Six month letter

Dear Mateo,
Mommy and I are writing your letter together this month, which is very exciting!

(Mama) Sometime between today and tomorrow (April being a month with no 31st), you will turn six months old! You have been on this earth for half a year. Someday, this will seem like no time at all to you, but right now it's your whole life. For some reason, I find it easier to believe that you're six months old than I did when you turned one week old, or one month. I guess I'm getting used to you racking up the milestones!

You've had another big month. If I had to pick a unifying theme for this month, I would say that it was the month in which you began to really see things. You have started to recognize all sorts of things - me and mommy, our cats, toys, friends, etc. When one of us goes in to get you up from a nap, your little face sometimes lights up with a big, heart-melting smile. It's a great way to wake up! You also light up for mommy when she comes home from work. I think it's a great thank you for all the hard work she does all day for us.

You've become fascinated by Rio and Beso, our kitties. When you see them, you reach out and say "Gah!" and try to grab their fur. They're taking it fairly well, and haven't batted at you yet in frustration - a pattern we hope will continue. Also, you have yet to really grab a tail, but I'm sure that is just a matter of time.

Your auntie and uncle visited this month and you had a great time with them. Your auntie Edlyn carried you all around our neighborhood and showed off her baby-whispering touch. She lulled you off to sleep masterfully and had some fun awake times, too.


You also found your uncle Galen to be quite fun and played with him for a long time.



You two had an almost riotously good time!


You have also mastered sitting. Last month, you were a wobbly tripod waiting to go down. Today, you sat for 15 minutes on your own without falling. You played with blocks and chatted with me and kept your balance even when you got a little off-kilter. You are a champion sitter! You've also graduated to riding on our backs in the Ergo:


This month, you added a new animal to your repertoire - a goat! We went to our friends Joanie and Jane's house for Easter and you met their goat, Barney. You seemed to like him, as well as hanging out with J and J.


Also, you developed a mug obsession. Yes, you have a thing for mugs. You will knock blocks and other fun things out of the way in order to lunge for a mug. You particularly like big and brightly-colored ones.


(Mommy) Sleeping has continued to be a challenge for the month. You have started taking naps on your own, going to bed between 6 and 7 pm most nights and putting yourself to sleep for most nights. You actually seem way happier since this has started, and seem happier in general. (Mama) We are definitely making progress - a relief to all involved.

(Mommy) These last three days you have started eating cereal. You definitely are not sure you like the taste right now. The first time you were suspicious of the rice cereal, and the second time you were downright mad about the whole situation and rather vocally expressed those feelings. Today was your third feeding and you were once again suspicious of the cereal, but did eat a good ten bites or so! This month you will get to start eating things more interesting than cereal! I hope you enjoy these new foods more and more as you get used to them!



You have started creeping this month. We put you down on your tummy, and slowly, you will start to move in a circle. We don't really see you moving, but if you see a block or toy you want, you will reach for it and wiggle around till you can reach the toy. You don't really move forward but sometimes creep backward. Although you have started creeping, you still show no interest in rolling. You have rolled from your tummy to your back a few times, but you seem much more interested in playing on your tummy or back than rolling from one side to the other.

I think you are the most beautiful boy in the entire world. Right now you are sleeping on mama's shoulder and your cute chubby cheeks are resting on her neck and shoulder. You look so happy, relaxed and calm. I know I am so lucky to have you and mama in my life and love both of you to the moon and stars.


(Mama) Me too, to everything she said :)

Mateo, in addition to your six-month birthday, I wanted to write about getting to six months of breastfeeding! I may have said this before, but there were times I never thought we would get to six weeks, much less six months. Beyond the normal latching and soreness issues of starting out with breastfeeding, we had lots of adventures with thrush and plugged ducts and reflux. These caused Mama to say lots of words she can't write here and to place at least one 3 am phone call to her own mama in tears.

There were some days that the only way I could get through feedings was to tell myself that I could always quit anytime and that maybe I just would tomorrow...but I always managed to get through that feeding and then the next and then somehow I looked up one day and it had gotten easier. Three months was the magic turning point - the thrush finally went away and you and I had gotten to know each other better and we started to have more nice times with nursing than frustrating ones. You nursed off to sleep tonight. I love it when you do that. It's the best and sweetest thing.

