Groundhog days

I have a confession to make.  I have no idea what to do with my two month old baby.

I mean, I know how to take care of him, obviously.  Feed, burp, bathe, change, swaddle...I've got the hang of those.  But over the past couple of weeks, my teeny tiny baby who could barely rouse himself from sleep long enough to suck on a boob has turned into a slightly less tiny baby who is now awake and alert a lot of the time.  It's awesome, of course, and there's absolutely nothing to compare to the gummy grins that I'm now getting on a regular basis.  Along with that, however, comes the need to actually do something to entertain the little guy in order to elicit said grins, or to keep him otherwise occupied and stimulated.  It's kind of making me wish that my prenatal class had included a section on children's songs and nursery rhymes, as it has become apparent that my knowledge in this area is sadly limited.  Once we've sung Old MacDonald, The Itsy Bitsy Spider and The Wheels on the Bus, I'm fresh out of ideas.  Lucky for me there's this YouTube channel that has turned 80s hair metal (among other things) into lullabies.  Now those I know!

Nothing like the dulcet tones of Axl Rose to put a baby to sleep.

Otherwise, right now my days are kind of blending into each other.  The most mentally challenging aspect is trying to figure out what order we should do things in.  Do we want to do tummy time, then walk the dog, then sing songs?  Or sing songs, tummy time, and dog walk?  Oh the variety!

I'm looking forward to taking advantage of some mom-and-baby activities in my area soon, but right now Q is still a little young for a lot of them.  I'm also sort of waiting for next week when Q has his two-month checkup and will get his first set of vaccinations before I venture out anywhere that has a ton of germy toddlers.  One cool thing I discovered is that there's a kiddie play centre within walking distance that has drop-in play during the weekdays.  Did I mention it's free for kids under 1 year?  The infant area is pretty small, since the place is mostly geared towards kids aged 2 to 6, but I'm hoping that I might meet some other moms there who are hanging out with their infants while they let their toddlers run amok.   I need to find me some local mom friends!

In the meantime, it's kind of ridiculous the sorts of things that I've been looking forward to doing since they get us out of the house.  Case in point: no one should ever, ever be as excited as I was to go to the passport office last week.  I wanted to get Q's done sooner rather than later so I wouldn't be rushing in advance of our semi-annual beach trip to Maine in July, so now he'll have a 6-week old baby photo on his passport for the next five years.  Luckily he napped like a tiny drunk so I didn't have to whip out a boob in front of everyone, although part of me was sort of looking forward to horrifying/offending a whole bunch of strangers.  Oh well.  Next time.

In other news, I got the go-ahead from my OB to resume normal activity at my post-natal checkup (which happened at 4 weeks instead of 6 for some reason) and have been using Q's nap time to squeeze in some workouts.  At first progress seemed agonizingly slow, and I was getting really frustrated and down on myself about it.  The first night that I put on my workout clothes to go to dance class I ended up in tears because of all the bulges that weren't there before, as well as the fact that the "baggy" shirt I tried to wear as camouflage turned out not to be baggy at all.  I was actually writing a whole big blog post about it in my head, but in the end I never put pen to paper (fingers to keyboard?) because I was afraid it would just come off as too whiny and ungrateful given the fact that all that really matters is that Q is finally here.  Now that a month has passed I've gradually started to see some of the remaining baby weight come off, and was pretty stoked to fit into a pair of pre-pregnancy jeans earlier this week.  Granted, they were my stretchiest pair, but still.  Which made it all the more tragic when I discovered this only a day or two later:

Inner thigh hole!!  AGAIN!!

The universe giveth and the universe taketh away, I guess.