Once things finally started to slow down a little bit and my baby was actually taking a few naps, I had time to reflect on what was going on around me and in my life. My daughter was almost 7 months old already, I became a stay-at-home mom when she was born, and my past life was history. And I missed it. I had a B.A. and was very successful in college, I finally had a career going at a great company, and I was a concert loving girl who would go out and party with friends at shows throughout most of the North East part of the country…and Ohio once. (I once road-tripped from NJ to Cleveland to see a Live concert, and went back to NJ that same night because I had to go to a housewarming party by 4pm the next day.) I loved the adrenaline I would get from live rock shows and the feeling of truly living life and having fun. Now, I haven’t been to a show since I was around 8 months pregnant, and I miss it. Instead, I sneak in a few moments on the computer where I can catch someone’s YouTube video of clips of a show here and there. I try to pretend I’m there, but it doesn’t really work–especially when my baby starts crying to let me know she’s up from her nap. And -SNAP- back to reality I come. I do love and appreciate my new life, and I’ve also accepted it. It’s just every now and then I’ll hear something about a band or artist I love and then it makes me wish I could just go to a show. The reason I can’t is because I’m breastfeeding so I’m literally connected on a chain to my daughter who wants to eat like every 3 hours. I could pump a few days before and leave a bottle for my husband, but I am not bringing a breast pump to a show for when I get “full” from missing a feeding. I don’t think so. Can you picture me going to a show at Maxwells in Hoboken, NJ or the North Star Bar in Philly and trying to use their single-person bathroom for 20 minutes trying to pump? Oh and then carrying around a bag of breast milk during the show? Now that’s classy. haha. Plus, my husband would freak out if I left him with “the Diva” for that long, and unfortunately no one we know would babysit and stay overnight for it.

Since I can’t go to shows for the time being, I fill that void by singing to my daughter the songs I’d like to hear at a show again. Of course I don’t do them justice, but she doesn’t know that. She laughs and “sings” along with her deep sounding, off-key “ahhhhhhhh.” She always does that every time my husband or I sing. Our little harmonizer. As for milestones, she’s finally starting to sit up on her own a little bit, but we have to do the pillow thing where there’s a sea of pillows 360 degrees around her, for when she falls back or does a face plant. She is no where near crawling yet, but I read that only 50% of babies can crawl at 6 months and by 11 months 90% of babies can crawl, if they do at all. She’s a really big baby (95th percentile in height & weight) so I think she needs a lot more muscle to carry around all that extra weight. The one issue I can’t seem to find a solution for is her eczema and cradle cap. The eczema is really bad behind her knees and it looks painful and red, but the doctor says it’s not bad enough to give her medicine for it yet and to continue using the Eucerin Aquaphor ointment. As for the cradle cap, I keep putting the Aquaphor on her head, combing out the flakes, and washing her hair with gentle shampoo, but it’s still there. I’d love some suggestions if anyone knows of how to combat the cradle cap. I thought cradle cap was only a newborn baby issue, but apparently not since my daughter is just about 7 months old.

To think that about 9 months ago I was at an Ours show dancing and rocking out to “Live Again” and now I’m talking about combing out cradle cap flakes. Times do change, huh?

At 6 months old, my daughter was starting to sleep pretty well at night, for about 5 hours straight (this was good to me). She was going strong with that pattern for about 2 weeks and then she went back to waking up 2 or 3 times at night. I didn’t know why this was happening, but I figured it was just her crazy ways.  Well, one night I distinctly remember her waking up EVERY 20 minutes all through the night. I’d go into her room, give her a pacifier, pat her belly, and she’d calm down and go to sleep. Twenty minutes later she’d be up and screaming again. I thought that maybe her teeth were finally ready to cut through, even though she’s been working on that since she was 3 months old (LOTS of drool; gumming everything). The next day I went out to buy some sort of pain reliever for her, and I had no idea which one to choose. Since I prefer natural things most of the time, I first tried the Humphrey’s Teething Tablets. I was a little confused on how to apply it because it says to dissolve the tablets in water and then apply it to the baby’s gums, but when I mixed it up it wasn’t thick enough to form any sort of paste (and I followed the directions) so it was more like trying to rub water on her gums, and it kept trickling down my hand. My daughter liked the taste, but it didn’t seem to help at all with her pain or crying.

