the other day so I have to lift and carry everything, including the baby.
It is going to be a great week, but at least I have a hooter hider to make me laugh while all the old people scowl at me for nursing in public.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
The in-laws are coming... OMG
I love waking up to all those wonderful comments to last night's insomnia stress post. Thank you all so much! I decided to stop thinking about strollers for at least a day, and I took myself off of a project at work. It was so hard to do, as I really wanted to write this little article and it would have been fun and I would have been a great person to do it, and I would have gotten some personal-career promotion from it. But I am feeling so exhausted these days that I need to be realistic. So I wrote the email, and cringed when I hit "send". It was the right thing to do though. And it lifts a little of the work burden off my shoulders.
And then I turned my weary headachy head to Dh during breakfast to learn some news he's clearly been keeping to himself for a couple of days. His parents are coming.
Dh's parents meet up with their friends at a resort-y type place about 2 hours away from where we live every year in March or April. They didn't make it last year because they both had the flu. And then his dad had the heart attack in July and the metastasized prostate cancer diagnosis in August/September.
Since Dh's dad is sort-of feeling better (although he has to take a 3 hour nap every day), they plan on going this year. Oh, and they plan to drive the 10 hours themselves.
Oh, and it is March 30, 31, and April 1.
Bad enough that they are not anywhere near fit enough to make this drive safely, that they are too cheap to break it up over three days and stay at hotels along the way, and that Dh's mom can't drive at all.
But add onto it the fact that they want to see us.
We renovated our house over the last few years and they haven't seen it yet, so we are thinking they want to come stay with us.
Remember, this is the mother-in-law who was not exactly excited or happy for us when she learned of the impending baby. This is the MIL who is ridiculously judgmental about food. This is the MIL who doesn't wash dishes with soap.
If little M is born on her due date, she'll be just over 3 weeks old.
OMG.
But given how ill Dh's dad is, this might be their only chance to see our house, and delays in seeing their new granddaughter are not a good idea.
But 3 freaking weeks old????!!!!
I don't know if I can handle this. I don't think I have a choice. I have no idea how this will ever work out ok.
And then I turned my weary headachy head to Dh during breakfast to learn some news he's clearly been keeping to himself for a couple of days. His parents are coming.
Dh's parents meet up with their friends at a resort-y type place about 2 hours away from where we live every year in March or April. They didn't make it last year because they both had the flu. And then his dad had the heart attack in July and the metastasized prostate cancer diagnosis in August/September.
Since Dh's dad is sort-of feeling better (although he has to take a 3 hour nap every day), they plan on going this year. Oh, and they plan to drive the 10 hours themselves.
Oh, and it is March 30, 31, and April 1.
Bad enough that they are not anywhere near fit enough to make this drive safely, that they are too cheap to break it up over three days and stay at hotels along the way, and that Dh's mom can't drive at all.
But add onto it the fact that they want to see us.
We renovated our house over the last few years and they haven't seen it yet, so we are thinking they want to come stay with us.
Remember, this is the mother-in-law who was not exactly excited or happy for us when she learned of the impending baby. This is the MIL who is ridiculously judgmental about food. This is the MIL who doesn't wash dishes with soap.
If little M is born on her due date, she'll be just over 3 weeks old.
OMG.
But given how ill Dh's dad is, this might be their only chance to see our house, and delays in seeing their new granddaughter are not a good idea.
But 3 freaking weeks old????!!!!
I don't know if I can handle this. I don't think I have a choice. I have no idea how this will ever work out ok.
Monday, January 3, 2011
The holidays
I've been going back and forth on how to write this post. Our holidays with the in-laws were, well, so-so. Please forgive me in advance for my inability to maintain maturity. :)
Dh got home safe and sound though a little sick and a lot jet-lagged. His flight landed around 6pm on Wednesday and we left our house at 1pm on Thursday to drive the 10 hours to his parent's for Christmas. I had made arrangements to stay at a pretty nice hotel about a 4 hour drive from our place that first night.
Things went really well that first day, just the two of us packing up and driving down. We had a decent dinner at the hotel, but my allergies were bothering me and I ended the meal with a huge coughing fit that resulted in my peeing my pants (literally, pee dripping down my legs).
Dh was a super-champ about it -- what a harsh welcome back to pregnancy land! I have coughing fits a lot so he's used to that, and the "I just peed my pants and have to go to the room" thing didn't seem to phase him. He paid the bill and brought up all our luggage to the room by himself while I went and cleaned myself up and licked the wounds to whatever dignity I might have still had left after the last two years of IF.
We arrived at his parent's place just after dark the next day (Christmas eve). We tied a bow around my belly. When we walked in (and they didn't seem to notice) we said that we wanted to give them their big present early -- a granddaughter!
The reaction:
The mother-in-law: leans over and hangs her head over the counter.
The father-in-law: hugs me and immediately cheers congratulations.
Back to the mother-in-law: stands back up and says, "well, are you two happy about this?"
