The hardest thing about breaking a months-long blogging hiatus is finding the time and energy to write the all-encompassing, profound post that will leave your readers in both tears and gales of laughter and praising your blogging muse. The kind of post that will instantly make up for the weeks of nothingness and leave instead a readership sated on a gratitude and fulfillment never before found within the confines of a mommy-blog.
Let me instead, then, dear reader, tell you about the mesh bumper pads I bought for Irene’s cradle today. This cradle was made for my husband by his grandfather at the time of his birth. It is truly beautiful and nowhere close to meeting today’s safety standards. My primary concern is the space between the bars is probably big enough to trap a baby’s head. (Particularly a head so tiny and round as my dear Irene’s.) The easy solution — and what we did when Colum was using the cradle — is to use bumper pads to protect the baby from the bars. Alas, those are also not recommended anymore (and haven’t been since well before Colum was born) as they are suffocation hazards and have been linked to SIDS. Still, the SIDS-inducing bumper pads lined her cradle for the first ten nights of her life as I weighed the risks of bumper pad vs. bare bars vs. the less beautiful and seemingly more wobbly bassinet we aren’t using vs. co-sleeping because she wasn’t having any of this sleep-on-your-back-in-your-own-bed business anyway. And then I thought why not just line the cradle with some sort of mesh netting that would both protect baby’s head and be unlikely to smother baby. Why, I could probably fashion such a thing myself out of the right material. Wait. I can barely make it to the shower every ( … other …) day. (Why it is that having a newborn makes me want to do things — crafty things — that I have neither the time nor ability for, I’ll never know.) Instead, I Googled “mesh baby bumpers”, or some such thing, and found that I could just buy one ready made, which I did. There are two layers of meshing, which I worry might make the product somewhat less “breathable” than it claims, and I’m not convinced that this bumper would be strictly recommended by the safety powers that be either. It is lacking the pretty eyelet lace and satin ribbons of the other bumper pads. “Don’t take off the ribbons, Mommy!” Colum pleaded. Nonetheless, I will be able to sleep easier with this bumper pad in place — even if Irene would rather sleep cradled on my forearms as I type than spend one sleeping minute in her cradle.
I am still on a babymoon of sorts since I have my husband home until next Monday. In preparation for the upcoming week I am lowering expectations on what I might hope to accomplish on all fronts. In that spirit, then, you might look forward to blog posts on such topics as “how I spent my pregnancy”, midwifery and natural childbirth, Irene’s birth story (and Colum’s for that matter), and breastfeeding: dos and don’ts. But, really, I wouldn’t bank on it.
Let me also throw to another Junction mommy-blog, one that actually delivers on it’s promise of regular posts, and is both informative and entertaining: Junction Parents. And who knows? Maybe I’ll also get around to making up a proper blog roll and resource list, too.