Arthur�s Mummy�s Thoughts�

2007-01-30 - 11.00pm previous entry next entry

First toothie, and lots of photos again!

Did I say I loved hormones?! I think I am about to have another really short luteal phase again, because I went from "Ohhhh, aren't hormones just the best?!" to "If you exhale again at that volume I will not be held responsible for the consequences!" in like 2 days flat! I have gone straight into big-time PMS right after ovulation, and my temperatures on my chart are really NOT good for post-ovulation. They are very similar to the ones I had the first couple of cycles after Arthur was born though, so that's reassuring! Anyway. I am 4 days past ovulation today. My guess is that I'll get my period within the next few days. I had an 8 day luteal phase last cycle. Joy of joys.

But apart from being tired and crabby, everything else is fine! :) Thank you SO much for the lovely comments after my "Arthur" entry! It's so nice to hear that I'm not odd for stealing from my sleep to get some "me" time! Not sensible, but not odd! Thanks for reassuring me! And Meg, YES PLEEEEASE!!! I would love a Meggie visit!! Just say when! :)

The main reason I'm writing tonight is to say that Matthew got his first tooth today! I know I had another entry a few months ago titled, "First toothie!" or something like that, but that was soooo weird back then - a brief appearance of a lil white toothie edge, only for it to be swallowed back up for several more months the very next day! How weird. But it's definitely here now. It's so much harder to tell with Matthew than it was with Arthur, because they have completely different mouth shapes. Arthur's is broad and naturally "open", and when he smiles, alllll his teeth and gums are visible. He almost never stopped smiling as a baby so it was VERY easy to tell what was going on with his gums at all times!

Matthew has Neil's exact mouth-shape (although, Arthur doesn't have mine, and his is totally different to Matthew's! I think Arthur's is exactly like Neil's dad's mouth shape, but Matthew's mouth is like Neil's mum's (as is Neil's) - is that even possible?!) and it's smaller and narrower. When he smiles his lips and tongue tend to mostly cover his gums - mine do that (Neil's don't) so I guess he gets that part from me! But anyway, the point is, it's very hard to see his gums at any time, even when he's smiling! And he is not a fan of me poking around trying to see/feel his gums either! So it's hard to know. With Arthur, I could clearly see a dark sort of "eroded" spot on his gum exactly 3 days before a new tooth came through it. It lasted the 3 days, and by the end of that time, there would be a sharp little something just touchable on that spot, and only a few hours later you'd be able to tell that the something was white. I can't see if Matthew's gums have that dark patch to them in time to predict the toothie so that's a shame. It was nice to be able to tell with Arthur's teeth!

Anyway. In the middle of the night last night, I nursed Matthew as usual in the dark in my bed, and then went to sleep. The next time he woke, I sleepily lifted him into bed with me and put him to the breast, and when he latched on, I thought, "Ow!" Not from something he was doing, but I was just sore like the previous feed had caused some irritation or something. The next feed felt exactly the same way, and then in the morning when I nursed Arthur, it hurt the same, but only on that side. So I wondered if perhaps Matthew had finally cut a tooth and in my sleepy state one time, maybe I'd let Matthew sort of drag himself off that breast (a habit that he has all the time and which I now HAVE to stop!!) at the end of a feed. I'm surprised I didn't notice it hurting at the time, but I was soooo sleepy.

I tried to see his gum down there by getting him to laugh a lot, but he never really moved his tongue out of the way. I felt with my finger and could feel like a little rough sharp grain-of-sand type thing on the smooth gum, so I thought, "Ah-ha!" :) I knew it was a toothie, but onnnly just. Later on, I let him bite my finger for a moment in some good light and just whipped his tongue up with another finger, and WOW he has a huuuuge dark sort of crater-y patch on his gum, with a little rough toothie edge just visible in the middle of it. It looks massive against his little mouth! Neil had to have LOTS of teeth removed when he was young because he has a very small mouth and not-so-small teeth. I think it's fairly probable that Matthew will have the same awful situation, given that he has the same little mouth :( How awful for him!