Needless to say, this was only half the reaction we expected. It continued to get worse, as my being pregnant became the elephant in the room that no one would talk about except Dh and me. Dh would constantly refer to my being pregnant, to our daughter on the way, etc. FIL asked a couple of questions here and there over the next 5 days but MIL was pretty pissed and wouldn't acknowledge the conversation topic.
And she wouldn't feed me. She's got this weird thing about food where she is ridiculously miserly in the servings. This is a mixed blessing because she's a terrible cook. I typically think of my visits to their house as an opportunity to go on a little diet, but I can't do that right now. I feel really sick if I don't eat, and I need to eat food I feel good about. Her food does not fall under that category by any definition (i.e., lots of instant and low-quality stuff that isn't cooked quite right). Add on the fact that she has apparently given up using dish soap, and you'll understand why I was pretty concerned about getting food poisoning.
So she was also pissed that we brought some food with us (like steel-cut oats to cook for breakfast instead of eating through the 10-year old 50 pound bag of oatmeal she got at the mormon church for a good price, except that it was a good price because it hadn't been husked quite right and contains sharp pieces that do not qualify as "oats"). And I took real milk because watered-down instant milk just sucks. And fresh veggies, I took fresh veggies because frozen celery reheated in the microwave is disgusting.
She was additionally pissed about what a pig I am. She kept trying to only give me super meager servings, like part of a banana or apple. Apparently in her world these fruits should be shared by at least 2-4 people per piece. At the first breakfast Dh forcefully pushed back and said that I was going to eat the whole banana because I am pregnant and need to. I loved that he defended me and was looking out for little M, but it pissed me off royally that every meal was a fight and lead to bad feelings all around. Such a contrast to my family that kept pushing me to finish off the last bits of particularly healthy foods.
Christmas dinner absolutely sucked. She made instant mashed potatoes (that I can barely stomach even to be polite), a "pork roast" that looked and tasted a lot like a roll of bologna (which again, I don't care for and shouldn't eat right now; Dh doesn't even like pork, needless to say faux pork), and some stale roles that a neighbor made and mailed special for Dh to have. Yes, I said that she mailed them... I insisted on making salad, professing a craving. She had planned on making a salad that consisted of one leaf of lettuce split between four people. I augmented with a lot more lettuce and other veggies (that she insisted they were allergic too and couldn't eat -- are people really allergic to cucumbers and bell peppers? that was a new one for me). That worked out ok though because at least Dh and I had salad to fill our bellies.
Dh tells me that he spent quite a bit of his childhood kind of hungry. This makes me very, very sad.
We did try to go out to eat a couple of times, but this was equally bad. MIL complained and complained about how the restaurant was terrible compared to what it was 20 years before, had been "junked up by prostitutes" (explanation: any woman not dressed ridiculously modestly is a prostitute in her mind), a waste of money, too loud, we were all eating too much, etc. Pick your poison, literally.
One of the particularly hard things about this food situation for Dh is that his dad just finished radiation therapy for his cancer. He was a very thin man to begin with but lost about 30 pounds over the last few months. He's been sent to nutritionists because he seriously needs to gain weight. But his wife controls all the food in the house and she won't feed him more than what he was eating before the cancer, when he was maintaining a very thin weight. But even worse, she read somewhere that sugar feeds cancer cells (note: sugar feeds ALL cells) so she won't let him put sugar on his oatmeal in the morning anymore. Needless to say, between the partial servings and the disgusting food, he's hungry but not gaining any weight. This was so hard for Dh as he can see that his mother is making his father more sick. We tried to make suggestions or to make things that FIL liked and would eat lots of (like my steel-cut oats, of which he'd eat more than a serving at every breakfast), but it just kept pissing his mom off more and more.
The visit did not end on a good note. I hadn't seen Dh so perky since he's been back as he was the morning we were leaving. I almost asked him to tone it down, except at that point I was so irked too that I just didn't care.
Overall, it was good to see his parents. They've had a really tough 6 months and I can imagine that his mom is in a really emotionally complicated place. But it was still hard to endure all the complaining, negativity, and meanness, especially about little M and especially towards their son who is really excited about his daughter.
One wonderful side bonus to having little M next time we go down there is that we'll have the perfect excuse to stay in a hotel instead of their trailer. The place is just too dang small, and in all honesty, I wouldn't want my little baby in a place that hadn't been vacuumed in about a year. It was gross... (I'm so mean, I know it. Please forgive me.)
It's great to be home.
Dh got home safe and sound though a little sick and a lot jet-lagged. His flight landed around 6pm on Wednesday and we left our house at 1pm on Thursday to drive the 10 hours to his parent's for Christmas. I had made arrangements to stay at a pretty nice hotel about a 4 hour drive from our place that first night.
Things went really well that first day, just the two of us packing up and driving down. We had a decent dinner at the hotel, but my allergies were bothering me and I ended the meal with a huge coughing fit that resulted in my peeing my pants (literally, pee dripping down my legs).
