What is love? Baby.

The lack of recent posts is attributable to the kitten's renewed protest against sleep. I think she's a bit excited about learning how to sit up and is generally disinterested in anything else - food, sleep, bathing...

So I'm a bit sleep deprived and busy keeping her entertained. We have done some sleep training to help her settle and I will write a bit more about that later. In the meantime, I wanted to post about something that people keep asking me when I meet up with them for the first time after having a baby.

Most of my friends are not parents, and they always wonder "what it's like". Such a vague, general question. I've been trying to come up with a succinct and comprehensible answer, and today it finally clicked in my brain. Ok, it's not as succinct as I'd like, but it's pretty good for someone as verbose as me.

Yes, it has something to do with A Night at the Roxbury. You know the song? What is love? Baby...

Don't sing the rest. That's it. What is love? Baby.

You know when you first meet someone and fall in love, it is all-consuming. You spend all your free time with them. You don't hang out with friends as much. You obsess about whether you're acting right and whether you're pleasing them. That is just like being a parent. It consumes you; you obsess.

But there's another side to falling in love. Everything they do is so wonderful and the tiniest gestures from them make you so happy. You think they're perfect in every way, even when they're imperfect. That is also just like being a parent.

The last thing is, with a child, that initial period of crazy love doesn't fade the way it might with a relationship. It hasn't gone away for me, and I'm pretty sure it never will.

Ok, I don't know if any of that made sense now that I've written it out. It does in my head.

Pacifiers

Pacifiers, soothers, binkies, dummies... whatever you call them, I hate them. Why did they suck me in? Pun intended.

I was planning on my next post being about infant potty training, but I am still working on it and I just have to interject with this rant. I HATE THE PACI.

You know who loves the paci? My child. We waited 2 months before letting her try one because we wanted breastfeeding to be established, and when we finally gave it to her it was like heaven. Just plunk that thing into her mouth and she's a veritable Maggie Simpson. She loves it so much that she won't go to sleep without it, and then she rolls over in her sleep and it falls out and she screams bloody murder until I trudge to her room and stick it back in. Repeat ten times each night.

Enough is enough. We are quitting the paci cold-turkey. I am on day 3 and it has been a challenge but I think we might be turning a corner. I have to offer other kinds of soothing in order to replace the paci because she doesn't seem to want to soothe herself and everyone tells me you can't really let her cry it out till after 6 months (though I'm not sure I want to let her cry anything out ever).

So I'm basically walking around the apartment for hours with 17 pounds of baby trying to make her go to sleep. Meanwhile, she's sucking on anything that gets within an inch of her face - my shirt, my arm, my neck, my ear, whatever. But when she does finally go to sleep, it's much more solid. I now only get up once per night to feed. No more running laps between our respective beds all night.

So the fight continues. I will defeat the paci!

Do you have any good paci weaning stories or tips?