Daddy's Girl
Originally published at Welcome To The Dollhouse. You can comment here or there.
was beginning to think that Zara hated me. Why? Because she’s been a total fussbudget these past few days, squawking and crying without any reason I could discern. I decided that she was developing colic to go along with her neonatal acne.
She fussed when I held her. She fussed when I gave her tummy time. She fussed when she was in her cradle swing. She just fussed, period.
I found myself looking her in the eyes as she began to wind up for another of her cry-fests to ask “what do you need? Mommy wants to make it better but she doesn’t understand.” And no, I still haven’t watched the Dunstan Baby Language - Learn the meaning of your baby’s cries
DVD given to me by my dear friend, Lisa, so I am still at a loss in baby communication.
Now AdoringHusband, on the other hand, never seemed to be home during any of these episodes. He told our social worker during our first home visit Tuesday that she was an easy baby. I looked at him like he had 9 heads. I’m not saying that she’s a hard baby, but her cry-fests were wearing me out.
So it was with a little big of smugness that I left Miss Z in AdoringHusband’s care yesterday as I had to go to work and pack my office for a move to another floor. I just knew that he would see how she gets during the morning and afternoon with her crying. He’ll see that I’m not making this up, I thought.
Around 5 PM yesterday I get a call from AH checking to see when I would be done. “How’s Zara?” I asked, expecting to hear him sigh heavily before answering.
“Oh she’s been a real sweetie. She’s eaten 3 times, had her diaper changed twice and is being cute in her swing right now.”
I then knew that my daughter hated me. She’s Daddy’s girl.
Yeah, well the logical part of my brain said, perhaps it has nothing to do with you. Perhaps she’s just doing well on the Good Start without any Karo syrup to cause her any GI distress. Maybe we just have her feeding regimen down.
And then the crazy part of the brain said, “no, she just hates you.” And this sentiment was confirmed when I returned home and tried to put her back to the breast. After a few minutes the child began acting as if I were trying to put her foot in a meat grinder! With bottles all day, she didn’t want Mommy’s breast since she had to work harder. She cried, I cried and AdoringHusband realized that I was losing confidence fast.
“You’re doing the right thing,” he soothed. “It’s hard and you both are upset, but she’ll get back on track. Breastmilk will help her with her antibodies especially as she goes to day care. You’re doing the right thing,” he repeated.
And he was right. With our overnight feedings, we had no more foot-in-the-meat-grinder drama. She nursed as I dozed on our new glider that finally arrived this week. Maybe she didn’t hate Mommy after all.
But this morning, Daddy’s luck ran out. He was sitting downstairs giving her her morning bottle when Miss Z began straining like she had to poop. He rubbed her stomach as he had done in the past. She relaxed, then strained again letting out a huge wet fart. “Good, it came out,” he congratulated her. Then he felt the wetness on his pajama pants. Girlfriend had pooped through the front and back of her diaper, onesie and now the poop had seeped through to his pajama pants.
I, upstairs, half-awake, heard shrieking. “Punkin’ Pie (his nickname for her) pooped onto my pajamas! How can someone so small have so much poop inside her?!” He bolted upstairs to change her stripping off PJs as he went. “But is her tongue alright?” I asked sleepily.
“What?!”
“Is her tongue alright?” I repeated.
“Why wouldn’t her tongue be alright?”
“Because I accidentally severed it while clipping her fingernails.”
The look AdoringHusband gave me was one where he was trying to sort out whether I was dreaming or whether I had lost my everloving mind.
“You were dreaming,” he concluded. “She’s fine but we’re both covered in shit!”
Immediately I was relieved that my crazy-ass dream wasn’t in any way true, and I bust out laughing. “Daddy’s girl took a dump on Daddy!” It doesn’t get much better than that.
After he left for work, Peapod and I were both clean and poop-free. Unfortunately she still had her morning boogerific nose. (For some reason she only sneezes and gets boogers in the morning…) I then decided to try out one of the most whacked-out, though ingenious inventions ever made: the musical battery-operated mucous sucker, otherwise known as the BebeSounds NasalClear nasal aspirator. Who came up with this thing? It sucks the mucous out of the baby’s nose with musical accompaniment. Too much! The good news is that it works and it doesn’t freak out the baby in the process. That was worth my $19.99.
The next issue we had to deal with was her hiccups. Girlfriend gets some terrible, body shaking hiccups after she eats. I never knew what to do about them until I started looking up colic remedies on the internet. There I learned about Gripe Water.
. How come none of my internet friends told me about this stuff? We are 5/5 in stopping her hiccups. She slurps it up like a champ. The hiccs are gone in 5 minutes. Even AdoringHusband is impressed.
The rest of the day has been pretty chilled. No drama, no feet-in-the-meat-grinder behavior. And even another normal poo for Mommy. I guess it was finding the right formula and not Daddy’s magical presence after all.
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