The 5 am feed

Annabelle is one month old this week, and we are finally settling into a routine. This infant still feels like a dream; she allows me to blog, to write in my journal, and today we shot a VLOG with CBC Kids' Mamma Yamma (They are posted every two weeks here and they are hysterical!). Well, Annabelle barely peeped throughout the shoot. In fact she slept through most of it.

Annabelle & Mamma Yamma

Yesterday I also wrote a new song with her at my side - my first since her arrival. I realize that this productivity will likely decrease as she starts to spend more of our days awake and alert, but for now I'm feeling pretty good about bringing her on the road.


Still, some of our routines are completely incompatible with the touring schedule. For example, she loves to cluster feed between 7 and 11 pm, the exact hours that I'll be onstage in a month's time. If I were to play a show tomorrow night, we'd all be dealing with a screaming hungry bear backstage. But, really, how do you change a baby's feeding pattern without witholding? Advice, fellow Moms? I feel terrible watching her cry and grunt from hunger. Mostly because I know how HANGRY I get. When my blood sugar plummets, I kick and scream too! Being hungry is the worst.

We also know that if she's napped too much during the day  (okay, it's more sleeping like the dead), that I'm going to pay for it in the wee hours. As of 7pm, if she's still sleeping, Colin and I start the mean-spirited and selfish Annie-B wake-up call. We'll spend the next 30-60 minutes slowly stripping her down to her diaper, blowing on her face, and tickling her into a crank. She is (especially) not fond of the beard rub, but face it honey: sometimes it just has to be done. It's your sleep or mine. And I'm your Mom, so you have to listen to me (at least until the hormones kick in).

The one standard routine since her birth has been the 4-5 am feed. Before Annie (B.A.), this was always the loneliest time of day for me - those few hours during which most people have gone to sleep after a late night or are still sleeping before an early wakeup.  It's strange to be up then, checking twitter (my overseas friends in full-morning swing), reading "How to be a Woman",  writing this blog, and watching inane youtube videos (like this one! And this one!). However, with Annabelle now, 5 am is no longer so lonely.

I have to remind myself while I'm nursing that it's okay not to "do" anything - to just feed her, daydream, or more importantly, stare at her sweet cherub face and into her increasingly focussed eyes. There's really, at the end of the day, nothing more productive than feeding her, fattening her up, and giving her a good start. I can feel her getting bigger, and that's the most important and productive thing I can be doing right now.

Til next time,

CB

As an aside, I went on my first post-baby run yesterday. It felt so good to move again, and to be alone for half an hour. Thanks to my Mother-in-law who held a sleepy little Annie (surprise), I had nothing to worry about other than getting one foot in front of the other.

Getting There

Baby and the Blog

 Annabelle and I went to attend and play our first Good Lovelies show last Friday at the Delta in Mississauga. We played a 40 minute set in the afternoon at the Ontario Council of Folk Festivals conference.

It felt so good to be onstage with the Lovelies again. Our last show together was over two months ago, the longest amount of time we've gone without performing since the band started. We jumped onstage without rehearsing and without a set list - winging it - and after our first song "Mrs. T.", my Dad yelled from the back of the room "like riding a bike, eh girls?". Indeed.

My parents met me in Mississauga to watch Annabelle while we played our set (have I mentioned how much I love Joy & Fred Brooks?). I was intrigued to see how she would react to hearing our three voices in harmony after spending so much time with us on the road and onstage in the last year. Part of me was expecting cooing, smiles - some kind of expression of recognition. Well, my Mom tells me she slept through the whole thing. So that's how it's going to be, eh Annie-B? She is so unfazed by the music, she can sleep through it all.



The Good Lovelies, conferencing it up. Photo by Mike Bourgeault

 The challenge, as it turns out, was not playing the show itself (mind you it was a short one), but rather the getting there. Let me capitalize that - GETTING THERE. Annie has so far been a very good baby, so in general I don't worry about taking her places, getting her fed in public, etc; it's leaving the house that I find most challenging, particularly when I am rushing. I sense that babies can feel distress, and my little Annie shares my stress by puking on her clean outfits, usually moments after she's been strapped into her car seat, and wrapped up in blankets. So out she comes, strip her down, new onesie (aside - any freaking sleeper with more than 8 snaps is a shit show), clean her up, strap her in. Then, minutes later, because she has barfed up all her milk, she is hungry again. Last Friday, this groundhog day experience meant that we arrived at the OCFF within 20 minutes of our set. Gone the days of skipping out the door...

I have joked about advice in other posts, but truth be told, I'm finding it very useful. A friend recently told me that I should always plan to leave an hour before I NEED to. Check.

These days it is very rare for us to leave the house before noon. Annabelle and I linger in bed, take our time with the morning feed,  and Mommy drinks a good coffee before appearing in public. I am enjoying this pace now, as the days of 6 am flights to Minnesota or Seattle or Edmonton for shows are coming fast. Dear Lord.

In preparation for that time, I have been taking Annabelle on daily adventures; coffee with friends (oh how easily old addictions are reestablished!); visits with grandparents; a parade at Daddy's work; snuggles with the ladies at Six Shooter Records. Next week we will attend a couple of shows in my fave Toronto haunts. Fingers crossed!

All of this has me excited about our future together as travelling partners, although this is said before she can even roll over. Check back with me when she is crawling, then wobbling, then walking and running away from me.

