Amy’s first Christmas and update

On Christmas Eve, our church had an evening candlelight service at 6:30. This is the first time since our honeymoon that we’ve been home for Christmas instead of traveling to one set of parents or the other. It was nice to be able to go to our own church service. It was a lovely service, with most of the light coming from big candelabras like at a wedding; we sang many carols, listened to various children’s solos and an adult duet, heard Scriptures, poetry, and a meditation.

This year I especially appreciated this verse of “Joy to the World”:

No more let sin and sorrow grow, nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make his blessings flow far as the curse is found.

Amy slept a good part of the time, some in her car seat, some in Mark’s arms. When she got fussy towards the end of the service, I fed her.

It was nice — but also overwhelming — to see everyone, and to be asked how I was doing. That’s a question I have such a hard time answering. First of all because I’m such a detail-oriented person that I find it difficult to generalize about a whole day or longer instead of listing all the various moments and evaluating each on some scale. Secondly because my journey through this post partum stuff is not following a nice linear path.

The depression and anxiety that hit me later that night continued the next morning. It wasn’t until the afternoon that I felt calm enough to be with everyone.

We did have a nice time exchanging gifts. Amy of course had no idea what was going on, but I’m sure she’ll enjoy the dangly toys she received.

I slept well last night (woo-hoo!), and now here we are, just the three of us, alone together for the first time since those hours on Tuesday 11/21 after coming home from the hospital (the first time) and before calling my parents in desperation at 1:30 the next morning. We had some oatmeal for breakfast while Amy was still sleeping, and now she’s been changed into daytime clothes, had her face washed, and is having a bottle.

So many cute things lately…

• This morning just after she woke up in her swing, I started her musical light up stuffed sunshine, and her eyes got big and wide as she stared at it.
• She’s getting better at connecting her hands with her mouth, and sucks her fingers with noisy gusto whenever she can keep hold of them.
• There’s a lot more variety in her “conversation,” not just the awful yelling, although she still does that when she’s hungry or very tired.
• At the Christmas Eve service, she looked like she fit perfectly on Mark’s shoulder, peacefully asleep, one arm reaching around his as far as it could, the little hand grasping a bit of his shirt.
• She’s getting stronger, pushing and kicking with her feet more, and sometimes almost straining to sit up.

She’s still also only five weeks old, and still unpredictable, and still very dependent, and it can be exasperating and taxing, like last night when she guzzled her bottle so strong and fast that you could hear the air going into her belly — she’d scream if you tried to burp her, and would even let go of the bottle herself to scream, but wouldn’t slow down and eat more smoothly. And it’s not like we can explain to her that she’s making herself miserable. (Sometimes even when we know we’re making ourselves miserable, we can’t seem to help it…)