When Margot Noticed Winnie

Ian and I were always concerned over how Winnie would adjust to a new baby. From the moment we knew a baby existed, Ian foretold horror stories:

"Winnie's going to bark and wake up the baby. I just know it."

"Winnie's going to be jealous of the baby. We might have to get rid of her."

"Winnie's annoying. Really annoying.  No, that had nothing to do with the baby. But she's so annoying."

I was so stressed out over Winnie and Margot mixing that I banished the poor dog to my parents' house for the first two weeks of the baby's life. For horror stories had been foretold.

A scary mixture, this

Then the dog returned home and, well, nothing happened. Winnie ignored Margot and Margot cried a lot. Neither of those things were related.

And then Margot dominated the blog to such an extent that you'd think, "Hell, why don't you just rename this thing? Margiferd in the Burbs?"

But Margot's here to tell you that that's nonsense. This thing is called Winiferd in the Burbs and you all need to bow down and worship the star of this nonsense.

Because a couple of weeks ago, Margot realized Winnie existed and concluded that Winnie must be the  ultimate supreme goddess of the universe, or at least this house. 

Margot loves Winnie. 

Ian and I practically do handstands trying to coax smiles out of Margot, but a side-eye by Winnie mesmerizes her. The dog causes grins, giggles, or just a generally pleasant disposition so we're all about the doggy now. It's like 2012 up in here.

A previously neglected Winnie has suddenly found herself the center of attention.

God help us all if my mom collects Winnie for the afternoon because Winnie is the only thing that can save us if a wailing Margot is having a there's-nothing-actually-wrong-with-me meltdown.

We ignored the dog for four months but now constantly shriek at her to come over and make eye-contact with the baby.

Winnie is still fairly indifferent to Margot and appears wary of Ian and me constantly prodding her towards the baby.

I expect the relationship to grow more mutual when Margot starts solids and flings mashed food all over the floor. It's gonna be awesome.

Breast Milk Versus Formula for the Adult Palate: Ian Takes One for the Team

We have a three month old baby now. Margot can lift herself up and we're seeing hints of her first efforts at crawling.

I'm shocked at how excited Ian and I get at such things. Kid lifts her head up a good three inches and thinks about rolling over, and we explode in such a way that you'd think we just won the Publisher's Clearing House grand prize.

The newborn phase is over, replaced by a vocal character who coos, babbles, and simultaneously looks just like me and just like Ian.

She looks like someone mashed my face with Ian's face and pushed her out into the world... wait, I think that's what happened.

Baby Ian

Baby Laura

Baby Margot

Apart from that, the only other interesting thing going on is that I have a oversupply of milk. I could easily feed three babies, and our freezer is loaded up with breast milk. 

Since I have an oversupply, so much that it's spilling out the freezer, I beseeched Ian to drink the excess. 

Too much. Too much.

He reluctantly drank a bottle of breast milk. 

And we still had formula samples from the hospital we were never going to use, so...

Laura: "Now drink a bottle of formula and compare them. Tell me which tastes better."

Ian: "Gross. This sounds awful."

Laura: "But it's for science. Do it for science."

Ian reluctantly downed the formula. 

This brand, in case you were wondering. For science.

He concluded that breast milk tastes like one percent milk left sitting in bowl of frosted flakes. Essentially, it tastes like skim milk with a hint of sugar. He declared breast milk "gross." 

Formula, on the other hand, "tastes like soy milk. It's richer." Ian loves soy milk. In the battle of breast vs bottle for adults, the bottle of formula wins. Ian proclaimed formula to be "something I could drink."

Stay tuned for the next post, when things get even sicker. Ian plans to make cheese out of a few bags of breast milk. 

So long, dear readers. For this will be the post that officially sinks Winiferd in the Burbs. It was nice having your readership. I regret nothing.

The Baby, The Dog, and The Cats (And The Poor Dead Chickens)

So Margot's sleeping a little better.

Of course, "a little better" with a seven week old merely means you sometimes sleep four, five, or even six hours in a row. The six hours in a row is rare, while four hours in a row is happening more and more. 