I was really nervous about trying Orajel because I read somewhere about how the numbing sensation can close up a baby’s throat and make them stop breathing. I caved in and bought some Infant Tylenol, and the doctor assured me that I can use it. Well, the next night when she started screaming I gave her some and she instantly fell asleep. It was heaven! Normally I am not a medicine person. In fact I hate taking medicine and almost always refuse it. I barely took any pain meds in the hospital after my C-section and the nurses kept yelling at me to take it, but I didn’t want to because I really wasn’t in any pain, and even if I was, I prefer to work through the pain. BUT, in this case with my daughter, I was saying hallelujah to Tylenol and used it almost every night for a week.

After giving Tylenol to my daughter for a week straight, I felt uneasy about using it so often and took the risk and bought Orajel. To test it I gave her the tiniest little drop ever (to make sure her throat didn’t close up), and she was fine. Well, by week 2 of her crazy screaming teething nights, we were all fed up so she was getting Tylenol AND Orajel. It gave her the peace we all needed, so I was happy about that. Finally, a bottom center tooth popped through and one week later the other bottom center tooth came through. YAY!

Once that “first tooth” fiasco was done with, I really enjoyed my daughter at 6 months old. It was my favorite age so far because she was always laughing and a lot of fun to be around. This is the age when I finally was able to sit back and enjoy motherhood. I even talked with my husband about maybe having a second kid (gasp!). I totally understand now how easily you can forget about how hard it was that first month of having a baby, and how it’s a good thing you forget because some people wouldn’t ever have a second child if they remembered!

Even though I was given the ‘ok’ from the pediatrician to start my daughter on rice cereal at 4 months old, I didn’t start her on it until she was 5 1/2 months old. I didn’t want to rush things and I read a lot of information that said you should actually wait until they’re 6 months old. I knew she was ready because whenever I ate my own cereal in the morning she would stare me down and open & close her mouth like a fish. I’ve heard that the first time you try to give your baby solids, expect it to go bad, so I braced myself for the tight lips, the crying, and the pushing away. Surprisingly, she LOVED it. She gave me a big smile on the very first spoonful, and she ate the entire serving. Finally, something that went nice and easy for me. She’s definitely a good eater, just like her mama. Only instead of cheesecake, chocolate, and ice cream, she likes to dive into sweet potatoes, peas, even prunes. I still haven’t found anything she doesn’t like. Actually, I once tried to give her a spoonful of the jarred Beef & Broth, and she made the biggest grimace ever. I tasted the stuff and I didn’t blame her. It looked and tasted like cat food so I threw it out. She prefers my homemade Turkey Sloppy Joe’s anyway (I have a great recipe btw..if you ever want it just email/leave me a comment).

At the end of 5 months she finally started to roll over from belly to back, to the right. Other kids were rolling in both directions and their parents loved to tell me about it and ask about my daughter’s progress. As a first time mom, it really is hard not to compare your kids to other kids because you want to know what “normal” is, whatever that means, so I did my best to fight the urge. I think my favorite part about 5 months old was that she finally started to sleep longer stretches at night, and I only had to nurse her once through the night, usually around 2:00 a.m. This gave her a 5 hour stretch of sleeping since she usually went to bed at 9:00 p.m., and I’m told that 5 hours is considered “sleeping through the night” (STTN) for a baby. It is amazing what sleep can do for you when you haven’t had it in sooo long.

As for music, my husband and I constantly would make up songs for her. He would write his own songs and play them on the guitar for her, usually acoustic, and I would usually make up little jingles on the spot. She really loved to hear “her” songs, as in the songs we made up that have her name in the song. Whenever she would hear them she’d get really excited and if she was in her bouncy chair she’d start rocking it like crazy. She was now in a period where she was crying less so I didn’t have to resort to singing constantly to calm her, but I still did anyway. I tried out some Jeff Buckley on her for the first time, by starting with “Hallelujah” (of course). She got really quiet and stared at me during most of the song. Then I played “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” and sang along with it to her (Damn, I love this song). I actually got a smile out of her during it; can you blame her? Haha. Beautiful song. Ah, Jeff. R.I.P. Whenever I would drive anywhere with her I would carefully select a cd to play for her. I usually stuck with softer, “art rock,” but every now and then I’d throw in some Rage Against The Machine. She didn’t seem to react to that either way. I’m curious to see what her music preferences will be as a toddler and if she really will like alternative rock as much as nursery rhymes. I shall have to wait and see.

