Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Baby post over on private blog

Hi readers, I just put some photos of Piper on my private blog. If you want to see it and you're not on the whitelist yet, message or e-mail me your gmail address! It's private mostly just to keep trolls out.

Piper has been doing really well at things babies have to do, so my life has been pretty okay. She sleeps at night for 6-8 hours and she eats well. The other day I wrote a post on my gaming blog and Critical Distance linked to it. It made me feel like a real writer again! Like... maybe I could be a mom and still have ideas about things other than nursing bras. I have been working on mom skills too though, like how to use different baby carriers, and we've been cloth diapering so I've been learning how to use and wash those.

I have been kind of reevaluating my organ practice time, because it's kind of a pain to take Ada along. I think I might either stop playing organ for a while, or try to get by with maybe 1-2 organ practice sessions/week. I've also been trying to practice sightreading more deliberately, i.e, setting a tempo and sticking with it through a whole song that I've never played before, and trying to keep my eyes on the music. I hope it's something I can get better at. I think as a teenager I just thought that sightreading was a talent I didn't have, but I'm becoming more skeptical of that idea.

Thursday, July 10, 2014

Babies are demanding

I had a baby four weeks ago. In the spirit of "small Whistler" I will call her Piper here. I have feelings about my skills as a parent. On good days when Piper sleeps and eats well I feel like parenting is easy. On days when she fusses for hours and I'm short on sleep I feel like a very unskilled parent. Probably one of the most frustrating things is when she cries and I don't understand why so I can't comfort her. In those times I feel like it's a miracle that so many people have survived babyhood and exist at all. And how does anyone have more than one child? But the other day a woman on my walk said she wasn't the biggest fan of "the newborn stage" and it gave me hope that maybe there are other stages of child development that I will enjoy more. But every time I find myself wondering at how difficult raising a baby is, I think about how it will only be MORE difficult if/when I have other children, which then makes me even more discouraged.

One of the most overwhelming things is when I feel bad for feeling bad. I mean, I prayed to have a child for a few years, and now that I have one, I don't even enjoy it that much? But I'm trying to think of it like a process? For example, if someone wants to go to college, and gets to go, and then they complain about their classes, we're not like "well you WANTED to go to college so stop WHINING." So I think it is possible to both want to have a child and not enjoy being a parent all the time. I just hope that when my child is older I actually enjoy that too, instead of just constantly wanting her to grow up.

Another thing I've had to adjust to is being flexible with my schedule. No matter how much I try to plan on feeding at a certain time, I have to be ready to drop everything at a moment's notice and pay attention to my daughter. That seems pretty basic but it makes me feel kind of out of control? Luckily I am finding ways to manage it; this morning when she wouldn't sleep I woke up and practiced piano for a bit, so I didn't feel like being awake when I wanted to sleep was a total waste of time. And I mean, it's not actually a waste of time to soothe a crying baby either, it just starts to feel futile after a while. Various sources inform me that Piper is cute, and the other day I think she actually smiled at me, so maybe there's hope that I won't see her as a milk-sucking leech for much longer.