The Husband reads my blog during the day when he’s at work. He says that it’s a bit weird sometimes to be getting the lowdown on his daughter’s development and his wife’s well-being from the Internet, but whatever. It’s not that I don’t give him the full update when he gets home, but by then I’ve usually already vented onto the blog, and he’s read it, so all that’s left to do usually is to fill in some colour, or, more usually, reassure him that I am NOT LOSING MY MIND.<\/p>\n
‘Cause apparently, it seems that from the Husband’s perspective, some of my postings sound as though I’m this<\/em> close to falling off of the the very narrow ledge of sanity that I’m currently occupying on the sheer cliff face that is new motherhood.<\/p>\n To wit: the swaddle rants. The Husband tells me that when he read, oh, the umpteenth paragraph in the 4th or 5th of the postings that were entirely about swaddling, he thought to himself: “The Wife is really not getting enough sleep.”<\/p>\n To which I reply: DUH.<\/p>\n But sleep-deprivation is not what fuels swaddling rants. SWADDLING is what fuels swaddling rants. (This posting is not, you’ll be happy to hear, going to be a swaddling rant. I’ve resigned myself to swaddling for the time being, and am saving up my swaddling issues for one big-ass rant in the future.)<\/p>\n OK, I’ll admit that maybe<\/em> sleep-deprivation is exacerbating my natural tendency to obsess about things. But the extent to which I may end up obsessing about baby-related issues (and then ranting about them here) is, I think, nearly – if not entirely (again, I grant that I tend to be obsessive about things and that I am currently sleep deprived, and that this may be something of an explosive combination) – proportionate to the magnitude of the task God\/Nature\/The Universe has given me: raising my amazing baby to be the INCREDIBLE human being that she is no doubt meant to become.<\/p>\n (I’ve noticed that I’ve begun to use excessively long stream-of-consciousness sentences, which have the effect of making it seem that I, alone at my keyboard, am on the verge of hyperventilation. This may be one reason why the Husband thinks, when he reads, that I am teetering on the edge. So I’ll slow it down. Breathe.)<\/p>\n ANYWAY. This is all to say that there is much to obsess about, but that my obsessing about it does not mean that I have, um, a problem with obsessing.<\/p>\n So, just to get it all (or most of it) out in the open, what follows is a partial list of things (I couldn’t possibly list all of them) that I am currently obsessing about, the obsession about which should not be taken as evidence of a fragile emotional or physical state:<\/p>\n OK. Deep breath.<\/p>\n\n