When we took her home, Sprout slept in our bed, between us in the hollow center of a cervical pillow the right size to be her bed. When she was hungry in the night, I could roll over and nurse her without even having to fully wake either of us. When she needed changed, my husband took care of her. I healed slowly from the tear and the internal rearrangement, requiring pain medication for the first 6 weeks after Sprout's birth. At least the doctor who had called me the "Iron Woman" was very understanding, and quite comfortable giving them to me, assured that I would not ask for pain medicine unless there was a real, serious, and severe need. I have always been that way, but it was nice to have a doctor who had been able to confirm it for herself against one of the most universal gauges of pain, childbirth.
We practised "Family Bed" for the first several months of Sprout's life. At first, she couldn't move around much, but she was still amazingly "Mommy-tropic"; she would go to sleep centered in her pillow, and we would consistently wake up to find her head completely off the pillow, having moved a foot and half to rest against the "Mommytit". We were convinced that she must be using her downy baby hair as cilia, to crawl her head toward me in her sleep, even at one month old.
At four months or so, she was moved into a bassinet next to our bed, when she was kicking in her sleep too much to share a bed. When she got too big for this arrangement to be safe, she moved to a crib in our room, where she could see and hear Mommy and Daddy all the time.
But, seeing and hearing Mommy and Daddy has its drawbacks, as well. Sprout eventually developed some trouble falling asleep or staying asleep with people in the room - she finds people too interesting to abandon them for sleep. We let her set our schedule for some months, until we found that we were going to bed at 4:00 am, and she had dark circles under her eyes, and was getting miserable. Then we tried everything, until we reached the point where we realized we had to set a bedtime, do our best to help her be drowsy at that time, and put her to bed. And, as her pediatrician told us, the first night she will scream for about a million years, also known as an hour and a half. The next night, she will scream for 15 minutes, then remember that she did this before and as soon as she went to sleep, it was morning and Mommy was there. The next night, and each night thereafter, she'll fall asleep in less than 10 minutes.
For this, she was switched into her own room, as she was old enough and secure enough. Sprout has been very secure and comfortable with this arrangement, as she knows that we will always come if anything is really wrong, and that she will have someone there right away if she calls in the night - unless she abuses that, in which case we tend to give her 15 minutes or so to settle each time before we come and make sure she's ok. Needing us is okay, but yanking Mommy and Daddy's chain for fun and entertainment is not acceptable. We rarely have a problem with this; usually, if it happens, its an indicator that she's changed developmental stages again, and has reached another self-assertive stage.
I nursed Sprout exclusively for the first 6 and a half, nearly 7 months of her life. She had developed an increasing interest in what I was eating, but we were determined to nurse her exclusively for the first year of her life. I have a history of allergies, as does her father, though not nearly as badly, and so we wanted to take every precaution to reduce her risk of allergies. In many cases, the intestinal tract of the developing baby is not finished when the baby is born, and this can cause colic even in a breast-fed baby. Sprout did not seem to have much problem with this, as she was exclusively breast-fed, and I had been taking supplemental L-Glutamine, which builds the intestinal lining, during my pregnancy and while nursing. However, this incomplete digestive tract can cause the infant to develop a sensitivity to any food that is introduced before the intestinal lining is complete enough to process it properly.
Babies don't tend to read books or calendars well, and our Sprout was no exception. At nearly seven months, she craned back to stare at my empty plate instead of nursing, and after watching this increase over the previous weeks to the point where she would not nurse at all, I broke down and accepted that Mother Nature must know what she was doing, and we bought some organic baby food. We will not feed Sprout anything other than organic food; that decision had been firm even before first my system, and then my husband's, became intolerant to anything other than organically-grown food. Since my own sensitivity developed before the point where it became necessary to introduce solid food into Sprout's diet, our original decision was confirmed. Sprout would never taste non-organic food, until she was old enough to give informed consent to such contamination of her bodily organs and processes.
Sprout took to the organic baby food like a duck to water. There was a rough moment after about the third day, when we realized that we should have introduced supplemental liquids when we introduced solid food - we had corked the baby. She had constipation, and had to have a little gentle encouragment to pass a stool firmer than any her poor little baby butt had known previously. After that, we had smooth sailing for a month or so, until her love of winter squash and carrots led to another inevitable result - we had turned the baby orange. The excess beta-carotene was no danger, and we quickly learned that we were far from the first parents to do this.
I nursed Sprout until she was over a year old; I would have nursed her longer, until she weaned herself, but she was eating more than I was, at the time, in solid food, and I had lost weight to the point where I was 103 pounds. She was nursing only a few minutes in the evening, for comfort, and she did not complain when she was weaned. I still held her for comfort, and I do to this day. My health had collapsed when she was about 5 months old, possibly due to the extra strain on my liver during pregnancy, when it had to process the toxins of two bodies rather than one. For someone already chemically injured, that strain was a bit much. I intend not to go through pregnancy again until I have substantially detoxified my body and my environment, so that my body can handle the added strain without damage to the system. Pregnancy was the healthiest time of my life, and I'd like to keep that feeling, and build on it.
My husband was very hands on, handling her diaper changes from the first. It was even he who dealt with her first meconium bowel movements - the loose stools of a breast-fed baby are messy, but relatively inoffensive to the nose, but meconium, the tarry green-black substance produced in the bowels during gestation, is sticky, copious, and reeks. The first one to three stools or so are usually meconium being passed, and have engendered many legends among parents.
Likewise legendary among parents are the amazing trajectories achieved by their offspring in their waste removal process, and our Sprout was no exception. She had not been home more than a month or so before we learned to always put her on her changing table AIMED TOWARD THE DOOR. My husband had failed to do so, and she had achieved a distance of four feet with her not-so-solid wastes, in the middle of a diaper change, targeting her bed perfectly, and requiring that we wash all of the bedding, and the walls. Apparently, the internal processes of the infant produce extraordinary pressure... <smile>
...As we found out again a week or so later, when she managed to redecorate our comforter in the night, with the meal she had just finished nursing out of me. She had a problem right at first getting used to having food in her stomach in large quantities, and until she got the hang of it, food had a tendency to bounce occasionally. It was bad enough waking up in pools of breastmilk, since I was producing enough to feed a small country, but to have her just-finished meal land right back whence it came was a joy of parenthood I had not quite anticipated. I discovered it was simpler to sleep nude and plan to change the sheets every day, since we were usually in bed when this happened. If this happens to you, well, don't say no one warned you. <smile>
Sprout was read to from the first day she came home. She loves books of all kinds, from Kipling to Pooh to Mother Goose; at the age of two months, she would crane over backwards toward the bookcase, refusing to nurse until she was read to. Not surprisingly, her first word was "book" - or at least, "mbuh", which is the most she could articulate at 6 months. She said book before she said "Mommy", or "Daddy". She has recently told us "I love books." This time it was clearly articulated, every letter present. She can identify her alphabet, most of it reliably, and the digits from 1 to 11 as well. She is not yet two years old at this writing, and won't be for another month or so.
Why has she been like this from day one? I don't know for certain, but I can tell you this; the children I have seen who are alert and oriented, as she is, tend to be the children I see at the health food store, and often at pagan gatherings. These are children who have been born naturally and drug-free, breastfed for the first 6 months minimum, preferably at least the first year, have been fed organically-grown food when they are introduced to solids, and have been loved and treated like important, valuable people from the day they were born.
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