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much without incident. Johan spent a few nights in the Bugaboo bassinet because he liked it for some reason. We didn’t avoid the big wooden crib for any reason other than convenience, and it worked well for us.
     
    Simon
    I have to say looking back now over six years later, the rose-colored glasses of which Alex wrote are firmly in place and for the life of me I find it hard to recall too many negatives. The wonderment of seeing black tar emanate from your new baby was hardly a negative. Nor even was the midnight race to the 24-hour pharmacy to buy a breast pump as Alex’s breasts were seemingly engorged with too much milk and she thought they were about to explode and fly off her chest. Frankly the hardest thing was probably the few times I held a crying Alex some four months or more after François was born. She was upset because he was then sleeping in another room and screaming for her, not out of hunger but merely missing her skin and not really liking his newfound nocturnal solitude. Before too long he learned to sleep throughout the night and to this day both he and Johan, with whom we also adopted the “cruel to be kind” sleeping strategy, have blessed us with mostly disturbance-free nights ever since. Thanks, guys.
     
    Alex
    Lest one think the first six months were perfect, let me tell you—they weren’t. I had terrible trouble pumping milk with François, and ended up taking him everywhere. Or (when we absolutely had to get a sitter) I’d leave formula as backup while we were out and then pump as soon as we got home to relieve the pressure and to build up a store of frozen milk. I never wanted formula to touch their lips, but it did on occasion, though I’m happy to say they both nursed on demand until they weaned themselves. François abruptly quit nursing at just under a year, and Johan held steady until about 16 months.
    Another problem we encountered was Simon’s frustration with my mommy-brain, and my frustration with both his frustration and myself. Sometimes it seems as though the lack of sleep and general order to new moms’ lives causes a loss of IQ points, but I’ve always been of the “never let them see you sweat” mentality, and did my best to appear put together at all times. I did this pretty well during the first six months of each boy’s life, so well sometimes that I even fooled my husband, who then resumed thinking of me as a normal person capable of a decent day’s output and on occasion wondered why the laundry wasn’t done, dinner wasn’t on the table and I wasn’t out looking for more acting or design work when he got home, when all I really wanted to do was lay down and die from exhaustion. This expectation worked both ways: I have always been an overachiever and relentlessly whipped myself to see how much I could accomplish for the baby, myself and the household each day.
    I was so obsessive about it that I felt as though I needed to go to confession if I even turned on the television or picked up a book during the day. I remember I so desperately wanted to a) feel like a normal person and b) be useful and productive that I went a little crazy. Simon began to appear to me as an alien from the land of effectiveness—someone who could actually wake up at a normal time, shower and put on a suit, go to his office and be useful all day. I was jealous of his routine and normality, and wondered whether I’d ever feel like that again. It didn’t help that my two professions were either freelance or, well, ephemeral would be putting it charitably. Prior to François’ birth I was fighting in the trenches of acting, trying to find a breakout role. I was beginning to build some momentum around the time I became pregnant and it was heartbreaking to be written off once I started to show, although when pregnant with Johan I was fortunate to do a movie with people who made a character pregnant for me. To then go out and fight for parts or design contracts when I was so loopy and