everybody wears their crankypants

I am losing my fucking mind.

This afternoon a co-worker got married at my local church, so I thought it would be nice to pop over & see it. I didn't realize that Blake would pick today to have an afternoon period of extreme crankiness. Poor little guy - not only is he still figuring out how to exist in this world, but now we're not "topping him up" every three hours, so he has to feed more frequently & more efficiently.

But as sorry as I feel for him, it doesn't change the fact that he cried for 3 hours straight. He cried in our basement. He cried in the car. He cried at the church. And he cried all the way home. To cope with this, we either gave him fingers to suck or put him on the breast - which has meant an almost continuous feeding time since 2 p.m. We had to hang out in an obscure corner of the church for 45 minutes following the ceremony just so I could feed my ravenous beastling. (The caretakers had shut off all the lights by the time we made it to the parking lot.) The Boy made himself extremely unpleasant during this time by continually muttering statements along the lines of "it was stupid and selfish for us to come," and "I want to get out of here."

everyone was wearing their crankypants this afternoon

Anyway, it wasn't until we got home that I was finally able to calm him down. Almost immediately thereafter, my parents' friends arrived. I had just sat down with a plate of lukewarm leftovers & a book on breastfeeding when my placid baby was whisked away from me for visitors. I tried to keep calm & kept eating while my mother's admonitions rang in my head ('if you don't eat, you'll lose your milk!')

Then my dad came downstairs to get me to socialize upstairs. When I refused, he made an angry gesture, bit back a few comments he was unwilling to say in front of guests and retreated. I suppose that in his defense, all he saw was the old me, eating & reading. He doesn't realize what it's like to feed a baby with one's body for three hours, to hear one's partner bitch one out repeatedly for deciding to leave home in the first place, to come home hungry to a fridge full of unappetizing stuff, to force oneself to choke it down, and then to be made guilty because the unexpected visitors of the other people in the house have brought a present for the babe.

But he turned my food to ashes and my hard-won peace to a semi-hysterical crying fit, so he doesn't really get my forgiveness right now.

3 or 4 staff members were also at this wedding, and I thrilled at the chance of showing off my beautiful (yet cranky) baby. I think my favourite comment from the whole wedding experience was, "holy cow...he has more hair than [the groom]!"

our angel

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- Rocketbride's adventure of 12/20/2003 10:34:00 p.m.