Dh was a super-champ about it -- what a harsh welcome back to pregnancy land! I have coughing fits a lot so he's used to that, and the "I just peed my pants and have to go to the room" thing didn't seem to phase him. He paid the bill and brought up all our luggage to the room by himself while I went and cleaned myself up and licked the wounds to whatever dignity I might have still had left after the last two years of IF.
We arrived at his parent's place just after dark the next day (Christmas eve). We tied a bow around my belly. When we walked in (and they didn't seem to notice) we said that we wanted to give them their big present early -- a granddaughter!
The reaction:
The mother-in-law: leans over and hangs her head over the counter.
The father-in-law: hugs me and immediately cheers congratulations.
Back to the mother-in-law: stands back up and says, "well, are you two happy about this?"
Needless to say, this was only half the reaction we expected. It continued to get worse, as my being pregnant became the elephant in the room that no one would talk about except Dh and me. Dh would constantly refer to my being pregnant, to our daughter on the way, etc. FIL asked a couple of questions here and there over the next 5 days but MIL was pretty pissed and wouldn't acknowledge the conversation topic.
And she wouldn't feed me. She's got this weird thing about food where she is ridiculously miserly in the servings. This is a mixed blessing because she's a terrible cook. I typically think of my visits to their house as an opportunity to go on a little diet, but I can't do that right now. I feel really sick if I don't eat, and I need to eat food I feel good about. Her food does not fall under that category by any definition (i.e., lots of instant and low-quality stuff that isn't cooked quite right). Add on the fact that she has apparently given up using dish soap, and you'll understand why I was pretty concerned about getting food poisoning.
So she was also pissed that we brought some food with us (like steel-cut oats to cook for breakfast instead of eating through the 10-year old 50 pound bag of oatmeal she got at the mormon church for a good price, except that it was a good price because it hadn't been husked quite right and contains sharp pieces that do not qualify as "oats"). And I took real milk because watered-down instant milk just sucks. And fresh veggies, I took fresh veggies because frozen celery reheated in the microwave is disgusting.
She was additionally pissed about what a pig I am. She kept trying to only give me super meager servings, like part of a banana or apple. Apparently in her world these fruits should be shared by at least 2-4 people per piece. At the first breakfast Dh forcefully pushed back and said that I was going to eat the whole banana because I am pregnant and need to. I loved that he defended me and was looking out for little M, but it pissed me off royally that every meal was a fight and lead to bad feelings all around. Such a contrast to my family that kept pushing me to finish off the last bits of particularly healthy foods.
Christmas dinner absolutely sucked. She made instant mashed potatoes (that I can barely stomach even to be polite), a "pork roast" that looked and tasted a lot like a roll of bologna (which again, I don't care for and shouldn't eat right now; Dh doesn't even like pork, needless to say faux pork), and some stale roles that a neighbor made and mailed special for Dh to have. Yes, I said that she mailed them... I insisted on making salad, professing a craving. She had planned on making a salad that consisted of one leaf of lettuce split between four people. I augmented with a lot more lettuce and other veggies (that she insisted they were allergic too and couldn't eat -- are people really allergic to cucumbers and bell peppers? that was a new one for me). That worked out ok though because at least Dh and I had salad to fill our bellies.
Dh tells me that he spent quite a bit of his childhood kind of hungry. This makes me very, very sad.
We did try to go out to eat a couple of times, but this was equally bad. MIL complained and complained about how the restaurant was terrible compared to what it was 20 years before, had been "junked up by prostitutes" (explanation: any woman not dressed ridiculously modestly is a prostitute in her mind), a waste of money, too loud, we were all eating too much, etc. Pick your poison, literally.
One of the particularly hard things about this food situation for Dh is that his dad just finished radiation therapy for his cancer. He was a very thin man to begin with but lost about 30 pounds over the last few months. He's been sent to nutritionists because he seriously needs to gain weight. But his wife controls all the food in the house and she won't feed him more than what he was eating before the cancer, when he was maintaining a very thin weight. But even worse, she read somewhere that sugar feeds cancer cells (note: sugar feeds ALL cells) so she won't let him put sugar on his oatmeal in the morning anymore. Needless to say, between the partial servings and the disgusting food, he's hungry but not gaining any weight. This was so hard for Dh as he can see that his mother is making his father more sick. We tried to make suggestions or to make things that FIL liked and would eat lots of (like my steel-cut oats, of which he'd eat more than a serving at every breakfast), but it just kept pissing his mom off more and more.
The visit did not end on a good note. I hadn't seen Dh so perky since he's been back as he was the morning we were leaving. I almost asked him to tone it down, except at that point I was so irked too that I just didn't care.
Overall, it was good to see his parents. They've had a really tough 6 months and I can imagine that his mom is in a really emotionally complicated place. But it was still hard to endure all the complaining, negativity, and meanness, especially about little M and especially towards their son who is really excited about his daughter.
One wonderful side bonus to having little M next time we go down there is that we'll have the perfect excuse to stay in a hotel instead of their trailer. The place is just too dang small, and in all honesty, I wouldn't want my little baby in a place that hadn't been vacuumed in about a year. It was gross... (I'm so mean, I know it. Please forgive me.)
It's great to be home.
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