So Matthew's first tooth is the left bottom middle toothie! I think that was Arthur's too. I must write it in his baby book! At 7� months, he is exactly one month younger than Arthur was when he got his first tooth. The tooth next to it looks like it might not be far behind, though I didn't get chance to see if there was a dark patch starting there yet. Arthur used to teethe mostly in pairs. His second tooth came 3 days after his first, so we'll see about Matthew's! I hope he gets a break from teething soon. He has suffered horribly with teething (the rashes, diarrhoea, 24-hour pain, etc) for nearly 3 weeks now, poor sausage. That seems rather excessive for just getting a tooth! I was starting to hope it would be this bad because maybe he'll get LOTS at once, then that would make it worthwhile, and get several out of the way. His top front teeth look "active" so they surely won't take a long time now? I hope not.

I can't believe my tiniest boy is getting TEETH! He has also spent the entire day pulling up to kneeling on everything. He is so pleased with himself because he can reach a whole new load of stuff "standing up" on his knees. He can push the button on the Fisher Price ball blast and just bop away at it whilst clinging on for dear life! Did I mention that he knows how to use the toy garage?! I watched him a few days ago, and he crawls over to it, grabs a toy car, and purposefully swings his arm up until it's wavering around above the top of the curving ramp (this sometimes takes him a few tries to perfect, as he usually does it from lying on his tummy, which is hard to do since it's above his head-height then!), and then he drops the car onto the ramp! The car then whizzes down the ramp and under the garage, and Matthew ducks his head to watch it zoom out at the bottom, and then grabs it again and puts it back on the ramp! He LOVES the garage and will spend a long time (5 minutes straight sometimes) just doing this over and over. I need to get that on video.

This evening he was kneeling at the garage, and he used the tower part of it (which is next to the ball blast toy) to cruise on his knees, doing funny little side-steps, to the ball blast!!!! Yikes! I think he must have nooo idea of the concept that he can one day pull to STANDING and use his feet to cruise, because otherwise I'm sure he would have tried it by now! He's soooo eager. I hope I am RIGHT there the moment he discovers that he can get to his feet :) His face when he managed to haul himself to his knees, steady himself holding onto something and look around, was priceless - soooo amazed and excited all rolled into one look! He was hauling himself up to peer over a big box of Fairy washing powder that I'd used as a barrier in front of a pile of dirty laundry which was in front of the washing machine yesterday, so he wouldn't get to the laundry when he went over to gaze lovingly at the machine! He kept going back there once he'd figured out that he could kneel and watch the machine over the box - it was so cute :)

Matthew is sleeping soooo well in the day at the moment. I don't want those to be my famous last words (!!) but I don't think I've mentioned his sleep for a while and the difference between him and Arthur is INCREDIBLE for day sleep. I am just constantly boggling at it! I don't know if it's the boys themselves, or something we've done differently, since BOTH are different factors. I do fiercely safeguard Matthew's day sleep though. To the point where we don't go out and do playgroups or other activities for Arthur because Matthew's naps co-incide with those things. Earlier on, I tried just carting Matthew with me and hoping he'd fall into step with his sleeps, around our activities. It did NOT work. His naps got so awful and he was so cranky and tired all the time. When he did nap, he'd wake after 30 minutes (just like Arthur used to) and be cross and tired till the next 30 minute nap. With just a bunch of 30 minute naps all day, he ended up with WAY less sleep than a baby his age needed - usually 4x 30 minutes (so, 2 hours) total. I know babies vary in their needs, but at his age, on average, he should have been getting 4-6 hours sleep in the day!!! Arthur never did, because his sleep was DREADFUL all round, and he completely depended on me to get him to sleep. I found it impossible to keep him asleep once he woke. Urgh, it was so hard! He never improved on his sleep, and in fact he now sometimes actually takes 1 straight hour spontaneously for his only nap, which is an improvement on some of the baby days even! He most often takes 30 or 40 minutes and then wakes wanting milk and if I'm lucky he'll nurse back to sleep for another 30 minutes. But he's older now, so that's fine.

