I had a hour of heaven in front of the television last night.
Normally, I don’t think of anything having to do with watching television as particularly heavenly, unless it involves putting my pregnant feet up for an hour of total rest before picking up my son from preschool. Those days, however, are no longer with me, and watching t.v. with an infant in my lap is neither satisfying nor a particularly good idea, as it seems to disturb her sleep, both while the t.v. is on and for pretty much the whole night afterward.
But I do like snuggling up with Jake to watch an hour of Sesame Street, as long as I enthusiastically yell out the numbers flashing on the screen in an effort to make it a learning experience. Plus, it’s not really an hour, since many of the segments provoke a bored/demanding, “Watch Sesame Street, please” from Jake, which translates roughly as, “TiVo has destroyed my attention span.”
And so, last night, when Mike resorted to Sesame Street as a way to free himself to cook dinner, I decided I needed to be near my son as much as I needed to feed my newborn daughter, and I committed what the lacatation consultant I saw when Jake was an infant deemed one of the Seven Deadly Sins — breastfeeding with the t.v. on.
Not that the television stayed off for the first four months of Jake’s life, during which I was using an evil supplemental nursing system that involved a collection of tubes, bottles, formula, and the patience of a saint. There’s only so long you can spend an hour and a half per feeding staring silently at the wall because your baby isn’t any more interested in gazing up into your eyes as he nurses than you are in gauging, ad nauseum, whether he is swallowing properly. But I don’t think I broke down for at least six weeks or so. And I know I wasn’t watching anything quite as stimulating as Sesame Street.
Lily certainly didn’t complain or seem to register any difference in her dining experience. And when she finished and remained wide-eyed I figured that was just a nice little bit of alert time that I’m trying to shift to my waking hours anyhow. So I propped the moses basket toward what seemed to be a particularly fascinating lamp and invited Jake to sit in my lap.
Oh, how my world became complete when he accepted my invitation.
Jake, you see, has adjusted rather stunningly well to the new baby. Sure, there are tantrums and Ignore Mommy moments. But the clinging to Mommy and screaming as she tries to feed the baby that I had been dreading has never materialized. Instead, Jake has neatly shifted his expectations of primary caregiving to his father.
And, in the process, broken my heart even more neatly than if he were making my life impossible by being less cooperative.
How lovely, then, to feel the solid toddler-ness of him in my lap, to be able to reach around once again to kiss his firm toddler cheeks, to wrap my arms all the way around his chest and squeeze as he puts his thumb in his mouth and moves in closer.
Lily tolerated all of this not-holding her for the rest of Sesame Street and a bit of Mama Mirabelle’s Home Movies, but I sensed something was shifting by the time Mike had dinner on the table. Indeed, although I placed her in the sling and invited her to sit with us, the tectonic plates were already in motion, and the earthquake was about to commence.
Yep. Mommy didn’t get to eat much of her dinner. I forgot about those days. And now they’re back.
Continue reading ‘Is a Toddler in the Lap Worth an Infant Who Can’t Sleep?’
