Little Kids, Big City: Tales from a Real House in New York City (With Lessons on Life and Love for Your Own Concrete Jungle) Read Online Free PDF Page B

François nursed under the cape, and couldn’t quite believe that I was two blocks away from my newborn, wearing makeup and a pre-pregnancy dress, standing and conversing with people. That evening everyone had seen us in New York a month earlier at a sales road show for the hotel Simon managed, and couldn’t believe how “sprightly and well rested” I seemed. “Let me tell you,” I said, “it’s all smoke and mirrors. I’m about to collapse and slide under the piano and a drink is not even necessary.” It was so surreal—someone also joked that I mustn’t have even had a baby, that it was all a ruse with a fake belly and we were laughing at them all. It was all too real when we scurried back to our room and found our new baby who was just becoming hungry and looking around for his mom. I quickly changed, snuggled up into an armchair and fell asleep with François attached to me while the guys ordered a bottle of wine and Simon made Ed give him an exact play-by-play of every move they made in the two hours.
    Life with a new baby is exciting and exhausting, as anyone who has been through it will tell you. In hindsight it seems harder than it did to me at the time, because there was such a constant adrenaline rush and everything was such a new experience. Nevertheless, there were times when Simon went to work and I was at home with the baby, looking around at the laundry to be done, the newspapers thrown everywhere, the sink full of dishes to be dealt with and hungry cats yowling for a refill of bowls, which I couldn’t bend down far enough to reach because François was sleeping in the carrier on my chest. One day I took a photo of the Greek tragedy our dining room had become, just for posterity. Taking that photo was helpful for my sanity and proved that these messes that happened in the space of three minutes were truly real and not exaggerated. The break that I got to find the camera, take the picture, download it and e-mail it to Simon allowed me to regroup enough to face cleaning it up 15 minutes later, and not put the baby in a FedEx box to send to my mother. When François was born we didn’t have a housekeeper or a regular babysitter, nor did we have any family in the city. It could have been isolating and depressing, but I forced myself out the door most days, even if for nothing more than a walk through the autumn leaves covering the city.
    We were very, very lucky that after getting over their initial shock at entering the world we had two good sleepers. Once we moved them out of our bed and into their own, we had a few cry-it-out nights with François and virtually none with Johan. We felt well equipped to bring a baby into our bed and never had a problem rolling onto either of them. Certainly some do argue against co-sleeping, but Simon and I both slept with cats and dogs our whole lives without squishing them, and neither of us drank to excess or took sleeping pills. I became pretty adept at nursing on my side while (sort of ) sleeping, which delayed the problem of leaping out of bed at regular intervals. One concession we made was to keep an infant car seat right next to the bed, and used it a few times. That also made us more comfortable when we had been out to dinner late and they fell asleep at the restaurant—we just brought the car seat out of the cab and straight into our room with no wake-ups. Another sneaky thing I did to get more sleep was put François in a king bed with bumpers on either side of him. This worked well for the first two months out of our bed, then once he began to roll we put him in a portable crib. While he was in the king bed, I could crawl in next to him to nurse if he woke up, and by the time we moved him into the Pack n’ Play at four or five months he was sleeping through the night most of the time. As a result, we never bought an actual crib for the boys. They went from our bed to a big bed to a Pack n’ Play to a twin bed between 18 months and two years, pretty