when five minutes is longer than seven weeks
It is impossible for me to calculate how Katya can be seven weeks old. I find myself telling back over the days listing events to convince myself that so much time has actually past. The first two weeks were the hospital. This time seems solid enough - but somehow I can’t grasp that she was two weeks old when we brought her home. Then Peter stayed home for two weeks. This time seems more fleeting. I remember what we did only in snatches, randomly. The last three weeks, home by myself, are completely collapsible. I have absolutely no sense of the time. It could have been one day. It could, for that matter, have been five or ten weeks.
The root of the matter is that I seem to be having a problem with time. The five minutes it takes to sterilize baby bottles in the microwave is the longest part of the day - in fact, it often seems longer than the day itself. In the two hours between the end of one feeding and the beginning of another I cannot seem to do anything. In the five minutes of bottle sterilization I can move the moon and the stars. I can clean the whole kitchen, break down ten boxes, feed the cats, arrange a doctor’s appointment and clean the diaper bin.
The only way I seem to be able to mark what has passed since Katya arrived in the world is by her stages of growth as I have named them to myself… and these make the experience come alive more than any mention of time or age can do:
Nik Yu (NICU): Three miles a day back and forth to the hospital. Each trip feeling excited, the thought of seeing Katya pulling me, and yet kind of sickly nervous, who would her new nurse be? would she take to the breast? would she eat enough? This is the period that Katya was alive but she wasn’t mine yet… I don’t like to think about this time too much. It was dominated by policies and nurses. It was impossible to feel confident about being a mother - in fact, it was hard to feel like a mother at all.
Little red milk monster: This is the time when Katya had just come home from the hosptial - 4 lbs, no muscles, no fat. When she strained to fart or poop, her whole body would turn red. She ate by squirming, making faces, squirting milk and and turning everything near her into a sweaty, sticky and milky blob.
Noodle-ee: She past the milk monster stage gradually. Even today she evidences some of those characteristics. Slowly, only her face would turn red while straining. She squirmed less and did not invariably spread milk everywhere. During this perido, still without lots of muscles and fat, periodically throughout the feeding she would let all control of her body parts go - becoming something like a wet noodle. For the new parent, it was quite a surprising thing - like holding a wooden board that suddenly turns into a floppy piece of sea weed.
We have just passed the Noodle-ee stage. I don’t know what the new stage is called yet. It includes crying and farting and crying when farting. It includes the advent of will power. It includes muscles and fat on arms and legs. She is much more solid and controlled in her actions. She makes all kinds of new facial expressions - although they don’t seem to be in response to anything in particular. We shall see…
She now weighs seven pounds - getting close to double her birth weight. A week from this coming Friday is her original due date - which means that practically she will be almost 2 months old and adjustedly (all books talk about “adjusted age”) she will be 0.