Around 4 1/2 months old, I really wanted to try to start my daughter on some sort of schedule. I mean she was already eating on a schedule because she wanted to nurse like every 2 hours, so I kept her on that, but she needed some sort of sleep/nap schedule. No one in the family got any sleep because she didn’t sleep. As with everything else, I turned to the Internet for some advice, or at least for some book recommendations. (I swear, what did new mothers do before the Internet?) There were a few books I was interested in, but my library only had one of them, so I got a copy of “The Baby Whisperer Solves All Your Problems” by Tracy Hogg. One of my favorite sections of the book is the part about different temperaments/personalities that babies can have. THANK YOU. I felt reassured to know that I am NOT going crazy when I swear that my child is a Diva baby. My baby definitely is a mix between 2 of the personality types: spirited and grumpy. She is very excitable, but also has a strong temper. So you get strong emotions either way…no chilled out baby here. Her grumpy/spirited personality probably explains why she had colic issues to begin with since she’s very expressive and has something to say about every little issue that comes her way. Boy, you should have heard the screams she would do from having hiccups as a young infant. And even now, at 9 months old, if she misses a nap you better be close to home or she’ll make you regret going out in the first place. It seems my friends all have either Angel babies or Textbook ones, so that’s why they have no clue where I’m coming from when I try to explain a lot of the issues I have with my daughter. I liked reading the book because I felt I wasn’t alone in dealing with a difficult, fussy baby.

As for the schedule/routine-making part of the book, I took what I could from that section, but I didn’t agree with all of it. For instance she says that a young breastfed baby can nurse at almost the same frequency as a formula-fed baby. I disagree- I believe in nursing a young baby on demand, and that breast milk is no where near as filling as formula. Also, she explains how to get your baby to take longer naps and how each nap should be about 2 hours. Well, I tried and tried, but my daughter would only take 30 min naps. So her suggested schedules were hard for me to follow since my daughter’s nursing times and nap times were way off the author’s suggested ones. However, I still felt like I gained a lot from reading the book, and I did follow it loosely. Even though my daughter’s naps were really short, at least she was taking them at certain times of the day, and in her own crib. And the best tip I got from the book was about doing a night routine so your baby knows it’s time for bed. Every night my routine became giving her a bath, then nursing, then bed. Because she has eczema/cradle cap pretty bad I didn’t always use soap, but I went through the motions just so she could know what to expect. It really made a difference. She went down for bed soo much easier. This part of motherhood, the schedule-making, actually felt like real work. Like a project that I had to study for, plan, and then try to execute. I actually kept lists of times for each thing. I wish I could have just gone with the flow, but since my baby’s personality isn’t “laid back,” it wouldn’t work with her. That was another valuable tip from the book: try to work WITH your baby’s personality type and not around it because otherwise you’ll have total chaos and many meltdowns. Deal with the hand you’ve been given, so to speak.

Throughout my entire pregnancy I used Palmer’s Cocoa Butter Stretch Mark Cream to try to prevent stretch marks. It worked, because to this day I still don’t really know what one looks like. The closest I’ve come to seeing one is on my husband’s bicep. Weird right? He has them right where the bicep meets the armpit. Anyway, after my daughter was born I was psyched and thought I would still be able to wear a bikini since I had no stretch marks and since the C-section scar was too low for anyone to see. I was wrong. Little did I know that even 3 months after she was born I still had that dark vertical line (linea negra) going from above my belly button all the way down to my pelvic area. That line didn’t even show up until I was like 8 months pregnant. (Even now, almost 9 mths after she was born, I still have traces of that line.)  Another pregnancy battle scar I have is from my navel piercing. I had it since I was 18, and from months 7-9 of my pregnancy I wore a maternity piercing that I got at maternitypiercings.com that was really pretty. But during month 10 of my pregnancy I was getting so many ultrasounds that I just took it out because I had to keep removing it anyway. Well, once the baby was born I pretty much forgot to put the belly button ring back in. (I was forgetting to eat, so there was no way I’d remember about my accessories.) Even though I had that piercing for 13 years, it closed up after 3 months. But I didn’t realize it closed at first because it LOOKED like it was still open, with a hole above my navel. So one day when I remembered to finally put the ring in, I tried and realized that it had closed inside and underneath. So now I have a scar there that looks like I have a hole - an ugly brownish hole since the pregnancy also made it turn brown, along with that line. Gross! All that work I put into preventing stretch marks and I got other marks instead. Not cool. I guess I’ll have to wear a Tankini next year.

