"mama, in this house we carry our babies."

i woke up this morning with a failing lower back (a common issue in my life well before pregnancy due to a snowboarding accident then being hit by a car on the same hip) due to yesterday's jaunt in mile end with sebastian in the baby carrier and said, "no more carrier. only stroller." i end the day defeated, saying begrudingly, "no more stroller. only baby carrier." i can't help but narrow my eyes at the not-so-little creature babbling on the floor beside me. sebastian is only three and a half months old but already weighs in the 16 lbs range, in the ninetieth percental for weight. he was born a reasonable size, seven and a half pounds. maybe big breasts equal big baby, i don't know, but my milk's made this kid balloon to an almost unmanagable size. what's more, he's not developed enough in other ways to be treated like a 16 lb baby, such as a reliably strong neck (he's almost there) and flexible hip joints (also almost there). for now he fits awkwardly in the ergo carrier and still needs to be strapped onto the front of my body, not the back, which i imagine is more managable.
aside from the fact that the city of montreal is appallingly unsupportive of wheel accessibility (for example, three of the sixty or so metro stations have an elevator from the platform to the street, the rest require negotiating at least one flight of concrete stairs, if not more), sebastian has taken to yelling and crying when i strap him into the car seat which fits into the stroller. last week, when this all began, i walked the full forty minutes to mama-baby yoga with him in the stroller screaming. i took him out once under the overpass to clench his little body above my head and yell back, so aggrivated, guilty, frustrated. the sound of the highway above me drowned out my voice. i put him back in and kept on rolling. it was the only time he stopped crying the whole way. luckily he doesn't understand being yelled at yet. he actually smiled for a brief moment when i held him up in the superman position which we often play in. yelling is not something i ever want to do to this kid. so this afternoon, after hours of trying to leave the house, as i pushed him around the block as he cried, i could feel the blood rushing up, frustration starting, and i decided i had to accept the baby carrier. i went home, lugged the kid, the car seat, the  folded stroller up three flights of narrow stairs, took a deep breath and strapped him onto my front. the only sounds he made were little attempts at conversation with the things he saw along our walk.
"baby carrying" is a part of the philosophy of the continuum concept which, to be honest, i hadn't heard of until i watched away we go, written by dave eggers and his wife vendela vida, in which maggie gyllenhaall's character is portrayed as the nut who thinks strollers are a reason for all the shitty people in the world. i'm wary of wide-sweeping parenting philosophies in general, and continuum is no exception. i guess i feel like with the birth of my son, i was born a mother. on the rare occassion that i've felt a lack of confidence in my motherly intuition, it's involved someone else meddling in my mothering affairs. enough said.