This week, I- I’m grateful for a lot. It’s been a really rough road since my daughter was born. On Valentine’s Day of all days, cutest day of the year, but it- it’s been rough.
I would have never thought that it could be so hard for some babies to learn how to eat. And I never thought that the body wouldn’t just produce, like, these copious amounts of milk. And it’s a supply and demand and all these hormones at play.
It’s such a complex system. It is like — thinking about my baby and how much trouble she’s had, like, latching on for breastfeeding and eating, it got me starting to think about how, like, even 50, 100 years ago, maybe more, I’m not sure if there were bottles for babies to drink out of and what they did is… The amount of professional intervention that’s been required to be able to get my baby to be able to breastfeed — and of course, now, we’ve got bottles and formulas, but thinking about how much was required now to even get us to be able to do it for most of the day, not even all the day. And what if this happened 100 years ago? Would that baby just starve? Like, what would happen?
So, I’m really grateful for all of these experts, all of the knowledge that we have now. Grateful that I’m not a medieval peasant seeing my baby kinda waste away. I’m — climate change, whatever, all that stuff going on now, but I’m seeing my baby still be able to grow. Become nourished. I’m getting help from experts. We’re growing together. We’re learning together.
It was like a really big development today, too. One of our cats, um, avoids her completely. The other cat, he’s okay being around her. He doesn’t dislike her. But he just kinda, kinda observes at a distance, not really a big deal. I was, and I actually am still, laying on the couch with baby on my lap. Like, she’s just laying down, sleeping on me. And the cat, he came up and he just jumped up right next to me and curled up right next to me and started snoozing. And he’s still curled up next to me almost two hours later. I can’t believe this.
This was like my dream every day while being pregnant. I was like, “Oh my God, like, the baby is gonna be best friends with Artemis the cat and they’re gonna cuddle and they’re gonna be so cute together.” Well, that hasn’t happened. But the fact that he came up and curled up next to me, which he never does. He will come up on the couch and lay down not far from me, but he never comes up and lays right next to me unless I like force, force him to do it. Like, you know, force cuddle him, pick him up and squish him.
But he came up of his own volition. Laid next to me. He’s so cozy. The way I’m laying down I can look out the window, too, and I can see the sky. Even though I have privacy film up on most of our windows, so I can’t see everything, I can at least see the color of the sky from the tree branches. It’s really nice.