Around 3-4 months old, my daughter’s colic FINALLY started to chill out a bit. Like I’ve said in earlier posts, without the swing and the 5 S’s I would have collapsed, so they helped a lot with the crying when it would start up, but I was thrilled that it was happening less and less. She was now letting her true personality show though, and it was pretty apparent that she really was a Diva. She has a nasty temper and is very vocal when you take away something she wants or if you don’t meet her immediate need (and she isn’t even in the Terrible 2’s yet!). She still does the banshee scream at the top of her lungs that turns a crowded room silent. But the positive side of this personality is that she’s really excitable, so when she’s happy that same crowded room will also know it. She literally squeals with delight. And she has the machine-gun/dolphin laugh that babies have, and it cracks me up. To sum up her personality, she’s either insanely upset and screaming OR  ridiculously happy.

Right when the colic started to end, she began having early teething symptoms:  drooling, gumming her hands, and crying a lot. Since she’s a really fussy baby, there was no question that she’d be one of those babies who doesn’t handle teething well. The one upside of having a colicky baby is that I was already used to all the crying, so it wasn’t really different for me. I didn’t want to use medications on her yet since she was only 3 months old, so we just stuck it out.

Another issue that was going on simultaneously was naps, or lack thereof. I began to try a very loose schedule with her of when I could expect her to nap in her bouncy seat, but it didn’t really work. She was pretty predictable of when she would get tired, but no matter how tired she was, she’d only nap 30 minutes. Oh, and at night she still was up to eat like every 2 hours. Fun times. Thirty minute naps meant that I had no free time whatsoever, so I still barely had time to cook, eat, or shower. I ran around the house like a mad woman the second she fell asleep, trying to get little things done here and there. According to Dr. Harvey Karp, the author of The Happiest Baby On The Block and founder of the 5 S’s, babies have a “4th trimester” which is actually their first 3 months of life. Now that my daughter was past the 4th trimester, I hoped that the eating, sleeping, & crying thing would work itself out.

I think I finally started to enjoy being a mom, at least a little bit, when my daughter was about 1 month old. Before then, I confess it was the most stressed I’ve ever been in my life. She cried non-stop from colic, I was severely sleep deprived, and I actually weighed less than I did before I was pregnant because I didn’t have any time to eat.  But once she was 1 month old I finally was rewarded with that first “real” smile, you know, the non-gas kind, which made it seem worth it. She has two huge dimples and a really wide face so she truly looked like a Gerber baby; a cherub. Where that cherub was from remains a question because she definitely wasn’t an angel baby. Haha.

My husband and I would sing to her almost daily, everything from nursery songs to Stone Temple Pilots. One morning I was singing to her and she just started babbling back. But it wasn’t her normal babbling that she did throughout the day. This was a specific babble that she does while being sung to, like a trill almost, and she would go up and down the scale. It’s really funny to watch because she’d belt out an off-key note and hold it while her eyebrows came together, like she’s REALLY concentrating on the note, or maybe she was just trying to poop, who knows. She would always “sing” whenever my husband or I would sing to her. But she also would babble a lot throughout the day, like she was talking to you about everyday stuff. Some of my friends’ babies weren’t really babbling much yet, so this was one area which she seemed to do early.

As a parent of a baby, my newest interest became baby poop. The amount, the frequency, the consistency, the color, etc. When they send you home from the hospital with your baby they want you to pay attention to poop, and I don’t think you ever stop paying attention to it!  If you were to put two very new mothers together, especially breastfeeding mothers, the conversation would quickly turn to this subject. Her poop was mostly the standard watery, yellow, mustard-seed poop that breastfed babies produce. But every now and then she’d have dark green, mucousy poop, and there would be tiny (and I do mean tiny) streaks of blood in it. It scared me to death! The doctor said that babies sometimes can have a little tearing from pooping so frequently, or that it could be a sensitivity to something I was eating. They said that dairy is usually the culprit, so I cut back on my dairy intake again. It seemed to help.

Unfortunately, she still didn’t sleep. She was sleeping a little at night, but naps were pretty much non-existent. I didn’t know about schedules or anything at the time, so I wasn’t aware about trying to put her on one. She fell asleep in her bouncy seat when she was tired during the day, and when she did sleep it was only for maybe 20-30 minutes. I always thought that the only thing young babies did mostly was sleep, at least that’s what everybody told me and what was portrayed on some episodes of the TV show Bringing Home Baby, but not my daughter. She never slept. That’s why I never had time to eat, cook, clean, or do anything else. This was another area where I tended to get a little jealous of my friends’ “easy” babies, versus my little diva.

