I never thought I'd become obsessed with statistics.
That was before I had our daughter.
To be clear: I don't mean sports stats or share trade data or gas consumption rates. I mean the hard stuff: ounces of food, hours (or minutes) of sleep and -- I'm sorry to confess -- number and type of bowel movements. I'm not proud, but that's how it is.
When C was first born by caesarean I was terrified my milk wouldn't come in. When it did I was terrified she wasn't getting enough. And that there was something wrong on days when she nursed every 45 minutes. I needn't have worried, but at the time it was all I could think about. I saved the sheets of tiny scribbled notes recording how many minutes and how often our baby feasted on my left or right side, as a memento of my temporary insanity.
To be fair to myself, everything about her birth had been different than I'd hoped, so I was determined to make nursing work. G realised that I was becoming truly obsessive, and came home one day with a shiny new baby scale so we could weigh our daughter every day. All the books tell you not to, but it calmed me down to see the weight steadily increasing.
Fast forward about 6 months to starting solid foods. Again, I was petrified. What to make and how and when to feed and if she was getting enough and a hundred other questions had me doubting whether I would do it right. Fortunately by then I had a good network of other first-time mothers and we compared notes almost daily about how many ounces our babies had eaten, what was working and what wasn't, and traded tricks to get them to open their mouths. To this day I still resort to the airplane in moments of desperation.
Through it all, the one measurement I haven't yet let go is that of sleep. I can't help it. With a nearly one year-old who still wakes in the night to nurse, I can't go to sleep in the evening unless I have my mobile beside the bed so I can check the time she wakes me and when I get back to bed. Even though it doesn't make me less tired, I feel a sense of accomplishment if she makes it to 4am without asking for a snack. Knowing the time somehow makes the waking up more manageable.
I'm sure my newfound tendency to measure will rear its head with every weigh-in and growth measurement as the years pass, but as C becomes her own little person by the day, it feels less essential to her survival to mentally chart in- and outgoings. Although I still get twitchy if I haven't seen a properly dirty nappy for more than 24 hours!
1 comment:
I often think we would all be better off if we could trust our judgement more often, certainly less stress. Better to lose the numbers sooner than later. My oldest son (now 14) spoke late and my entire family was concerned- he's now one hell of a speaker when he manages more than a grunt, and absolutely normal as of age 4. Now I have a little newborn (very little at birth), and I get lots and lots of unsolicited concern for her size! "So little and she's two months???" I let it roll now...
Post a Comment