Big Girls Do Cry

Brenna has been home for over two weeks now & we are all setteling into a routine-well as much as you can be in a routine after a week because that’s how long we waited until we headed down to Grandpa & Grandma’s house. Let me tell you it is a whole lot easier adjusting to parenthood when you do it on the beach (and you do it with veteran supervision…).
I know I am going to jinx myself & deeply regret saying this, but so far Brenna has been such an easy baby (ok, not counting the 2 months in the NICU….). We have kept to the same 3 hour feeding schedule that she was on in the hospital, each of us alternating both feeding & diapering. Trust me, Brenna has gotten quite an earful on why she should poop on the other parents timetable (can you bribe a baby…?)….We figure that if we keep the baby happy she will have no reason to cry-so far its working, well sort of. Brenna doesn’t really know how to cry, she does when she is in pain (she WAILED after her first two shots-I cringe just thinking about it!), but as a means of communication she hasn’t quite figured it out, but she is getting awfully close. As terrible as this may sound, hearing her cry at the Doctors office was actually oddly reassuring & comforting to us as parents because it is only the second time we had ever heard her cry. Some people have said that babies don’t cry in the NICU (preemies don’t cry) & I had thought this was true, but it should be that not all babies cry in the NICU, but others babies (preemies) do & they cry all the time (seriously, sometimes I thought maybe they tortured babies in other bays….). It’s just that Brenna was more of the strong silent type, she started out fussy, but she settled into the NICU routine rather quickly & has been a rather easy going baby ever since. However, Brenna is slowly figuring out this whole crying thing-she is about halfway there-it really is an interesting process to watch her figure things out. Bean will scrunch up her face, look like she is going to tear up & make an intial ‘waaa’ sound (not always in that order) & that’s it, no continuation, no big ‘finale’ & really the only time she has done this is when one of us slept through the midnight or 3 am feeding alarm. As a Mom I have mixed emotions about the whole crying thing. On one hand I do not want one of ‘those’ (yup, the horror story crying ALL the time) babies, but on the other hand there are times I know she is agitated or wants something, but I don’t know what it is & crying would be her way of communicating it to me. One of my NICU buddy Mom’s has a daughter about 2 months older than Bean so she has been a great source of information of what’s to come for me, but she had said that her daughter has got the different cries for different things. Part of me has to say, how cool is that?! As we get closer to her ‘due date’ (she will be 39 weeks on Thursday!) I am sure that there will be quite a few things that suddenly ‘click’ for little Bean. All I know is that when I hear the slightest ‘waa’ sound I am at her side in an instant, all I hope is that when she does get it all figured out, Mommy can figure out how to make everything better-just because she can cry doesn’t mean she has to………