Three Teaspoons

Now that we've started giving Declan rice cereal, we decided that I'd try to pump in the morning so that we could mix the cereal with breast milk. All I'd need to pump is three teaspoons worth. That's not even one ounce. Babies Declan's age often eat up to five ounces in a sitting. This should be a piece of cake. Except all I could muster was a paltry two teaspoons. Two! I'd be afraid that I'm not making enough milk, but one look at Declan tells me he's doing just fine.

So what gives? I hate pumping anyway, I feel like a cow, it hurts, and obviously I'm not very good at it. These are my struggles.

I read Babycenter a lot, which can be good and bad. What gets me is that there seem to be (you know how I feel about the baby liars) so many women with babies who always seem to come in on the easy side: they poop every three days, they take a bottle like a champ, they love to fall asleep in their car seats, and I've already talked about the sleeping thing. And don't even get me started on the women who post on the "I feel so gross, I haven't lost my weight" threads. I've clicked on those a few times thinking I'd found some kindred spirits, but I found women complaining that they have three pounds to go or they'd lost all the weight but they were still wearing that dreaded size six. Or they list their prepregnancy weight as 120. I flip off the computer screen sometimes. And I mean my middle finger, not turning it off. Then I make myself feel better by reading their profiles and realizing that they are 18 and living with their parents. Then I feel bad because I'm not being the bigger person...then I don't.

The thing that always gets me is that I always seem to come in on the other side. I haven't lost all my weight yet, and I definitely didn't weigh 120 when I started. Not to mention the baby stuff. We all know Declan isn't sleeping through the night, if anything he's gotten worse, he drools a lot, he is so so on the bottle thing, he wants to be held all the time, and he refuses to sleep in his car seat, swing, baby chair, and sometimes anywhere other than my arms. Dr. Sears calls him a "high need" baby. So do I.

I'll never forget this lady I used to work with who looked at me with pity in her eyes and told me that my next one would be a good baby because all babies can't be this hard. Her babies all slept through the night at eight weeks. Her labor was five hours long. She weighs 120.

*On an unrelated note, I'd like to share something that cracked me up yesterday. Allison Taylor emailed me to tell me that she'd been laughing all day about bigfatbaby. Her son Luke is nine months old and basically has the same stats as Declan so she's dubbed him littletinybaby. I told her I was jealous because at four months Luke's grandma probably didn't get winded holding him for five minutes.