My husband was still working in Esk, but managed to get a few days off over Christmas to visit Anika and I in Sydney. I was overjoyed that he was coming. Not just because we hadn't seen him for three weeks, but mainly because he was someone else who could get Anika to sleep. I know that sounds horrible, but sleep deprivation does funny things to your brain. He could give me a break. Oh how I needed a break. I was probably averaging anywhere from 1/1/2 hrs to 3 hours sleep in any 24 hour period by this stage. The feeding was the killer. My poor starving baby was just so hungry. ALL of the time. 24/7.
Christmas for my family was luckily at our house in the afternoon/evening. Christmas for my husband's family was at lunch and a 45-60 minute drive away depending on the Sydney traffic. Pre-baby, we did both- lunch with my husband's family, then dinner with mine. Sounds ok right? Well it certainly would be if you had a baby that fell asleep in the car. Or fell asleep in a cradle or in your arms with a hive of activity happening around you at someone else's house. Apparently some babies do both those things. I've seen them actually. I've even held them whilst they slept. So I know they aren't just a fable. It just wasn't our baby.
Understandably, my husband wanted to take Anika over for lunch to introduce her to his extended family. For me, this brought a huge amount of pressure and anxiety. I'd spent the last three weeks getting myself and Anika into an unsustainable horror of a situation in which she'd scream in the car (getting louder and louder by the second and no, it did not dissipate after a while. I am fairly certain I have permanent hearing damage following a car ride to buy Christmas presents where I got stuck in traffic from my poor darling screaming so loud), where I'd have to swaddle her in a Woombie, put her in the sling, cover the sling with a muslin wrap to reduce stimulation and bounce on an exercise ball singing lullabies. Sydney was REALLY hot last summer, so I also needed air conditioning, otherwise Anika would overheat and not be able to sleep. So you can now understand why a 45-60 minute drive somewhere AND back, to a place without air conditioning or an exercise ball was like my very worst nightmare! But I agreed regardless.
Christmas day was sweltering hot. We did presents at my parents, had breakfast and Anika went down for her morning nap (by down, I obviously mean in the sling). Everything was packed and ready to go for when she woke up. As soon as she woke up I fed her and we jumped in the car. Before we'd even got to the end of the street she'd done a poo. We pulled over, got her out of the car and changed her on the grassy verge at the side of the road. Back into the car and try again. I pulled out every toy under the sun. I sang to her and held her hand. I patted her face. She screamed. And screamed. And screamed. I was having difficulty watching her scream. I wanted to rip her out of that stupid seat and comfort her, but I couldn't. I didn't want our little girl to spend her first Christmas screaming all the way to my husbands family and then face doing the whole thing over again on the way back a few hours later.
I was horrible to my husband. I asked him whether he wanted to see his daughter spend her first Christmas screaming? When he asked what I thought he should do, I said I wasn't going to tell him to turn around and that it was his decision as it was his family. I also started to say to Anika 'I'm so sorry darling, but Daddy really wants you to meet his family so unfortunately you're just going to have to stay in the seat and scream'. I was sobbing by this stage. My poor husband was so torn. He pulled over into a train station car park and I ripped Anika out of the seat and started to feed her. She calmed right down and snuggled into me. My husband got out of the car to call his parents. When he came back, he said that we were going back to my parents house. Relief flooded through me. On top of the relief were anxious thoughts about what his parents thought of me. What the rest of his family would think of me. Would they think I was trying to keep Anika from them? Would they think I was being manipulative? Would they ever understand how much I was struggling and how what seemed like a small outing on Christmas day to them was like climbing Mt Everest to me? I was just surviving by this stage and I wasn't sure how much more I could take before I might break.
So we spent a large part of Christmas Day in that car park deciding what to do, feeding Anika and then making our way back to my parents. A 4 hour round trip. A trip to a car park on Christmas Day. When we got home, Anika had a blissful 3 hour nap in the sling while I sat on a wooden swing chair in the shade with a cool breeze rustling through the trees whilst I stared vacantly into nowhere. Now all we had to do was get through the evening when my extended family descended on us!
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