Life with Bumpus

I figured it was time to do another “slice of life” post, since I know for me these are the things I will want to remember one day: what was it actually like, on a day to day basis, to live with a baby? Things change so fast around here I can barely keep up.

These days there is plenty of “roll around the bed” time in the morning. And the rolling is getting a lot more elaborate – he’s rolling front to back, back to front, and sometimes continuously. If I don’t keep a close eye, he can end up in an entirely different quadrant of the bed than where I left him just seconds ago. I know I keep saying this, but I MUST develop some arrangement so he’s not unattended in the bed anymore; any day now I know he’s going to take a header off the side and then I’ll never forgive myself. But anyway, back to the schedule. So I’ve recognized he needs new kinds of stimulation now, so I try to set up toys and blankets and things just out of arm’s reach that he can try to grasp or at least have fun looking at. He’s only just started to reach for things, grab hold, and sometimes even get them into his mouth. It’s very tentative right now. Kind of reminds me how the nursing has progressed from day one – I used to have to shove my nipple full on into his mouth and he would eventually start weakly suckling at it; now he just rolls over, curls up his legs, squeals with delight, and grabs hold of the boob with both hands, shoving it into his mouth and sucking so hard I think my whole body is going to pull 

inside out. Amazing the difference a few months makes, isn’t it?

So some day he will be grabbing everything and putting everything in his mouth, and that will be a whole new phase. But right now he mostly just stares at interesting objects while in a push up position, and then lets his head collapse onto it if he gets tired. He still gets frustrated on his belly until I come flip him over…and then he immediately flips onto his belly again. He less and less likes to lie on his back. It’s all about curling up into a ball and putting his toes in his mouth, rolling to his side, and finally ending up spread out on his belly.

Eventually we both get sick of lying around in the bed, so I put him in his bouncy chair while I have breakfast/futz around on the computer. Again in the bouncy chair you can see the vast difference a few months makes – in the beginning he could only sit in it a few minutes, and just lounged there, still. Now he actively bounces until I think the thing might flip over, and squeals with delight at the toys and lights on the activity bar. He can stay in it for hours, although he usually starts whining and then crying if he’s sick of it. I try to catch it at the whining phase, though. Believe it or not, very little actual crying goes on here anymore. I think it’s because he has a slow fuse – he can whine with displeasure for a good half hour before working up to a full on cry, and I’ve usually long dealt with the issue before the crying starts. And “the issue” is nearly always just a need for a change of venue: “I’m sick of this – what else can we do?” Right now he rotates between the swing, the bouncy chair, the bed, the glider (for feedings, or periods of holding him sitting up at the end of my lap, while he plays with his toes), and the new thing, lying on the floor on a blanket with some toys strewn around. I guess this is my made up form of “tummy time” which as you know I never really did, officially. I try to get out of the house most days, even just to go to the back yard. Yes, he does get bored – even if he’s bored in his swing inside, he’ll not be bored outside, because there’s so many new things to look at and new sensations. Lately it’s been the best thing ever to take him outside in the swing where he’ll sit contentedly for nearly hours, almost always napping at some point, while I swim or sit in the hot tub. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to swim at all this summer – not knowing if I could have him sit somewhere outside for long stretches. But hooray, he’s just at that right phase of development where he can just hang out.

He still wakes up a lot at night (and by “night” it usually means early morning when most normal people are already awake – don’t mock me). Last “night” he was awake from 7 AM – 9 AM just rolling and cooing and screaming away. I was desperate for some more sleep and found myself wondering, as I often do during those times, how wonderful it would be if there were a magic pill that would make your child sleep. Well, I guess technically there is, but we won’t go there! Eventually he did settle down and went back to sleep for a couple more hours, and today I got up as I have for the last (nearly) five months; not so much ready to get up, but having given up on the hope of getting any more sleep. By ten or eleven I usually just say, “well, I guess I’d better just get up,” and that’s it. I have not once felt fully rested – but luckily I’ve only had a handful of nights of having gotten nearly no sleep at all (and most of those nights were in the beginning). Don’t think for a minute I don’t treasure and appreciate the reality of not having to get up for something, like a job. I think being able to sleep as long as I want has made the difference between enjoying Bumpus’ babyhood and being a sleep-deprived monster.

He blows bubbles. He spits up. He pees. He poops. Although he poops a lot less suddenly than he used to – sometimes now he’ll only poop once a day, or even less, whereas before he was pretty much a pooping machine. However yesterday we had one of those comic parental moments – he had a massive poop explosion all over his bouncy chair, so messy I couldn’t lay him down on anything, so I just put him on the bare bathroom floor in an attempt to change him…but of course he was squirming and rolling all over, and yes, managed to get poop ALL OVER himself. I’m glad at least I caught his hands before he put them in his mouth. Nearly an entire pack of wipes later I managed to clean him and the floor completely. God, I hope this doesn’t happen on the airplane next week! I will bring extra wipes and blankets just in case.

So this is life with Bumpus these days. It’s all about changing the venue and keeping him interested. Life is SO much easier now that he is easily entertained by toys and seats and things – I still don’t quite know what to do with myself when he’s content on his own for an hour or more; I’m still in that newborn mindset that he has to be constantly ON me, always feeding, or crying, or needing something.