After seven weeks straight with no full night of sleep, you veer into strange territory at night. 

One early morning, Ian sprang awake and flipped out:

Ian: "The baby's at the end of the bed! She's lost in the covers!"

Laura: "No, she's in her bassinet."

Ian frantically pawed through the covers at the end of the bed. And then he stopped, a dawning realization washing over him.

Ian: "I thought the dog was the baby. I saw Winnie's dark eyes staring at me and thought they were Margot's eyes."

Laura: "Why would the baby be at the foot of the bed?"

Ian: "They have the same dark eyes..."

Winnie and Margot do share a striking resemblance



Especially when sleeping

Last night, a practically comatose Ian tried in vain to rock the baby but kept falling asleep, mid-rock. He demanded, "Why won't you just sit up?" to our seven week old infant. 

Then he babbled, "Our opponent takes better care of the baby then me." 

Who's our opponent? Hannibal Lecter? The Joker? Leatherface? Mitt Romney? We shall never know. Ian has no recollection of saying it.

The worst is when Margot fights sleep and then gets mad at us about it.

I'm just a poor, sleepy baby. Why won't you let me sleep?

Surely this rocking, swaying, singing, and patting aren't meant for me? 

You give me no choice. I must weep now.

In other Winiferd news, we have zero chickens. We have zero chickens. 

I am glad to know we kept the wildlife population out here well-fed for over a year.

Bantam chickens taste best served hot, basted in the juices of their own hysterical fear. I'm sure all ten terrified chicken dinners were scrumptious.

Harvey now lives outside. We tossed him out in mid-April after he crapped on kitchen floor for a solid week. He sleeps in the barn with his buddies, the rats.

He loves it out there. He runs more, eats less, looks happier, and is a whole new cat. Well done, Harvard.

Spottswood and Winnie also had to make a huge adjustment.

They cling to each other a little more, as they deal with no longer being the cutest creatures in the house.

But they have done well, although Winnie licks the baby's head a little more than I'd like.

And that's all I got. Peace out.

Mobiles! Holy Crap! MOBILES!

Margot is 6 weeks old now, meaning she's good and fussy most evenings and into the night.

Ian: "What's wrong with her?"

Laura: "She's 6 weeks old. That's the peak age of baby fussiness. We should be on the downhill slope towards sanity soon."

Ian: "You said 5 weeks was the peak of fussiness. And the week before that, you said 4 weeks was the peak of fussiness."

Laura: "Yeah, you know... I was hoping those weeks would be the peaks of HER fussiness. I had assumed she was a superior baby. I guess she's not."

Luckily, Margot has developed a habit that counteracts the effects of insane noisy baby fussing: smiling.

We've noticed baby smiles for a while, but I've finally caught them on camera, facilitated by the most amazing things on the whole entire planet.

Baby mobiles. Margot coos and beams and giggles and shakes excitedly when she sees them.

This is the most amazing thing I've ever seen in my life. All six weeks of it.

Margot thinks mobiles are mass-produced in heaven by God himself. I've refrained from telling her they're churned out in Chinese work factories by people even more sleep-deprived than her parents.

I don't want to spoil the magic, you know?

Magic! These are magic!

So someone hangs cheap plastic toys on a cheap plastic hanger...

HOLY CRAP. AMAZING.

This face would almost make you believe she doesn't wail with the sheer agony of being out of the womb every night between the hours of 8 and midnight. 

She keeps asking when she'll get her umbilical cord back.

Next post: Margot stops fighting sleep! Margot sleeps through the night! Hurrah!

Yeah, right.

Margot Iris

Whew.

We have a baby.

A baby who is almost a month old and just now getting a shout-out on the blog but let me tell you about that sleep deprivation thing. 

You will never sleep again.

I couldn't string more than three sentences together until now.

Ian and I were so sleep-deprived during the first week, we thought we heard the breast pump talking to us:

Ian: "Listen, it's saying 'Brantley' over and over."

Laura: "I thought it was saying 'Brinkley'."

