The Clareverse

1.) I gave birth to a unusually calm and quiet baby.

2.) I put her in her crib at night.

If you follow these two steps, you also will enjoy having a baby who magically sleeps through the night.

Seriously, I have a particular Bedtime Process:
1. Around 6 or 7, give the baby a warm bath. She tires herself out kicking and splashing.
2. Feed and swaddle in a Kiddopotamus SwaddleMe
3. Cuddle & rock in a dark room til she falls asleep. Takes 5-15 minutes. Put her in the crib.
4. At 10:30, take her out of the crib and feed her without waking her up. She can drink from a bottle while sleeping if you get it far enough in her mouth. After a few weeks she learned how to nurse without waking up, so we nurse and then top her off with a bottle. Feed her until she’s so deeply asleep she can’t swallow any more. If she’s really relaxed she won’t have swallowed any air, so just burp her a little.

If all these steps are followed the baby sleeps until sometime between 6:30-8:30am, but I suspect it only works because she’s a freaky easy baby.

If you have a baby and you want to go out for a run, you should feed the baby really really well before you go running, because if she’s hungry when you get back, she will not at all appreciate being expected to nurse from hot sweaty boobs. There will be screaming, and rinsing off the boobs and scrubbing them with a washcloth will not be enough to stop the screaming.

I’m currently enjoying the state of not being pregnant, and the fun of losing 10 pounds a week while keeping up my rigorous donut regimen. The postpartum period is a lot more pleasant than the 41st week of pregnancy.

Other than the fact that it dragged on for a week too long, my pregnancy was pretty easy. I had no significant discomfort or any of the nasty side effects or secondary symptoms, except for a few small stretch marks. Since I’d had such an easy time, I was worried that I hadn’t been mentally toughened up enough to handle birth, and I braced myself for a comparatively unpleasant childbirth process. But the birth itself was also easy and not too uncomfortable, as these things go.

So, having certainly used up all my good karma on the birth, I figured the newborn period would be a pain in the butt. Again, not so much. JB the Baby acts like she’s competing in some “World’s Mellowest Baby” competition. I’m getting 8 hours of sleep a night (albeit in 3- and 4- hour chunks), and on the rare occasions she cries she can be quieted in a few minutes by cuddling. Mostly she just sleeps or looks around with big googly eyes and makes funny faces. Sometimes she pokes herself in the face. I sit around and keep myself entertained with books and TV while I wait for her to wake up and need something. It’s nowhere near as difficult or as stressful as I was expecting.

I assume that this is some temporary newborn state, and that sooner or later JB will perk up and start giving me trouble. I’ll try to enjoy this while it lasts.