Bath-time Adventures (etc.) with Baby Ben

Tomorrow Baby Ben will have been with us for two pretty amazing weeks. I have lots to say about him, but much of the time I'm trapped underneath him and can't reach the keyboard with both hands :-) My recovery has been slower than anticipated in some respects (I have not been in much pain at all--just very weak), but I'm not complaining, because there's really nowhere else I'd rather be than resting in bed with the sweetest little baby around.

In addition to being totally adorable, he's also very easygoing, which is *great*. He does not cry much at all, and he's a good sleeper, often sleeping for 3-hour stretches or even a little longer. Of course he makes up for those blocks of time by being very hungry afterwards, but that's all going pretty well, too.

I have to say that I'm finding everything a lot easier the second time around! George was a really good/happy baby, too, so it's not that. Well, it's partly that my life is a lot better now in some very important ways than it was 10 years ago. Everything was sort of crashing down around me when George was born: my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer the very day he was born; soon thereafter George's dad lost his job and it looked very much like I was going to lose mine, plus our relationship wasn't super stable; my physical recovery from the birth was slower and more painful than it should have been; I had a painful skin cancer in my ear.... So when, in those insanely difficult weeks (which stretched out into months), lightning struck a tree right in front of my house, knocking out power and phone lines to my house alone, well, you can see why I was feeling like the universe had it in for me! Ten years later, the story is quite different. I'm very happily married and stably employed, and everyone seems to be in good health (knock on wood)....

But on top of that, it's just easier having been through all of this before. The incredible changes that your body goes through, which I found so disconcerting last time (of course that was compounded by all of the uncertainty all around me); the lack of sleep; the sudden and almost total loss of any personal time and space (which you know about going into it, but you might not realize how overwhelming it can be); even things like having to inhale your own dinner in between baby feedings.... It's just so much easier to keep it all in perspective this time. Having been through it once I *know* these things don't last, and it makes it easier not to be overwhelmed by it all, and also to settle in and relish all of the good parts. Really, if I had known how much easier pretty much every aspect of this would be the second time around, I don't know if I would have waited 10 whole years to do it again!

Back to Baby Ben... We're convinced he's some sort of prodigy, because he turned himself over--back-to-front, no less--when he was two and a half days old. And he's almost smiling already... he came really close yesterday when he had his first bath (more on that in a minute), and it seriously looked like he smiled at Bob twice this evening. Plus, he gained over three ounces during his first week, when breast-fed babies are expected to lose 7-10% of their total weight; I'm feeling a bit proud of myself on that one!

On the less exciting side, he snores and doesn't seem to tolerate onions very well! Hoping that won't last.

So, his first bath was kind of classic. We have this little tub that has a sort of hammock built in to it (one of our cats seemed convinced it was his new cat bed). So we filled up the tub with warm water, and lowered Ben into it... and this look of wonder and rapture spread across his little face! It was so sweet. He seemed to be feeling such joy at having recovered the experience of being in water. He was, as I said, really almost smiling. He was so relaxed that--you guessed it--he peed. So, Bob lifted him up, I dumped out the bath and refilled it, and we started over again. Take two. And it happened again, right away. Ok, so same thing, we dump it out and start again; take three. We're thinking he ought to be good to go now. He's got the same rapturous look on his face. He opens his little mouth as if to smile, and... out comes the spit-up. A lot. Ok. So, Bob lifts him up again (and Ben really has to be wondering why we keep putting him in this wonderful warm water but then lifting him back up into the air!), I rinse and refill the tub; take four. We put him back in and now we're really sure he's good to go. I even take a minute to go get my camera, since we know we should be recording his first bath for posterity.

I start the recording, narrating how it's his first bath, and how we've had three mishaps but won't dwell on those because look-how-content-he-is-and-how-great-everything-is-going, and I'm zooming in on his adorable, happy little face when all of a sudden we hear... you guessed it again... the sound of a big ole baby poop being let loose. Oh noooooo! We laughed and laughed as we cleaned up and got ready for take 5, thinking about all the fun we'll have showing this video in the future if there ever should arise an occasion when we want to embarrass him ;-)

Our little water baby

Happy baby (and mama!)

All clean (whew), and all tuckered out