One Month of Hattie!

Today is Hattie’s 1 month birthday.  We are in San Francisco with Brynn’s parents, and she is happy to be here.  It was quite an adventure getting here.  On Friday our friend Kizzy drove Brynn, Hattie, Rumpus and I to Chicago to a hotel near O’hare.  We stayed overnight and then all piled into a shuttle to the airport.  We left ourselves plenty of time, but walking Rumpus, changing Hattie, checking in, going through security with a dog and all the baby paraphernalia took extra time.  We got to the gate and discovered that Brynn and I weren’t sitting together.  Luckily, they were able to fix that and we survived the flight with Rumpus under the seat and Hattie nursing on and off.  It could have been so much worse!

We went to a BBQ and a wedding over the weekend, and now we’re able to relax a bit.  Hattie spent some time playing with her new mobile.

I’ve found that I do all right when Hattie cries if I’m by myself or just with Brynn.  Then, the baby cries for a little while, and then we deal with it. If there are other people around and she’s not crying, everybody thinks she’s so sweet.  If she starts to cry, the judgments come out, and they judge ME, rather than the one they SHOULD be judging: the one who’s CRYING.  They state the obvious (“She’s crying.” Or “Sounds like she’s upset.”) or offer advice (“Might be time to feed her.” Or “You should try bouncing her on one of those bouncing balls.” 

So many people see the baby and say “she’s perfect.” At first this bothered me, because it felt like bad Karma.  Nobody’s perfect, and we don’t expect our daughter to be.  But I realized that people don’t mean that she really is perfect like that.  They mean “unspoiled,” I think.  Innocent.  Nothing/nobody has corrupted her yet.  But they would feel strange saying, “look at her!  She is completely uncorrupted at this point in her life!”  So they just say “She’s so perfect,” and I silently acknowledge that they are really saying, “Seeing her, I am reminded that life has bruised my spirit and corrupted my nature.  I am stained.”

 

People also say “isn’t it just the most amazing thing?” or “Isn’t it a miracle?” And yes, it IS.  But sometimes people ask this some morning after we’ve been up half the night, dealing with screaming and stinky and perfectly-timed peeing (right after the dirty diaper is removed and before the new one is in place) and at that particular moment, parenthood feels less like a miracle and more like a pain in the butt. But you can’t say that, or you break the unwritten rule of constant appreciation for all things newborn.  In such cases, you always say, “Yes!  It is a miracle!  It is an amazing miracle!” 

I haven’t updated the blog for a while because we discovered that some strangers were following the blog and it felt kind of creepy.  I got Facebook messages from people in foreign countries that said things like. “Kaufmann John!   Am hearing of your babygirl! And I congrats you!”  It was a little unsettling.  We considered making the blog private, and still may do that.  But for the time being, if this blog gives inspiration to strangers, hopefully new-parents themselves, maybe that’s not the worst thing.  We did resolve to stop posting half-naked pictures of daughter on-line the moment she graduates from high school.