Things I did not expect

1. Kaya sleeps! I'm sure I'm jinxing myself, cursing myself etc. etc. so on and so forth, but I'm going to come out and say it anyway. My girl sleeps! She's been sleeping from 11pm to around 4am, getting up to nurse and going back down until between 9:15 and 10:15. I've had to go in to make sure she's still breathing. But, before you hate me too much, remember that I am also the mother of the non-stop puking will not sleep ever child. So, this is nature's way of making sure Kaya survives infancy. (On that note though, Hayden went to sleep like a big girl tonight for the first time in a month after Daddy had a long talk with her about how she can do it...I think it was her Father's Day gift to him.)

2. I thought Hayden would be jealous of me nursing Kaya, because I can't really do much with her while Kaya is eating. What I didn't count on is that Hayden was/is TERRIFIED of seeing Kaya nurse. The first time she saw it she came running over yelling, "No, Baby! No!" and "Uh Oh Mommy!" She was desperate to get Kaya to stop. In all the "You're a Big Sister" books we got for Hayden, none of them mentioned breast feeding. They all said things like "babies drink milk" with pictures of a baby with a bottle. Fine, but not that helpful to our situation. So, we've talked about how the baby isn't biting Mommy and how the baby isn't hurting Mommy (which some of you know is only slightly true, since nursing hurts like hell the first week or two). But, she seems to have come around. Unfortunately now she says things like "Baby Booby?". I tried for "breast" but it just didn't feel right. I should have known that "booby" is way too much fun to resist saying.

3. Hayden and Maria are both obsessed with watching me change Kaya's diaper. It's like a national pastime for those two. I don't know if it's just that she's so small or if it's the fact that someone other than them has a diaper, but whatever it is, they seem to love the fact that Kaya is almost always poopy. Me, not so much.

4. Hayden has renamed herself and her sister. She is now "Dee Dee" and Kaya is "Ki Ki". Most of the time Kaya is "baby" but when pressed, she'll call her "Ki Ki". We don't discourage this.

5. I feel like our family is complete. I loved, loved, loved being pregnant and I really thought I'd mourn the fact that this is probably our last child, but at least in the last week (which I realize isn't much time in the overall scheme of things) I really feel like we're a family. With Hayden it felt like us as a couple with a baby, but now I really feel like we're a family in a more solid, complete way. I don't know if that makes sense, but it feels good to feel that way. Who knows, maybe we'll have more, but I feel like I can put away my maternity clothes without a pang.

6. I think I had Post Partum Depression with Hayden. I don't know if it was to the point of being full scale PPD, but looking back now I can see that it was there. I remember being afraid to pick up Hayden, afraid to put her down, terrified about driving with her, feeling incapable of taking care of her basic needs, and feeling utterly dependent on Brian. Now, some of that is just first time parenting and some of it was because I was so incapacitated by the c-section, but I really think some of it went beyond all of that, or at the very least came out of that and then grew. In the past week, I feel like myself. Not some supermom but not an incompetent freak who doesn't deserve children. Just me.

I'm sure there's more but my baby is calling....