Sanity, anyone?
The Leaf Baby has found his voice. And, boy is he using it. Rather than making sweet little grunts and squeaks, now when he wakes up he yells something in baby speak that sounds to me like "FEED ME NOW, MILK WOMAN!" I try to tell him gently to say please, but sometimes even after I remind him a few times, he still forgets.
We're doing pretty well, even though we have THRUSH. Thrush just like that, all in capitals. Leaf's is pretty much taken care of now, thanks to the wonders of Grapefruit Seed Extract (ten to fifteen drops in an ounce of water swabbed on a baby's tongue works way better than Nystatin sugar junk) and my left milk-maker is fine, but when Leaf nurses on my right milk-maker, it feels like he's sucking out sand, rather than milk. It really is too painful to even write about any longer, so that's all I'm going to say about our THRUSH. Except that I've dealt with it with two other babies, and "This too shall pass."
He's very sweet and smells like milk. He looks like a combination of his brother and sister and someone else entirely different, whom I guess would be him, and sometimes I slip and call him by his brother's name. Today Chinua said, "Kid A! What did your mama say about what you're not supposed to do when she's nursing Kid A?" No wonder the boy can be confused, sometimes.
The answer, of course, although I'm nursing Leaf, not Kid A, is that the two other little people are not supposed to touch the baby while he's nursing. This is purely for sanity's sake, although there's little enough of that around here. Not touching him includes not wrinkling up his forehead or kissing his cheeks or sticking their fingers in his nostrils, and it especially includes not leaning on either of my milk-makers with their pointy little elbows in order to bend down and smother the baby with attention while I yelp in pain.
The phrase most often spoken around here now? "The baby is not a TOY." Which is why you two can't rock his car seat back and forth really fast or touch his eyes or put blankets on him or mess with him at all. They really are good at holding him, though. Except for YaYa's tendency to push him away when she's had enough, (one good reason never to completely let go of the baby when you are letting a toddler hold him) or Kid A's sudden freakish impulse to try to turn him upside down (another good reason) they do well. They really really love him. Which makes all the hyper vigilance I have to have when they are around him worth it.