This may sound cliché, but wow, did Zoe’s first three months go by quickly. Really, I’m sitting here trying to get my mind around the fact that she is already three months old. My Zoe is three months old! I realize Alison and I have been watching her change daily. We notice that she is sleeping longer at night (but not yet through the night). She seems to be trying to grab things (but isn’t quite, yet). She is smiling often and has a very cute though abbreviated laugh. She’s filling out and has actually grown out of some of her cloths. And suddenly her head looks big. But it’s still hard to believe that she has been around for three months. And now Alison is heading back to work and I’m going to have to change all the diapers and try to get her to drink from a bottle and dress her. These are things Alison usually does. I suppose I could just keep her in her PJ’s, but there really is no getting around diaper changes and feedings. It’s the feedings I’m really worried about. Right now she really likes the boob. We give her the boob all the time. If she’s fussy she gets the boob. If she cry’s she gets the boob. If we want her to sleep we give her the boob. I don’t have a boob. When I’ve tried to give her a bottle she screams loudly and only takes the bottle after fifteen or twenty minutes of crying and pushing it away.
I know Zoe likes me. She laughs when I play with her, and she seems to like being held by me, at least most of the time. But sometimes she wants her mother, and only her mother. I can spend fifteen or twenty minutes trying to sooth her, holding her this way and that, but she’ll cry until the moment I hand her to Alison. There will be a sniffle or two, then calm. And this is before the boob even makes an appearance. On the few occasions when Alison has left me alone, I have had to deal with long periods of crying because nothing I do seems to satisfy her. I spend the entire time pacing across the living room with her in my arms, watching the clock, just waiting for Alison to get home.
It is now Sunday afternoon. Tomorrow morning Alison returns to her job. Early on we had talked about preparing Zoe—and me—for this day. I was supposed to start feeding her regularly from a bottle a month ago, to get her used to it, but haven’t. We were going to have her sleeping in her crib by now, but she seems to like sleeping either in our arms or in our bed (with us). And I was really hoping Zoe would be toilet trained by the time Alison returned to work, but she doesn’t even seem to recognize where the bathroom is. I’m sure everything will go fine. I’m not so worried about taking care of her, but that she will become upset early and I will spend four hours trying to calm her down. I expect that the first week or so will be the hardest, while we both adjust, then things will get easier and we can start really having some fun. But just in case, this is an open invitation for visitors to come by in the mornings for the next month or so, preferably visitors who like to sooth crying babies.
See photos of Zoe at http://picasaweb.google.com/dbglass.
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