Carolyn

I’ve made up new words to that song, because I really don’t like the whole mockingbird/diamond ring version:

Hush, little baby, don’t you cry, Mama’s gonna sing you a lullaby.
And if that lullaby is flat, Daddy’s gonna buy you a silly hat;
And if that silly hat turns red, Mama’s gonna knit you a scarf instead;
And if that scarf gets lost one day, Daddy’s gonna take you to the park to play.
So hush, little baby, don’t you cry, Mama’s gonna sing you a lullaby.
And if that lullaby’s in tune, Daddy’s gonna make you a macaroon;
And if that macaroon’s too sweet, Mama’s gonna felt you some Fuzzy Feet;
And if those Fuzzy Feet get chewed, Daddy’s gonna teach you a game called Snood.
So hush, little baby, don’t you cry, Mama’s gonna sing you a lullaby.

I haven’t quite figured out a verse for if the lullaby is sharp yet. Maybe something about a harp?

Now, if only the song worked. If I try to sing Carrie to sleep, she just watches and listens intently. Every night, our half-hour bedtime routine stretches at least another hour of trying to convince her to actually go to sleep. I don’t really get it – earlier this week she was falling asleep within minutes of laying down in her crib, but now every nap and bedtime involves copious amounts of tears. Oh, and Carrie cries too. I guess maybe we should remove the thumbtacks from her mattress?

I can’t even imagine trying the cry-it-out method of getting her to sleep – the tears are hard enough to handle when I’m right there comforting her. I’m really hoping this is just a phase. I think I read somewhere that when babies are learning new skills they tend to have problems sleeping, and so far this week she’s figured out a lot of new things – including how to grab things off a restaurant table faster than we can move them out of her reach! Now if I could just figure out how to function when I have to wake up every 45 minutes, life would be good.

This is a week of new achievements for Carolyn. She started sucking her thumb and rolling over, and now she’s figured out how to get her toes in her mouth. This morning, she was laying in the middle of my bed sticking her feet in her mouth – and every time she did it, she’d look at me as if to say “Look, Mom, aren’t I cute?”

Carolyn is learning at least one new trick every day. Literally in the past 24 hours my binky-addict has decided that her thumb is way better. To be perfectly honest, I really don’t mind if she starts sucking her thumb (I keep trying to type that as “thucking her sumb”) instead of using a pacifier, because that means she won’t cry for us to put her pacifier back in during the night. Granted, it’s harder to take away a thumb, but I kind of figure either way – binky or thumb – she won’t be needing it in college. (Well, she’ll need her thumb, but not to help her fall asleep I hope!)

She apparently comes by it honestly: both Denis and my mother were thumb-suckers. Maybe it’s genetic? So far she doesn’t seem to be favoring one thumb over the other. Does that mean she’s thumbidextrous? (Sorry. It’s really not that late, but I haven’t gotten much sleep the past few nights. I’m going to just close up these parentheses, hit “publish”, and go to bed. ‘k?)

Carrie’s earned a new nickname. She’s our beloved little Nazgul. Seriously, she’s been testing the upper limits of her vocal range (and volume) for the past two days. I think my hearing is starting to suffer. Is this a normal developmental thing? Because if she weren’t doing it with a smile on her face I’d really think that she was in great agony over something. But since it’s interlaced with giggles and smiles and normal babble, I think she’s just playing with her voice. Right?

And then last night, the first time ever that Denis and I sat down to watch a movie after Carrie went to bed, she all of a sudden decided that her mattress was filled with rocks. Or something. I don’t know, all I know is every ten minutes she would wake up very, very angry. Needless to say, we didn’t watch our movie. At least it’s wintertime and the windows are shut – if they were open, I would have fully expected the police to show up last night, between the shrieking and the wailing and the gnashing of…um…gums. Tonight seems to be going better. We’ve watched the rest of our movie and she’s still asleep. Now I need to go to sleep!

One year ago today, I found out I was pregnant. Actually, I had taken a test the night before, and saw a faint line, but then I looked at the expiration date on the box and realized that it had expired more than a year before, so I didn’t think I should believe the results. Being the total geek that I am, when I went to buy new tests and saw these digital ones, I had to get them. This was the easy test – after I took this one I had to have blood drawn every 48 hours for the next week and a half to check my hormone levels.

Not a lot of people know this, but it took us three years and infertility treatments to get pregnant. In fact, this was the last “easy” cycle – instead of just taking drugs, I was going to have to start giving myself injections if this one didn’t work. We fell into the “unexplained” infertility category. Nothing particularly wrong with either of us, but things just weren’t working anyway.

It was a really hard couple of years. Every time I heard someone else’s wonderful news, I was happy for them, but I cried for what I was starting to believe I’d never have. I can’t believe I can say this after all those tears, but I’m actually glad things worked out the way they did. If everything had gone as planned and I had gotten pregnant in those first few months, we would not have ended up with this particular child, and she is the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to us. She is worth everything we went through to get her. She is our miracle.

We do want to have another child someday, if we can, but if it’s not meant to be that’s ok too. I made sure to cherish every minute of being pregnant – even the uncomfortable ones – just in case it never happens for me again.