Relentless

From Bambini

This week has been brutal. There is no particular reason, just the on going pressure of everyday life with infants. It's not like you can point to any one thing, but after four months at this level of intensity, there are weeks when it gets to you more than others. Although I have a lot of work to do, after checking emails, I was not able to get one thing completed this week. In fact I was lucky to get an hour of actual work done all week.

There was a TV show a while ago called wife swap or something racy like that. Despite it's title, it was really about the removal of a key figure in a family, replacing her with the wife from the other family. I remember one show where the husband was in tears within a day. The disruption to his the family schedule was overwhelming. I now fully understand how disruptive even the smallest changes can be, when you are tightly bound with small children.

When the babies are awake, they need constant attention. If you leave them for more than a minute they can get all worked up and be "bicycling" frantically. Nico has begun to fake cry unless you hold him or feed him this week. He has become very needy and is probably in discomfort as his body grows.

Despite my best efforts, I was only able to sleep 4/5Hrs a night this week but I think I have adjusted to the early schedule now. The problem is that I end up falling asleep on the sofa at around 4am right when they are waking up and need attention. Barbara is now getting up at 6am and taking over so I have two hours when I am praying that they don't wake up.

It's a very odd feeling to have two babies in control of many aspects of your life. If they wake up and cry, they will wake up Barbara. When we are both tired, communication gets really difficult and even conveying the simplest things (like where in the store the organic section is) becomes an exercise in pure frustration.

Is it on the right of the left?
It's on the left.
Isn't that where the meat section is?
No, that's behind you.
Behind me is the street.
No, I'm talking about when you are in the store
OK, well lets say I walk in the door, is it on the right or the left?
Which door?
The one we always go in!
Well, when you are sleeping honey, I go to the mail box and use the other entrance
OK the door on the left, then its on the right.... right?
No! its on the left in the back.
Are you talking about the grocery section or the organic section?
The grocery section silly
but I want the organic section
Well that's on the left
The left of the store
No, the left of the grocery section!
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrgh


Getting through the small hours of the morning is like an endurance test on the TV show Survivor. You feel like the you are literally carrying them the last few miles of a marathon. The other day I stood at the side of the cot for 45mins with my hand under Nico's back so he was comfortable. If he had woken up I would have had to feed him so Mom could get her sleep, and right when I would have finished she would get up and be mad that he was not ready to breast feed.

Adding to the problem is their sleeping position. It seems difficult for a baby to lay flat on his back for 8 hours with his head twisted to one side. They seem to need to stretch their backs by arching them more these days so the chairs that have them curved in the seated position get uncomfortable more quickly. They regularly arch back against the chair which they don't quite have the strength to do yet, making the bed the lesser of the two evils.

So every morning at 4am, right when I would kill to put my head on a pillow, I am watching the minutes on the digital clock, terrified that they will wake up and start screaming. At any other time, this would be no big deal, but day after day, week after week, it really starts to get to you as you realize your weeks productivity and happiness turns on the most random of events that might cause a baby to wake up.

If ever there was an exercise in acceptance, this is it. You are utterly powerless, even with every device known to man to create a favorable situation and access to information of a quality never seen before in history. Its very humbling, and this week overwhelming.

I would go further and say that this is the hidden side of raising children. The reality that parents gloss over and use tactful adjectives to describe while smiling slightly from embarrassment. As you may have surmised, I am pulling no punches in this blog. Its bloody and its brutal. For those that think I tend to exaggerate a little, we have a sofa bed with your name on it.

When people tell you that raising kids is "hard work", you picture carrying large containers of heavy things up and down stairs or something. In fact this is more like a game of psychological warfare in which the "enemy" has no discernible plan, and the game begins with you being dealt a loosing hand.

Even our very flexible landlord (who has two older children) informed us that after his experience he would not do it again. He said that this was confirmed by an informal poll that Oprah did on her TV show that demonstrated that more than 50% of parents would not have children if they had realized how difficult it was. So for those of you feeling the pressure of that overwhelming urge to procreate for whatever reason, think again!

In light of the pictures that we parents post, you might be inclined to feel this is a somewhat cynical view. I may remind you that as parents, we take hundreds of pictures and spend our waking hours pouring over them to select the ones that perpetuate the "bundles of joy" myth as convincingly as possible. Pictures are taken in hunredth's of a second, and let me be the first to tell you, the enjoyment is measure in hundredths of a second before that pervasive, dull, lack of sleep headache, slams you and reminds you what your reality is.