Ian: "I hear 'red-blue'."

Do you understand what I'm saying? We were so sleep-deprived we had conversations with the breast pump. Dear God, people.

And then, the baby insists on being one of those super attached babies.

I watched my dreams of a baby who preferred crib sleeping, Enfamil, and reading the New York Times over tea fly out the window as Mommy's little tyrant demanded co-sleeping, breast milk, and non-stop snuggly togetherness.

Alas. So much for detachment parenting.

Laura: "She demands our attention because she's smart. It's a sign of intelligence."

Ian: "But I wanted a stupid baby."

Laura: "Babies could only survive if they were attached to their parents at all times. These are her survival instincts. It's the only way she would have survived attacks by wolves, bears, or republicans."

Ian: "Those republican attacks are the worst."

And that's our baby: Margot Iris, born May 1, 2013 at 6:23 pm weighing 7 pounds, 2 ounces and measuring 20 inches long. She's beautiful and wonderful and I will perhaps have more to say later, when I sleep more.

In the meantime, here are baby pictures which is probably the only reason anyone clicked over here anyways.

37 Weeks

Nothing to see here, folks. Everything's still exactly as it was, save for a slightly larger belly which only serves to make my legs look skinnier.

Me in jogging shorts is an absurd sight. It amuses Ian greatly.

"You should see yourself, " he said. "It looks like you stuffed a basketball under your shirt so you could make fun of pregnant women." And so he snapped these photos.

Two slight variations of the exact same photo is seriously all I have to offer. 

I hear the human brain shrinks temporarily during pregnancy, which might be why I have trouble stringing more than a few sentences together for each new post. 

Me write words. Me have baby. 

I don't suppose the baby's kicking habits in the womb indicate much about personality, but if they did, I'd call our baby "placid." 

She spends most of her time squirming or sleeping and only occasionally kicking. I've heard many a woman describe insomnia in the third trimester due to fervent baby kicks. I don't have that problem. 

I'd call her rather sloth-like which we can probably attribute to genetics. She's a child after my own heart.

36 Weeks

It's all been very quiet over here at the Winiferd house, which is exactly how I like it. There are only a couple things worth mentioning.

1. Living with Ian is like living with the paparazzi. He records every nap, so I now snatch up his phone after each nap to view the latest snaps. Mostly they appear double-chin-like and gape-mouthed. 

I've posted the more attractive (and I'm really stretching it with that word) examples of these in the past, and frankly, that was enough. I mean, Ian thinks these photos are cute and darling and adorable but he also married me.  

He also documents my movements when I'm awake. And completely oblivious.

I am now fifty percent baby.

2. Winnie and Ian love each other now. Or something.

It took Winnie three or so years but she has finally warmed to Forever Daddy. Either that, or she needs the extra emotional support during this trying time of new life and the next generation and all that horrible stuff.

Hold me, Daddy. For I cannot handle this baby shit. I can not.

33 Weeks

I would have updated sooner but...you know.

Ian takes great delight in snapping photos of me looking like Jabba the Hut while passed out on the couch, with the dog firmly wedged into the crook of my knee. 

Which happens every evening.  

Look at the baby grow.

 It's all very exciting.

 Winnie finds pregnancy beautiful.

Occasionally, I do leave the couch and venture into the real world. It's shocking, I know. 

At my latest appointment, last week, my doc determined the baby is in the 48th percentile for weight. Neither Ian or I can remember the exact weight he gave, but I think it was 4 pounds, 4 ounces. Or something. 

Based on that, she's projected to weigh around 7 pounds, 6 ounces at term. 

My doc also announced I had lost two pounds. 

I have no idea how such a thing is possible since I consume about 10 enormous meals a day. Breakfast is definitely my favorite meal of the morning. 

By my calculations, I have gained about 22 pounds total so far. 

Baby is also head-down, like the nice, obedient child we know she will be.

Pictured: delusional future parents

And with that, it's nearly time for my pre-bedtime nap. Good night, everyone. For lo, it is almost 6:30.