We could never have done it without mommy, who was just amazing from the very first feeding onward. We three are a great team! Grammy and Bubby were also so encouraging and supportive and sympathetic. And, the lactation consultants and La Leche League and Claudia, the wonderful therapeutic ultrasound person at Good Sam who swooped in and helped solve the problem of the plugged ducts.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that I am so proud of us. We did it! And now that we're here, I think we should keep going. What do you think? From your reaction to the rice cereal, I'm thinking that you're pretty happy with your current main source of food :)

Mateo, these last six months have been full of new things for all of us. Just think, you've progressed from learning how to breathe (you mastered that very quickly, thank goodness!) and open your eyes to sitting up, jumping in your Johnny Jump-up and becoming a little person before our eyes. We can't wait to see what the next six months (and the next, and the next) will bring.

With love and so many kisses,
Mommy and Mama

First solid food!

Mateo had his very first solid food today - rice cereal! It didn't seem that "solid" to us, though. The package said to mix 1 tablespoon of the cereal with 4 or 5 tablespoons of breastmilk, which made it the consistency of heavy cream. As our friend Kristi recently said, that stuff is hard to keep on a spoon!

Anyway, Mateo did a great job. He sat in his high chair and gamely tried out this eating from a spoon thing. I think his final feeling about the rice cereal/breastmilk combo was...well...suspicion. He didn't hate it, didn't love it. He survived to try another day! Here are a couple of videos of his first few bites. They're long, as we documented the moment in its entirety, but we, of course, are captivated by them.





Also, we got to meet Wendy and Karen's beautiful baby, Kylie, this afternoon and she is adorable! Congratulations to the new family :)

Job offer for next year!

Yesterday I found out that I have been offered a job teaching fifth grade at a bilingual school! It is a half time (morning) position, which mean I'll have more time to be with Mateo! I am really looking forward to spending more time with him, teaching at a school that is way closer to home, teaching half time and an older grade. I've never taught fifth grade, but I student taught in fourth (which I've liked) and have taught 6th (which I also enjoyed). I imagine that fifth will be similar to those two grades.

Here is the other thing that sounds good about the job. I'll mostly be teaching math. There are two different groups of 20 students, and I'll teach the same math lesson to each group every day. I'm not sure what I'll be teaching for the other two hours, but I love math and am looking forward to teaching math! Obviously I teach math in kindergarten, but it's really not the same thing. In kindergarten it is really all about counting and shapes. It's fun for the kids (lots of hands on activities), but not very mentally challenging for me. To be sure, it is challenging in different ways. (i.e. - management!)

I'm really excited about the job and am so thrilled to have an offer this early in the year!

Fuel and airplanes and outness

I think Mateo must be having a growth spurt, because he has been eating like he is preparing for a sumo competition. In turn, this makes me very hungry. It's kind of fun! Today, I had breakfast at 7 am, lunch #1 at 11 am, lunch #2 around 2:30 pm and dinner #1 at 6:30 pm. Then Mateo had a gorge-fest around 8 pm, which led to me having some ice cream as a snack and finally caving and eating dinner #2 around 8:30. Now, around 9:00, I feel pleasantly full but certainly not stuffed. I also feel as if I have drunk enough water to drain the Willamette. I am beginning to understand why babies start on solids around six months: their caloric needs become difficult (and then impossible) to keep up with on breast milk alone!

In unrelated news, I have been pondering travel lately, for no particular reason. Before Mateo was born, I read The Kid (by Dan Savage). Okay, I think I've read it at least five times cover to cover. It is my favorite book about queer families and kids. In it (or maybe in his subsequent book, The Commitment?), Dan Savage talks about traveling with his partner and their son. Presenting as two men with a small child and all having different last names, they tend to get questioned by airport screeners and airline gate people. They bring their son's birth certificate everywhere. Other passengers repeatedly ask them (or their baby) "Where's Mommy?" This leads to interesting explanations of their family.

We traveled on an airplane several times early in Mateo's life. I expected that this same thing would happen to us, only with "Where's Daddy?" substituted. I thought all sorts of people would ask us about our family. I felt kind of anxious about it, actually. I pictured some nice people and some confrontations. I was a little bit afraid that we would run into a militant fundamentalist who would snatch Mateo and make a break for it. Sacha and I talked generally about what we might say if someone asked where Mateo's dad was. We thought we might explain that Mateo has two moms who love him very much, and that he also has an important relationship with his Apa.

Instead, we sailed through all our plane flights (and really, all our travel experiences thus far) without so much as a peep from anyone. No one, not even our seat mates, asked a single thing about our family. We realized that women alone with children in public are the norm, not the exception. Moreover, while asking a man where his child's mom is is a socially acceptable thing to do, the same doesn't hold true for asking a woman where her child's dad is. It's just not something you ask a stranger.

So, instead of feeling exposed while traveling, I ended up feeling like our family was invisible. I think people assumed Sacha and I were friends or sisters and that one was helping with the other's baby. In some ways, we're probably safer when others make that assumption...but really, I'd like people to see us for who/what we are and to navigate things from there. It will be interesting to see, as the gayby boom continues, how our experiences in public may shift and change - both in our little liberal enclave and out in the great big world beyond it.

