Home Alone!
Home alone, but not alone – I’ve got a baby! Last week Yenari returned back to work, so for the past week there have been big changes in our house. Yenari works from around 2pm to midnight 3 weekdays a week and then every other weekend. We have a nanny coming to take care of Hazel for 4 hours on the 3 weekdays, but then I’m on baby duty for the next 6 hours and I’ve got the full 10 hours on the weekends.
So…I went from spending just about no time home alone with Hazel a few weeks ago to spending about 50 hours alone with her over the past week and a half! It has been an…interesting transition and is definitely taking some getting used to for all of us.
For the most part things have been going really well in my alone time with Hazel. I’ve been going on long walks with her through the neighborhood – checking out all the parks, exploring the small streets I’ve never been on before, and seeing things I never noticed in the neighborhood when life moved at a faster pace. I’m not looking forward to the end of daylight savings time and the shortening of the daylight hours – soon enough it will be dark by the time I get home, so the walks will probably be shorter and less entertaining.
My favorite thing though is making her laugh. Over the past few weeks she’s transitioned from occasional little smiles, to big smiles, to the occasional laugh, and now to all out cracking up. I just about gave myself whiplash today shaking my head around while she watched me in the mirror, laughing her chubby cheeks off!
It’s not all laughs though. Hazel still hasn’t caught on to eating from a bottle – she’s eating only a few ounces a day while Yenari is at work and those ounces are painful painful attempts filled with crying and frustration. She definitely knows how to eat from the bottle – she’s done it for short periods of time successfully – it just seems that she doesn’t want to do it! So, for now I’m keeping up on trying to feed her, but I’m not trying to push it much – if she fights it I give it a break and try twenty minutes later. As long as I don’t fight with her on eating she seems perfectly happy and well behaved. When Yenari finally gets home Hazel goes into eating overdrive and catches up on 10 hours of eating. Apparently lots of breastfed babies take a few weeks to adjusting to eating from a bottle in daycare, so hopefully we’ll have a better story to tell in a few weeks.
One area she has been very cooperative in is sleep – she’s been able to get to sleep around 9 or 9:30 each night, letting me wind down after a long day of work and then baby herding. I’ve even led a number of calls for work while she’s been sleeping – though I have warned my colleagues that I may have to abruptly end the calls to soothe the crying babe.
So…things haven’t been perfect by any means, but at the same time they haven’t been a complete disaster. Hazel and I have been able to spend a lot of time together and as a result I’m getting to know her and to understand her better. Now if we can just take care of this ‘not eating anything’ issue, all we’ll have left is the fun and games!
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