03.17.06
Posted in Evelyne, Uncategorized at 10:36 pm by admin
I’m sitting in Muni on my way back from AKQA after one of my first days back at work. My thoughts start to drift away and I suddenly find myself daydreaming about Evelyne. Her little square head, hamster cheeks, bright eyes are there right in front of me. I suddenly feel overwhelmed by emotion. I have not felt like this about someone in a long time. I’m in love!
A few nights before, as I was feeding her before putting her to bed, Evelyne released the nipple for a little while, turned her head towards me and raised her hand to my cheek as if to give it a little “carresse”. Again, that wave of love just washed over me and I gazed at my daughter with tears in my eyes under the emotion. After I finished the bedtime routine, I told Dylan that I apologized to him but I had fallen in love with someone else. Evelyne’s the name of my latest flame.
Dylan laughed. But the next day after playing with Evelyne, he declared he was in love with her too. “You know that feeling you have when you are just falling for someone? Well it’s like that”. Yes, I know that feeling. It’s sweet and exciting.
So all is well and basking in the love of our little “menage a trois” at the Henrys right now.
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02.24.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 6:50 pm by admin
DSC00182-sepia
Originally uploaded by Je suis sophie.
Prise par Dylan par suprise un soir comme ca sur notre canape. C’est beau non ?
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02.13.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:39 pm by admin
Yesterday, Dylan and I commented about how having a child really causes you to feel emotions that you would otherwise never have had a chance to experience. It sounds and is completely cliche but there is really no other way to say it. Although friends had told us about it, there is really no way to be prepared for it. In my case, it is not so much the nature of the emotions as the amount of them that has been a suprise. I’m not used to being overwhelmed like that. I’m a French engineer for God’s sake, you can’t really be more cartesian than that, can you?
Emotions have been running particularly high lately as I am tackling the issue of finding a day care solution for Evelyne. All parents I talk with confirm that this is one of the most difficult things parents face. It’s loaded with issues of guilt (shouldn’t I be taking care of her), of fear (what if something happened?), of resentment, and many more too numerous and complex to name. Amid the confusion, one thing stands out clearly, I do want to work part-time only to make sure I can spend some time with Evelyne while she is still young. I would really miss her if I were to work full-time now. Deciding to work 3 days a week only really helped me focus my search for the perfect caregiver. But there is so much more to decide! The most frustrating is that there is no central place for recommendations or comparison of child care providers in San Francisco. Hard to believe in a place like San Francisco! There is really little available on the Internet for this. Tough for me who relies so much on this medium for…well everything now. I have to do what everyone does, which is to visit a ton of places and compare. I guess it comes down more or less to a gut feeling in the end. That’s what all sites/advisors are saying. It is such an un-easy experience for me. Ugh… I hate it.
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01.24.06
Posted in Evelyne at 6:06 pm by admin
In my family, girls look like their mothers and boys like their fathers. I look a lot like my mother. So much so that when I have my glasses on and tie my hair in the back, I sometimes scare myself when I inadvertently catch myself in the mirror.
So it was a given that if I had a daughter she’d look like me, no? Well, Evelyne does not look like me at all. It’s still early to tell, but if you look at pictures of her dad when he was a baby, the resemblance is obvious. She has is lips, his chin, his big brainy forehead, and hair plantation. She may have my ears and (thank God) my non-existant eyebrows :-). That’s it. So it’s strange. I have had to come to terms with the fact that my daughter won’t be, as I had always assumed, a mini-me, facial structure, expressions and all. I thought I’d be looking into a mirror of myself, and instead I get this entirely different person, a female version of Dylan. I was truly disappointed at first, almost competitive about it too. Something about how could my genes be less good than Dylan’s? What happened here? Where’s my half of this kid? That’s not the deal we had. She’s supposed to be 50% me, no? I had her so that I could pass my genes down, where are they then? But I’m over it now, especially as she is growing into her own personality and as she is developing new expressions. I’m now looking less at “who does she look like?” than “who is she as an individual?”.
The big cheeks are from neither of us and we don’t know where she gets that from. My daughter: part Dylan, part me, part hamster.
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Posted in Evelyne at 12:02 am by admin
060118-4
Originally uploaded by Je suis sophie.
Evelyne is fun these days. I can manage to make her smile on a regular basis, sometimes just by getting my face at the right distance from her and talking to her calmly. I can’t help it, every time she beams one of those cute smiles at me, my eyes get all watery!