Matthew seemed willing and happy to sleep well if only I'd enable him to do so. It started to seem unfair to not give him that opportunity, even though it then seemed a bit unfair that Arthur didn't get to go out as much and do things. I had to choose one of them to prioritize for this time in their lives. My friend Katie has prioritized her toddler who attends playgroups all over the place and gets out of the house for walks or activities twice a day, every day. Arthur would love to do that, I know. But her baby (the same age as Matthew) is constantly crying and miserable and rubbing her face. She always has been like this whenever I've seen her. She falls into exhausted sleep randomly while being held or in the car or pushchair, for 20 or 30 minutes at a time before being woken by something and crying again. When they do get time at home for a few days, the baby sleeps really badly anyway. They have real trouble with her sleep in general. Katie knows she's overtired, but she hasn't got much choice other than to go with the flow, because her toddler needs to be out and doing his stuff. We both agree that it's horribly hard to have to prioritize one child over another for things like this, but that there really doesn't seem to be any way around it when neither of your little ones go to any activities without their mummy.

I chose to prioritize Matthew because, well, babies need their sleep, and I read an article that said that growth hormones in babies are not even secreted till they've been asleep for about an hour! So that did it. I started making sure he got to nap properly, and took quite a few weeks (maybe even a month or two) enforcing longer naps - doing a ton of stuff to get him back to sleep if he woke too early. We used to use a dummy with him, remember that?! It seems like a whole different lifetime, Matthew's tiny baby days. That's crazy, because he's only 7 months old, but honestly, remembering the things he did or the equipment we were using for this or that back then REALLY feels as distant and detached as remembering something from when ARTHUR was a baby! It's so strange how that happens.

Anyway. I don't know how the dummy disappeared, but I think he pretty much stopped using it by himself. We only gave it to him if he was colicky or fussy, or if he got tired and needed to calm down to sleep. After a while I would only give it to him for a short bit, while I cuddled and rocked him before putting him down. When he had dozed off, or was just about to, I popped it out of his mouth. There were a few occasions where he got annoyed and refused to take his dummy when he was cranky and needing to settle for sleep, and after trying to get him to for a while, I thought, "What am I doing?!" and stopped trying! We used it on a few random occasions, but less and less, and then suddenly one day I found a dummy down the side of the bed and that's when I realised it had been ages since I'd picked one of those up or used one with Matthew! So that was that.

So anyway. His day sleep still varies a little in how long he'll nap for. He's fairly predictable though - something amazing in comparison with Arthur! And the AMOUNT of sleep he gets is also very different to what I "achieved" with Arthur. He takes two naps, having dropped the third a few months ago. He started refusing to go down again for a late afternoon nap if he'd already had two naps that day, EVEN if he was exhausted and it had been way too long since his last nap, and he'd NEVER make it to bedtime! He just was having nothing of it. A few times he was so tired and cranky that I just left him in the cot hoping he'd drop off while I made Arthur's tea. He sometimes lay there without much fuss for a whole 30 minutes, which was how long I expected him to nap, so I would just get him up again after that! Then I stopped trying to put him down for 3 naps, and spaced out the timings of the remaining two - this is when playgroups and stuff went RIGHT out of the window.

He gets up between 5.30 (uggggggghhh) and 7am most days. It varies hugely, but most often it's around 6am, like Arthur. He needs to go back to bed after he's been awake for 2 hours or so, so his nap start-time depends on his morning wake-time. Lately he goes down for a nap just after Neil goes to work, about 8.45am maybe. He sleeps without needing me to resettle him or anything for at least 1� hours! Amazing. Occasionally it's only an hour, and he will NOT go back to sleep for anything these days, when I try to get him to. I just get him up and think of it as extra time for a morning outing for Arthur, and hope that he'll make it up in the afternoon!

Often he will sleep 2 straight hours in the morning, getting up sometime just before 11am. Then he needs another nap after 2 or 3 more hours have passed. The afternoon nap is rather structured by me, and always has been. See, I discovered that if I don't get my children to sleep at the same time at some point in the day, then I go CRAZY! I'm just so thankful that my older child is still young enough to need a nap in the day - I have no idea how I'd manage otherwise! I need a gap in the day, even 30 minutes, where the house is quiet and I can eat some lunch without stress or little grabbing hands! Arthur needs a nap any time from noon, after he eats lunch. It varies for him depending on how tired he is. But I make one or the other of them wait until the other boy is ready for a nap too. If Matthew wakes early in the morning and takes a morning nap from 8am or something, and then wakes at 9.30am, he has a LONG stretch till I let him nap again! It sounds so mean of me! ;) He will be up for 3-4 hours until Arthur has eaten lunch and seems more tired for his nap. But if Matthew's nap has started late and gone on till 11.30am, Arthur will have to wait till 2pm or something, for his nap, because Matthew won't be ready for his nap till then. Poor boys ;)