*************

I showed this post to Sacha before I posted it and we ended up having an interesting talk about being invisible versus being out. She read what I had written and said that actually, she had never felt more out than she does right now. Working as a teacher in a setting in which everyone knows she has a baby, she has a lot of conversations with other staff and parents who want to know where her baby is (home with her partner) and if she's breastfeeding, which inevitably leads to an explanation of our family. She's instantly outed in a situation where she would have been more subtle in the past. It's definitely a different experience. It's one thing to be a queer couple, but adding a child to the mix makes things a lot more interesting!

Spring visitor day

Today Mateo's Auntie Edlyn came to visit. She'll be here all week and she and Mateo are very excited about this. They took a walk, which he enjoyed for 3 blocks until he fell asleep. They also went to lunch with his Mama, where Mateo had a great time playing with napkins and throwing them to the ground. He had a repeat performance with the napkin-throwing at a Cold Stone Creamery later in the afternoon. Soon he will be an expert!

Cute new cloth diapers!

Alayna and I had a nice date yesterday, thanks to our friends Ashlee and Katie who came to hang out with the little dude. Thanks guys! We went all over the place. We went to the Tea Zone and enjoyed some bubble tea. When we lived in the Bay Area, we loved to drink jasmine guava bubble tea in Piedmont, but since moving to Portland we have not had nearly as much bubble tea. Two dates ago (before Christmas I think) we accidentally found the Tea Zone and discovered their fabulous bubble tea. I had green tea, rose infused, tapioca pearls tea! Yummy.

After our time at the tea shop, we headed off to Powell's to look around and get some advice on sleep (which it appears we no longer need :)).

Then, we headed off to Milagros to check out some more cloth diapers! We have been using prefold diapers - which are pictured here. They are very convenient, but they are a little bit bulky. Mateo only uses them during the daytime because at night the moisture would be against his skin, which would not be great for the little guy.

Some friends of ours gave us two pocket diapers which have a fleece covering. To use pocket diapers, you take the prefold and stuff it into the diaper. The fleece covering wicks away the wetness, and so we have been using one of these for a night time diaper, and then wash them every two days. Alayna and I were thinking of getting some more pocket diapers. They are much more pricey than the prefolds, but are better for night time wearing. The problem we were having with these is that we didn't have any doublers, an insert that helps them absorb more water (cloth diapering can be very confusing and complicated at first!). So on our date we bought two inserts - one for each diaper and one more pocket diaper.

Last night was our first night using the insert, and it worked really well. I'm now wondering why we didn't buy three inserts, now that we have three pocket diapers. Oh well. I guess we'll have to make another trip. :)

All-in-one diapers are normally really pricey. Strangely enough, there was an all-in-one diaper at Milagros that was cheaper than the pocket diaper. We just had to buy one of those! Ours is really cute and has all sorts of fruit on the outside cover (unlike the one pictured here). The all-in-one is really easy - you just use it and wash it. You don't have to stuff anything in any pockets, it's all just right there. We haven't used the all-in-one diaper yet, but hopefully we will try it out today and let you know how it goes!

I just can't get over how cute cloth diapers are. I want to buy more, more, more!

Sleep, sweet sleep

Sleep has been one of the more challenging parts of parenthood. Until 2 weeks ago, we had an elaborate routine of walking Mateo for 20 minutes (rain or drizzle or sprinkle or shine). He had to have his face covered, and then, once he was asleep we had our next task: transferring our sleeping Mateo from the Ergo to the bed and swaddling him without waking him up. That meant bouncing him just so as the Ergo was taken off, slowly transferring him to the bed, not looking at his eyes if they did open up (because then the nap would be over, before it began) and then slowly, carefully swaddling him. As elaborate as the routine was, the problem is that it started to stop working. . .

Mateo didn't want to fall asleep on the walks.

Two weeks ago, we started a new routine. When we thought Mateo was getting sleepy, we would change his diaper, feed him, take him outside to say good night to all sorts of things (in Spanish) and then sing him Twinkle, Twinkle little star and put him down and check on him every few minutes. After a bit of protesting, he has started to get used to his new routine and fall asleep in 15 minutes. (Note - that is less time than our walks normally lasted for!) Even better than that, he has been sleeping better when he falls asleep in his own bed.

Today, we had two firsts. We decided to try the new routine during his naps and on his third nap of the day he fell right asleep without a single peep. He just went down for his nap, and fell right asleep! People told us this would eventually happen, but WOW. This is fabulous! I love our new bedtime and nap routine.