I was still successfully breastfeeding, which I was really proud about considering how hard it was for me. I think it paid off because when she went to her 1st month check-up at the doctor, she was in the 95th percentile in height/weight at 11 lbs and 23 inches. I didn’t realize how big she was until the doctor laughed and said that she’s considered a huge baby, but not to worry about her being an Amazon Woman when she’s older because they can’t tell that until children are about 2 years old. That didn’t  reassure me much, but at least she wasn’t overly small. I’d rather her be a big baby than an overly small baby. The only issue that her height/weight presented to me was clothing. It killed me inside that she was only able to wear some items once, or not at all, because she quickly outgrew everything. This child had gorgeous outfits that people had given her, but she couldn’t wear a lot of them. I’m dealing with the mental torture of that by holding onto them and hoping that if I ever have another child that it will be a girl. This way I’ll feel like the clothing was used more.

It was time to get the anatomical ultrasound where they check to see if everything looks ok so far, and to see if they can tell the sex of the baby. I definitely wanted to find out what I was having. When I was in college I used to think that IF I were to have kids, I’d want a boy. But now I wanted a girl more. I’m not sure why; I think I could just envision a little girl running around my house more than a little boy. Like most men, my husband seemed to want a boy more. He’s the total “anti-jock,” so it wasn’t about sports or anything. He pictured teaching his little boy how to play guitar, computer stuff, and other random things. But I just FELT like I was carrying a girl and I told him this to prepare him, just in case I was right.

The appointment day came. I was actually pretty nervous about the test because I wanted to make sure everything was ok, so I wasn’t really thinking about the baby’s sex that much.  Plus, I didn’t have too much faith in the results being correct anyway. I have a friend who had multiple ultrasounds and they all told her she was having a girl. So EVERYTHING was pink at her baby shower- bassinet, clothes, quilts, etc. Delivery day came and out came a boy! She was doing returns for months after that. So I went into the ultrasound thinking that if they say “boy,” then I’m having a boy. If they say “girl,” then I’m having a girl or boy. During my ultrasound everything looked good and the baby was in a head-down position, so I was very relieved. After you have a miscarriage and after trying for so long to get pregnant you tend to get a little paranoid about everything. I was like this my whole pregnancy. In fact, I didn’t tell any of my family I was pregnant until I was almost 4 months along, just in case something went wrong. I didn’t tell my job until I was 5 months pregnant (I was barely showing so I got away with it).

Now that the anatomy stuff was out of the way, it was time to find out the baby’s sex. The technician said my baby was in a curled position so she couldn’t get a good view. She kept jiggling my belly around, had me turn to my side, etc. Finally she said, “Girl!”  I looked at my husband and laughed. Could this be my first case of “mother’s intuition?”  Maybe! I asked the tech how sure she was that it was a girl. She explained that there were 3 dots, and that means it’s a girl. I still was hesitant though, so when I told my friends/family that I was having a girl, I told them that I would prefer gender-neutral items because the baby’s position wasn’t ideal. (Did I get neutral items at my shower a few months later? Nope. No one listened and gave me dresses, pinks, etc). When I went to my next doctor’s appointment, they went over the ultrasound results with me in more detail. The doctor said that the ultrasound place recommends a follow up scan in a month because they couldn’t get good pictures of the baby’s heart, due to the baby’s position. I immediately got really nervous, but the doctor told me it’s only because of the position so they just want to double check. Since my insurance was going to cover it, I made the appointment for a month later and tried to relax and focus on the fact that at least I’ll get a 2nd opinion on the baby’s sex!

I’m a 31 year old married woman who recently became a mom. When I was in my early 20’s I swore that I never wanted to have kids, even though I was dating my current husband and knew I would marry him. I was going to be that hot, young career woman who is independent and self-sufficient, and would spend my free time doing what I love most: going to concerts. Music is not just an interest of mine–it’s a passion. Specifically, I love alternative rock music, if that term is even still around. Whereas most people leave a show feeling pretty happy that they got their money’s worth and start thinking about their drive home, traffic, work the next day…I feel a great sense of sadness, even if the show was amazing. It’s a feeling of loss because what I love most has now ended. For those 2 hours or so it’s like I’m put in a different world and become part of something huge, and everyone in the crowd is along for the ride with me. Being a Scorpio, when I find something I like I become very loyal to it (ahem-obsessed), and that goes for bands also. No, I’m not a groupie, but people like to call me that when they want to annoy me. I guess you can say I’ve formed a few acquaintances with some of the musicians I admire, but that’s it, and that’s how it’s gonna stay. It’s honestly all about the music and nothing else. People who aren’t music lovers can’t understand that. I could do a whole separate blog about my experiences backstage, but for now I’m going to try to focus more on how the music and bands I love have influenced my pregnancy and my daughter, who is now 3 months old.