It's soooo worth it though! When it comes to nap time, I change both their nappies, and then take Matthew upstairs while Arthur watches Thomas the Tank Engine or something, and I nurse Matthew in my bed and then put him down in his cot. Sometimes I have to rock him a bit first and pat his bum once he's in the cot until he's closing his eyes. This week he's driving me crazy fighting me when I try to put him down for a nap - he flips over and giggles at me, so everything gets very drawn out as he gets noisy and so I try again, and he resists with cheeky laughter, and so I leave him to it again, and so Arthur waits longer :( Today they didn't go to sleep till after 3PM! I don't want to repeat that again, so I'll try something different next time.

After I leave Matthew dozing off, I go down and fetch Arthur, and take him up to bed as fast as possible. I nurse him to sleep (he ALWAYS needs to nurse right to sleep, and has never been able to sleep for day naps any other way) and then check on Matthew, who is always fast asleep. The difference between getting Matthew to sleep and getting Arthur to sleep is usually about 10-15 minutes. That way, if either of them wake at the 30-minute mark (which both can tend to do, but especially Arthur), I still get to have 15+ minutes to totally relax and be "off-duty"!! Once I know a boy has reached the 30-minute mark, even if they stay asleep, I can't relax as much because I know they could wake at any moment. If Matthew wakes that soon, he always wakes crying and that tends to wake Arthur, and then I'm in trouble! Both awake and crying and needing Mummy to fix it! Which, no can do. So it's not good if that happens, and I can't relax because I need to be ready to sprint to either boy's side in 0.56 seconds and stop the crying with breast or reassuring cuddle until they sleep again!

When Neil is here at the weekend, the urgency isn't so great. When someone else is around, if one boy wakes and his noise wakes the other, there is one person to tend to each boy, so it works fine.

Anyway. So I get a blissful 15 minutes or so, and manage to eat something in that time usually, though I can't cook anything because it takes too long. I usually eat a sandwich or toast or something and just flop on the sofa with my ears pinging joyfully at the "noisy" silence around me, hehe!

If Matthew wakes at all, it's at that 30-40 minute mark, like Arthur, but because their naps are staggered by about 10-15 minutes, Matthew doesn't usually wake Arthur at that stage, because Arthur is only about 15 minutes into his nap and that is a time when it's really hard to wake him :) It just works really well for us to do it that way. I resettle him without trouble, as he desperately wants to get back to sleep, and then he sleeps a longer stretch. All in all, he tends to take about 2 hours in the afternoon as well!!! It's just amaaazing! I still feel anxious about waking him, because once he's awake he can only make it 2-3 hours before needing to go to bed for the night, and if he wakes (or is woken) earlier than 3.30pm he will be cranky and overtired before bedtime arrives. If I put him down for his afternoon nap earlier than 1.30pm he is guaranteed to wake no later than 3.30pm. He almost can't quite make it with just 2 naps, but he WILL NOT take a third, and I don't think he actually needs one anyway. He's just stretched. If his naps were shorter, he'd take three, probably. Otherwise he'd never make it through the long gaps till bedtime!

Today he slept especially well - I wonder if it was teething-related? He napped a straight 2� hours this morning and then a very unusual 2� hours this afternoon. I use his nap times to do lots of one-on-one stuff with Arthur - crafts or playdough, but often housework like folding clothes from the tumble dryer, which is Arthur's absolute FAVOURITE thing to do in the whole world at the moment! There's always plenty of it to be done, so it's a good activity! It's also quiet-ish, which is something I like since Matthew is sleeping.

