Eating

For a little while today, we saw some light at the end of our tunnel. Our little baby Max, who has been stubborn and impatient when it comes to feeding, is starting to get the hang of the things. The change is huge. It feels like taking a boulder off your chest where you've been carrying it for the last six days.

When a baby doesn't want to feed and it's 4am, and he's bright red, hot and angry and wriggling like a cat, what do you do?

You keep trying. And Max has his own rules. For instance: sleep is completely overrated.

So the days become a list of feeding times, by which we start to measure our success. Feeding every 3-hours is the goal. Any less is failure. The writing on the list starts to look a little ragged at 11pm, worse at 1am, almost unreadable by 3am, and by 5am the scrawl on the paper is unfamiliar symbols. The missed feeds. The walking up and down the hallway, bouncing. The bouncing. Bouncing. I'm bouncing as I type.

And then a new day begins.

As our midwife says, Max suddenly has to learn to breathe, swallow and suck all at the same time. That doesn't sound so easy. And then once he's got the hang of it, he's full of wind and doesn't know what to do. It must be very traumatic to have to learn all this by yourself after 10-months of laziness in a nice, warm, cozy spot.

And as I've said to Emeline on an hourly basis since Max arrived in our lives: millions of years of evolution and human development, and this is what we get? I can understand if a baby doesn't get the hang of long division, or punctuation ... but eating?

Let's try harder, folks. As a species. Can we do that?