Yesterday Robert turned three weeks. The focus of the past week has been his feeding schedule, and from my meticulous tracking of his feeds, I can now say that he gets between six and seven feedings a day. This means that on average he feeds every four hours, and naps for about three hours between feedings. Over the weekend my mom got her first look at baby over Skype, I was breastfeeding him at the time, and she commented how calm and quiet he was. I was lucky she said. On my worries about breastfeeding she said that my sister had to put both her boys on the bottle because her milk was not rich enough. I did not want to think about this option.
Today was the first hot day we had this spring, with the mercury climbing to 27 degrees. Ron and I decided that it was a perfect opportunity to ‘go see something different’ and ‘expand our horizon’ as he put it. We took a long time to decide which beach to go to; Ron does not like Camps Bay beach because he thinks it is too busy and open, and I did not think going to Clifton Beach Four was such a good idea with the baby carrier. In the end we went to Camps Bay and walked for some time past the busy restaurant strip. Even on this Tuesday afternoon, the beach front was busy, and it seemed that everyone was out to soak up the sun.
For us even going on a little trip like this involved a lot of planning. We had to take the car seat, the baby carrier – which we remembered at the last minute, and the nappy bag of course in case of an accident. When we finished our walk, we could not sit on the sand or put our feet in the water as we used to do. We just sat on the edge of the sandy beach, on a bench, watching families with older toddlers making the most of the sunny day on the beach. It will be a while before we could do the same with Robert.
On our way back home Robert started crying. I was sitting in the front seat for the first time, so I could not tell what was wrong with him. We tried to ignore our instinctive impulse to stop; Ron turned the radio on and baby’s cries were drowned by the music. Shortly before we arrived he stopped crying and went back to sleep, but by then it was time to wake him up again to take him out of the car.
The Loskop Diaries 