I will spare you the financial analysis. Suffice to say that we now have a full time employee and I can get no work done to speak of, while in the depths of the worst depression since the 1020's. I remember friends of mine telling "ooooh don't worry, they don't cost anything for the first few years. Just shove then in a drawer at night and forget about em heh heh" Uh Huh. I could feed an immigrant family on the amount we spend on diapers and formula alone.

As if this isn't enough, there is a subtle battle of the sex's underway in the house. Barbara feels like its all boys when she is alone, and I feel like the lone man in women's domain when the nanny is here. To add to the mystery, they converse in a foreign language.

Last week there was an excited hubub in the nursery so I went in to see what was going on. After some more giggles and darting glances, Barbara finally translated the gist of it. Luca had found his Penis. Whatever. I'm sure he just had a reflex to protect his gentials.

Anyway, later the full meaning of the Colombian nanny's comment is revealed. It doesn't translate well, and its very cultural, but essentially she was saying that once a man has discovered it, he never lets it alone.

So with this gender specific attack in mind, at dinner we tried to watch a movie. It was the insider, about the Tobacco industry whistle blower, Jeffrey Weigand. If ever there was an American hero, he is it. Well it took an hour to get them to sleep and by the time we had eaten and cleared up, we had not even made it to the part where Brown and Williams get law enforcement to illegally remove stuff from his house. It is just impossible to watch movies with kids.

So I decided to try to describe the scene and extrapolate the gender based conclusion. It just didn't have the same impact. Instead I just got a long roll of the eyes and that look that could kill small rodents at 20 paces. Life is a box of chocolates all right.

In high school these days, they actually do a class in baby care called "Baby think it over" that involves taking home an electronically configured dummy that is programmed to make some horrible crying noise every two hours. The teenager has to rock it for 20mins to get it to shut up and the whole event is recorded by some clever microchip device buried within it. Not surprisingly, it is very effective at jaw dropping teen pregnancy rates. Some of these "babies" take more than a little abuse...



In reaction to all this, I have been planning some time to hang out with the boys on Fathers day. We will hike into the wilderness to a remote hot spring that has been on my list for many years. So this week I bought a pair of trail running shoes (the hike is 11 miles each way) and I am trying a hammock to sleep in. Its amazing how refreshing it is to spend a little time working on "boy toys" instead of baby stuff!

I was then informed that it was time we began running again. We have not run together since Barbara got pregnant. The idea was to strap the babies into the stroller and do a lap around the neighborhood.

As we set out I was surprised how easy this was after all the aerobic workouts I had hour after hour with the babies. When we got back we realized we had not taken a good look at the babies. When we got them into the apartment, Luca had gone unconscious and Nico looked like that guy in the arm chair in the sound system commercial.

The boys had a Doctor appointment on Thursday and were measured and weighed. He takes about 15 minutes to print out these very nice graphs (that we subsequently use to line the trash can with) showing that their height and weight is within the "normal" region. He then checked them over and had them sit and see if they were aware and alert. They both are doing very well. He declared them "normal".

We also heard back from Barbara's doctor with the results of the biopsy they performed on the tissue removed from her. There was no malignant tumor, in fact there was no tumor at all. It was just a little placenta left over from the C-Section. The Doctor seemed to want Barbara to sound a lot more excited than she did. I think Barbara is still a little annoyed that she was envisioning weeks of Chemotherapy and all her hair falling out and an early death without being able to raise the children. I resisted the slight temptation to say "told you so" and we talked about how fast fear can dominate your thinking and the Multi billion dollar industries that are built on it.

I bought her some roses to mark the closing of the "baby making" cycle. After the months of preparation, daily injections of hormones, procedures and a long pregnancy, its over. The only residual seems to be that strands of her thick hair are turning up everywhere. Barbara is a little concerned, but our nanny has brought her some fresh rosemary for it. I am not sure what she does with it, but occasionally the house is filled with this wonderful fragrance.

This week Luca also made a leap in his sleeping from four hours to 5 1/2 hours. This is very encouraging. Nico seems to need to stretch a lot and doesn't enjoy being on his back all night. Unfortunately until they can roll themselves over, we cant let them sleep on their tummy as they are at risk of sudden infant death.