Atticus and I seem to have caught some kind of a stomach bug. I’ve been up all night for the past two nights spending some quality time in the bathroom, and Atticus has had some crazy diapers for the first time in his little life. On top of the stomach bug, I wrenched my back somehow over the weekend hauling stuff around, so I’m stiff and sore along with being dehydrated and weak and in constant awareness of how far I am from a bathroom at any given moment.
Monday night I was so exhausted between my sickness and his that I went a little delirious at his 1 am feeding. I couldn’t seem to manage to make the bottle by myself for some reason, so after I filled the bottle with water and still had the nipple in my hand, I woke up Bear and passed it off to him to add the formula. By the time he handed it back I had completely forgotten that I was still holding the nipple and, while Bear kept saying, “the top. put the top on. Tree, the top.” I poured the entire contents of his bottle all over the inside of his co-sleeper. Luckily he had squirmed enough in his sleep that I ended up just drenching his feet instead of giving him a head to toe formula shower. He didn’t seem to mind an awful lot either. Bear changed his jammies while I stripped the bedding, and he was back to sleep before we even got him back in his bed.
My little guy is such a good baby, there are seriously times I feel guilty about it. He never cries unless there is a reason for it, and yet there are still moments when I just have to take a deep breath and marshal my patience. What would I possibly do with a baby with colic?
So far this week I’ve accomplished nothing. I don’t know why I continue to allow it to surprise me, but once again I’ve had to toss out my grand plans and just snuggle on the couch as we whimpered together. Motherhood has turned out to be so much more demanding and yet also so much more tedious than I ever imagined. I need to be holding him at all times, and yet holding him doesn’t require all of the attention I have to give. Just snuggling him doesn’t require a ton of me, while it simultaneously requires all of me. I don’t know what mothers of newborns did before Netflix and the internet.