Til next time,
CB

ps. I have decided that she will begin her instruction in upright bass as soon as her hands are big enough to wrap around the neck of one. I have dreams of duo shows with Annabelle already. Poor little girl is going to have to put up with the music of her uncool folky Mom. HA HA HA!

Two weeks in.

Tomorrow Annabelle is two weeks old. Here are thirteen things I've learned after my first few weeks of Motherhood:

1. I love this little girl more than I ever thought possible.
2. Baby poop and spit-up is not so gross - at least not yet.
3. "I am leaking" has become a regular part of my vocabulary.
4. I thought my reading days were over. As it turns out, I am devouring books while breastfeeding.
5. My baby sleeps. Other parents hate me because of this.
6. People have a lot of advice. My sister-in-law's best advice: "Don't listen to people's advice".
7. I squeezed a baby out of my lady junk; it still hurts.
8. Though really cute, sometimes my baby looks like E.T.
9. Skin-on-skin may be the most blissfully peaceful thing I have ever experienced.
10. My nipples really frigging hurt.
11. I get why people want to cuddle their babies while sleeping.
12. It is not "cluster feeding," it's "cluster fucked."
13. Holy shit, I'm someone's Mom. Where are my pleated jeans?!

At 8 days old, Annabelle experienced her first hotel overnight. And in the hot stuffy room, she slept a good 9 hours, with one feed in the middle of the night. What a little rockstar. Revelling in cableland, we watched Aliens until the wee hours (my husband noting that it is better than the original, and may be the best sequel of all time, aside from Empire Strikes Back, and certainly better than Ghostbusters 2). She even slept through that scene where the woman is still alive, and the Alien pops out of her stomach. I squealed, Annie sighed and kept sleeping.

Tomorrow we head off to our first show. My bandmates, Kerri & Sue, are mentoring at the Ontario Council of Folk Festivals annual conference. They're showing some young ambitious musicians the ropes - sharing their experience in performance and the music business with newbies to the scene. As part of their role, they are asked to give a performance, and I'm going to sneak in and do some Good Lovelies tunes with them. I am really really excited about getting onstage. It's been over a month now since we've done a show, and I can't wait to get my cowboy boots on. I'm also very excited to see how Annabelle reacts to us all singing together. She'll be experiencing our harmonies outside of the womb for the first time.

Our early baby-prepping for the road has meant lots of hot-potato-ing with family and friends (Thanksgiving helped with that); getting her used to different environments (IKEA, grocery stores, walks in Toronto ravines, etc.); having her sleep in very noisy situations (yesterday she slept through 3 fire alarms. Not just three separate alarms, but three alarms going off simultaneously... long story.); putting her to bed at midnight, and getting her up around 9 or 10; going on road trips; and ambushing her with kisses! Well, that last one doesn't have anything to do with the road - I just like doing that.

She's a dream so far. I hesitate to write this, as she will probably become some kind of nightmare child who never eats greens or terrible teen who stays out too late and makes out in the basement with boys (or girls if that's what she wants). I keep reminding myself that her good nature may take a turn for the worse...

Okay I must go now - off to do piles of laundry. That's another insight I suppose. There must be some mathematical equation to calculate the exponential growth of laundry piles due to babies. It's not like there's just one extra person living with us now. It's like I'm doing the laundry of two adults and fourteen dirty little gnomes.

Til next time,

CB

Welcome Baby Annabelle

Well, she's here. And she's beautiful. And I am so in love with her.

Annabelle at 16 hours. Photo Credit: Kerri Ough

Annabelle Patti Brooks Love was born one week ago today, in the early morning hours of September 28th, 2012, clocking in at 7 lbs and 20.7 inches. From the moment she arrived, I have felt that I've known her my whole life. And still, everyday is a new experience. So begins that duality of time - where it feels like forever and no time at all. One week has passed so quickly. But it's like Annie-B's been here all along.

As I write this, my sweetheart is sleeping on our quilted bed. We are pooched from our first adventures from home - today to IKEA to buy bedstands (and other useless stuff that will clutter up our home), yesterday to the Stockyards for a greasy lunch, and the day before to Loblaws. These little jaunts are fraught with preparation: do we have enough diapers? What time did she last feed? Will there be somewhere I can breastfeed privately if she gets hungry? What if she craps all over the place? Will people be annoyed if she cries? There's a certain amount of letting go necessary to stay sane in all of this...Patient Mom I hope to be. These are still early days.

Seriously, if you've never had a burger from the Stockyards on St. Clair, you are missing out. See how much Annie-B loves her burger?!

Friends and family, as expected, have been wonderful. Our fridge and freezer is stocked with food, and so many have come to snuggle the girl and shower her with gifts. My Mom also came to stay for our first few days home to show us the ropes. Her approach was perfect - keeping our kitchen clean and preparing food so that we would have time to figure out how to do all of this on our own. Her guidance was there when needed (often). I love my Mom.

I can feel my body slowly putting itself back together. Recovery has been good, but harder than I expected; my insides knitting themselves after 21 hours of labour. Childbirth, from this vantage, almost seems an impossible thing - and still billions of women have done it before. But it's done. I have had a couple of my nightmares come true - stitches in places that should never have stitches (!!!) and swelling in many places that should not swell. I will spare you the gory details, and blame it on nature. My body is no longer my own but thankfully our pain memory is short.

Our first week has been completely blissful. We are tired, but so thankful (even with the stitches and swelling and 20-odd hours of labour - totally worth it). For now it's all bliss and skin-to-skin and staring at our little Annabelle. I will leave it at that today, I'd like to join my love for a nap.