Third Culture Kid(s)

Thank you all for all the lovely congratulations!!  It was really nice coming back online to see all of your good thoughts for our little family.

Things have been - predictably - crazy around here.  Happily, M. is home this week; he may not burn the midnight oil with me, but he’s been working his butt off doing all the little stuff for me while I try to figure out C.’s schedule and merge it with the one we already had.

So this is going to be a quickie update - honestly, I’m not sure when I’ll be able to do more substantive posts.  But here’s the lowdown:

- After a week plus of latching issues on one side (right) and pain that was bad enough to make me cringe every time C. wanted to eat, a nipple shield (now rejected) seems to have helped with both the pain and the latch.  C. hadn’t been gaining weight since we got home, but over the weekend he put on 4 oz., which was enough to get me emancipated from the lactation consultant at the pediatrician’s office.  Which was none too soon, since my mother HATES lactation consultants (she believes it’s a lot of meddling in something that should be more instinctive), and it was causing some stress between us.

- All of which makes me wonder what it is that will drive my kids batty when they’re older.  And if it’s inevitable that parents make their kids crazy.

- MM’s been doing very, very well with C. so far.  She doesn’t like his crying (but, then, he sounds like a baby hawk when he cries, so I’m not exactly crazy about it myself), but so far she hasn’t made it personal, so to speak.  She still thinks the baby is “cute,” and asks to hold him a lot.  She brings him offerings of small toys - that kind of thing.  And, in what seems to be an indicator of her overall comfort level, she once again had a poopy blowout this morning that HAD to have cleared out a lot of cumulative, um, stress.

- Beyond that…well, that’s pretty much the sum total of my days right now.  Unfortunately for me, C. likes to burn the midnight oil.  He’s a night owl - shades of his father - which means that I’ve been seriously sleep deprived.  BUT, happily, he has one very consistent, long nap in the mid-afternoon - roughly 1-4 or so - which happens to coincide with MM’s naptime, meaning that Mommy can get some sleep during the day.  It isn’t great sleep, but it’s sleep and I’ll take it.  My present mantra is “it doesn’t last forever.”