Notes From A House Frau IX

The Magic Marker?

Our RRBB turned three months on Saturday, the magic marker, everyone told me, to when things would start to improve. There's just one caveat, he was born a month early so I'm thinking he'll start sleeping more, and the fussiness will calm down somewhere closer to 16 weeks or four months. I didn't think we'd make it this far, let alone still be sane, but he's been so terrific lately, and crying for only about a half-hour every day at different times in the day, that we all feel a bit calmer in the house. He's also doing an awesome job with tummy time as represented in this hilarious photo.

And calm is what I need. My creatinine went back up, and so the SFDD is still back and forth about whether or not to change our treatment. I am so freaked out right now by the disease and by the fact that, while nothing has really changed (the levels are high but not AS high as they were), the disease still seems to be stubbornly trying to kill me. Yet, I feel so much better. That could be accounted by the fact that I'm getting much more sleep these days, though. It's a silent killer, this Wegener's Granulomatosis, and I wish that it would just go away.

It's funny how being home turns your life upside down in a way. I have never figured myself to be a particularly active person -- I like to sit around, watch TV, read, watch movies. But all of that comes from working full time and needing, I suppose, the down time. I never figured that a 50-odd hour work week, plus commute, was really all that much, it was just what you did. And now, I'm not saying that staying home with an infant is easy, far from it, it's the hardest job I've ever had, but it's also boring. The baby isn't boring. He's a fascinating little thing and watching him evolve is one hell of an interesting perspective, a blessing, I know. But your brain, your own brain, kind of goes on hold, and instead of filling up your day with work, with actual things that make a contribution to the world (in my case, it's books, and I love my job), you fill up your day with errands. With all of the things that you had to cram into the weekend because by Monday morning at 730AM, it was up and go back into the routine again.

The RRBB sat in his bouncy chair for over an hour yesterday while I went through his clothes. Consistently amused by a toy giraffe, we read two books, and listened to music. Then, we danced, a little three-month celebration, I suppose. But that's a lot of stimulation for one wee one and that was only one hour. What do you do with the other 23? He sleeps, I read. He eats, I read. He cries, I cuddle. My RRHB cleans the entire house, I manage to vacuum the upstairs and clean the bathroom sink. Because baby fusses, baby sleeps, baby eats, and I read.

Don't get me wrong, I love reading, but I also need a day that's not filled up specifically with errands. And most of them are made up because if we just don't get out of the house, we start to lose our minds. It's funny, compartmentalizing your life into little hour-long blocks (will he sleep longer than an hour this time?) is not conducive to a lot of activities. And the weather isn't helping. We try to take him for a walk every day, despite the bitter cold, despite the fact that people don't shovel, despite the fact that it's mid-January in Toronto, Canada, simply because we are not the homebodies we claim to be. I will do anything to get out of the house these days, healthy or not, and I'm hoping that it's good for the RRBB, because his parents are errand-crazy.

I'm bleary-eyed this morning, cramming blogging into today. I'm trying a new tactic and putting the RRBB right back into his crib the minute he falls asleep if we are home. The sleep book says that he'll sleep better that way but I'm just trying to wean him from the human-couch aspect of our relationship. It doesn't always work. We had a semi-rough night last night, the first in weeks, so one can't really complain, and I've never seen a baby smile so much in my entire life. He's truly a happy little guy, which means, I hope, we're doing something right. Now if only that happiness could calm me down so I'm not always freaking out about my test results and what the doctors are going to say and whether or not I'll have to change medications and whether or not my kidneys will survive and whether or not the preeclampsia will ever go away and whether or not the prednisone crazies will kick in and whether or not my blood pressure will stablize and whether or not I'll be able to fill up another week with errands. And I feel like I'm wasting this time, which makes me resent the disease even more, it's holding me back from all kinds of things. I can't see the positives today, perhaps that's what boredom does to you, in a way, it pulls you down in ways that you don't want to go, makes you imagine the worst, refuses to give into the calm that you need to badly to get better.

So, errands, made up stuff that isn't remotely necessary to your life, but gets you through the days, pushes you forward without actually accomplishing anything major. I suppose, if you had enough errands, and the ability to focus for longer than a half-hour because of sheer exhaustion, you could manage a to-do list or two. Maybe that's the solution. Putting the errands on a master list just so I feel like I'm spending days living instead of dying (sic, The Shawshank Redemption).

Yesterday, I just had to dance with the RRBB to The Pogues' song A Rainy Night in Soho. I'm not going to lie, I had his little hand in mind and we were waltzing around his room, singing these words in particular: "You're the measure of my dreams, the measure of my dreams." I cried, which is something I do a lot, and then remembered what my RRHB said when I told him about the test results bumping back up -- that it's not getting worse so why freak out just yet, everything is exactly the same, even if it's not terrific, at least it's not as bad as it could be, and the RRBB is certainly the measure of my dreams these errand-filled days.