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01.13.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 6:01 pm by admin
the lizard-face
Originally uploaded by Je suis sophie.
Yeah! I set up flickr to send pictures to my blog to liven this up. Cool.
As a test, here’s the little lizard face we love. Evelyne loves playing with her tongue. In general as an answer to us sticking our tongue out at her.
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01.10.06
Posted in Evelyne at 11:44 pm by admin
I’m not usually a very physical person. By that I mean I’m not the hugging type. Some people need to always be up close to others and touch them or hug them. Well, that’s not me. I suspected that my relation with my child would be different. I mean who would not like to cuddle from time to time with a little live teddy bear? I even was afraid (and still am) to have a child that would not like to be held and to cuddle. But I didn’t think that the physical bond would be as strong and important as it is. Even taking into account that the relationship at this point is physical by default (there is no real other way to interact with Eveylne at this point and she needs to be carried everywhere), I am surprised at its effect on me.
All my senses are newly stimulated by my daughter. There are moments when I miss holding her. Even if my back is constantly hurting from having to carry her around and even if I can’t do anything while I have her in my arms, as soon as I put her down in her bouncer or on a bed, I miss the contact. I can’t help but kiss her whenever she’s against me. Today she “hugged” me for the first time (or that’s how I decided to interpret her clawing at my neck :-)). I love those “calins” as we say in french. I rub my chin, my nose against her. I massage her and run my hands on her back. I smell her. Oh that smell :-). I’m crazy about it and I keep inhaling it as if I needed to memorize it. Actually, I think I could recognize her by smell at this point… All this was to be expected, and there is nothing new there to other parents I’m sure, but it’s quite interesting and surprising for me to feel this way.
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01.05.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 9:06 pm by admin
Poil aux pieds. (J’ai eu un disque de Bobby Lapointe pour Noël ;-))
Quel retard. Je réecris dans ce blog juste le jour où Maman repart pour la France et donc où je me retrouve de nouveau seule avec Evelyne pour la première fois depuis longtemps. Cette fois-ci, ce sera pour un petit bout de temps. Notre prochain visiteur sera Emmanuelle pour une nuit dans deux semaines, et après ça nous aurons une fin Fevrier très occupée, mais entre temps, j’aurai j’espère l’occasion de trouver une petite routine avec ma fille.
La visite de maman s’est très bien passée. C’était bien agréable d’avoir de la famille pour le premier Noël d’Evelyne et de passer le Nouvel An avec ma mère et ma fille.
Seul hic : ce drole de truc qui m’est arrivé hier. J’étais pliée en deux par des douleurs incroyables dans le dos et le bas de cotes, ce qui m’a fallu une visite aux urgences de UCSF. Pas de diagnostic ferme, mais deux doses de morphine ont aidé. J’espère que ça ne se reproduira pas !
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12.12.05
Posted in Evelyne, Uncategorized at 6:13 pm by admin
L’autre jour, pendant que j’avais Evelyne dans les bras et que je jouais avec elle, ma mère a fait la remarque qu’elle n’a jamais su ce que c’était de passer du temps avec un enfant. Evidemment, ça peut surprendre quand on ne sait pas que ma mère a épousé mon père alors qu’il était veuf et déjà père de quatre enfants. Comme elle dit aussi : elle n’a jamais su ce qu’était la vie de couple. Quelle différence avec ma propre experience ! Je suis tellement absorbée en ce moment par ma récente maternité et l’apprentissage d’Evelyne est encore quelquechose de tellement recent et excitant pour moi qu’il m’est difficile de m’imaginer ne pas avoir ces petits tête-à -têtes pour découvrir ma fille. Aujourd’hui est mon premier jour seule avec elle depuis des semaines après la visite de Maman et de ma belle-mère. J’ai bien apprecié toutes ces visites, et je suis contente de savoir que Maman revient, mais quel plaisir aussi de enfin avoir Evelyne pour moi :-).
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11.22.05
Posted in Evelyne at 8:03 pm by admin
Motherhood is about wanting one thing and its exact opposite at the same time. I feel constantly pulled between two extremes. I am very curious to see Evelyne grow and learn new things, yet I am sad to already see her change and sometimes wish she would stay this small. I want her to be awake and active but when she is I wish I could just put her down to sleep and do other things. I want her to develop her individuality but I want her to take it all from me. I hate that I have to wake her up every three hours to feed her (she still doesn’t let us know systematically when she’s hungry) but when she does signal hunger I hate the fact that I am bound to her schedule.
How does anyone remain sane under these conditions???
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