Matthew only sleeps on his tummy. He has only slept on his tummy since he was tiny - I can't remember now how old he was when I first started putting him down for naps on his tummy, but it was very early on. I don't like that he does really, since it does carry risks, but he wouldn't sleep on his back. At night he would, though he'd wake a bit more, but in the day he got so that he wouldn't sleep, or else he kept waking. He slept great on his tummy so I put him like that for all his naps. Then he started getting hard to keep asleep past 4am at night, so after that feed he would go onto his tummy, and gradually the night sleep got phased into tummy-sleep rather than back-sleep. I was really anxious about the night sleep on his tummy, and would pray over him every night before I got in my bed. I just felt scared every single night, knowing he was on his tummy and I was dropping off and not able to watch over him, so it was a relief to pray about it. I still sometimes feel nervous about it, even though he's been sleeping that way for so long. He still wakes 2-3 hourly at night all the same! But his day naps are GREAT. I love his one extra-soft-and-warm red cheek when he wakes :) That is just about the cutest part of having a baby who sleeps on his tummy! I kiss it and kiss it and kiss it and KISS it when I pick him up from his cot. It's going in my sensory memory treasure trove along with things like popping bubble-wrap, and hearing rain on a canvas tent above my head, etc. I could EAT that boy, he is so scrumptious! :)

Of course he has been able to roll himself from back to front and front to back since about 3 or 4 months old, so that took some of the worry away, as he would probably have started putting himself to sleep on his tummy anyway and I couldn't have done much about that.

Wow, what a lot of detailed waffle about naps and sleep!!!! DARN IT, it's got late again!!! I never notice when I'm writing here. Tsk.

Okay, must post a few photos to try and catch up. What else to report before I go? Oh, our dishwasher broke today :( It had a horrible burning metal/plastic smell and now there's no heat to it :( So it's not working. And I was NOT keeping up with the kitchen and dirty dishes even WITH a dishwasher. I don't know how we'll manage without one! Urgh. We have no money (again), in fact, less than no money at the moment, so repairs or - the worst-case scenario - replacment does not sound good right now. Also, do you remember when Neil went shopping a couple of weekends ago and 3+ pints of milk spilled all over the inside of the car boot? Well, he took the carpet out and it's STILL in our back garden, grrrrr! But the milk also seeped into the works of the car, and today when I opened the door to put Arthur in his car seat and lifted him up, I was hit with SUCH an awful smell! I actually took Arthur back inside and took his coat and shoes off, got a nappy together and took his nappy off, only to discover that he HADN'T done a poo at all, and the smell had to have been coming from the car itself - YUCK! It smells like rotting poo. I kid you not. It's absolutely disgusting. The next thing I hunted for was a forgotten package of sausages or something that might have fallen out of a shopping bag in the boot, but I found nothing, so I guess it has to be the darn milk. Urgh. I have NO idea what we are going to do about that. The smell is awful, and I don't think it's going to go by itself. Neil is soooo depressed about it tonight. He's had a hard day at work, and the car stinks, and the dishwasher is broken and we haven't got any money. Poor Neil.

Happy News! My parents are doing a flying visit tomorrow!!!! They are coming to bid on some furniture at an auction somewhere, and they are travelling overnight tonight and going back tomorrow night, so no stop-over. They plan to visit us for a few hours in the afternoon tomorrow - yaaaay! I can't wait! Arthur seems excited too. He keeps saying, "Nana coming sooooon!" and "Out Nana walk!" (he wants to go out with Nana for a walk), and "Fold clothes, Nana!" and "Do tlay-dough, Nana!" ("tlay-dough" is how he pronounces playdough!). He loves Nana! So do I :)

Yet again there is sooooooo much more I wanted to write and that is pressing to be caught up on! But it's too late again. I'll post some photos of the boys playing together and stuff now - I've been meaning to catch up on those for a while, and there really are SO many of them playing together now. They spend accumulative HOURS each day playing with each other now, and they enjoy each other so much. They like the same things (cars, trains, building blocks, etc) and I am just beginning to notice that I can go in the kitchen and do a bit of housework while the boys entertain each other!!!!! How wonderful is that?! I'm so happy about it. If they want me, either of them can come in to me independently now, as Matthew crawls everywhere. If Matthew gets something he shouldn't, I hear Arthur say something about it so that alerts me (plus I look in to check on them very frequently, or I call to ask Arthur if they are doing okay) - he'll suddenly say, "Oh Mashew! No no no!" or a very wary-sounding "Ohhhh no!" and when I call out, "What's Matthew doing, Arthur?!" the reply will come back, "Mashew eat paper!" or "Mashew got phone cord!" and then I come dashing in to prise things out of Matthew's hands/mouth and put them away! I have no idea how he finds some of the stuff he gets hold of. Anyway, photos! They are all from about a week or two ago: