Category: Baby days

32 minutes

For the last two days, Lucas has been averaging a 32 minute nap, a couple of times per day. That would explain, for those of you who are hanging on my every word (hi Mom!), why posting has been so light this week. For what it’s worth, 32 minute naps also make for one cranky-assed little baby who wants to be held and entertained all day, thus further reducing stolen minutes online.

This is a list of things you can achieve in 32 minutes:

  • read/write Twitter updates or read/write e-mails (but not both)
  • fold one basket of clean laundry (but not put it into the drawers)
  • pick up all the clutter off the floor so you can vacuum or actually vacuum (but not both)
  • eat breakfast or clean up the breakfast dishes from the rest of the family (but not both)
  • read the last three or four entries on one favourite blog (but not comment)
  • shower or get dressed (but not both)
  • compose a kick-ass clever blog post in your head (but not write it)
  • write one lame placeholder of a blog post (but not one worth reading)

And right on cue, there he is…

Edited to add: yeah, Lee beat me to it again:

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Doodle by Lee. The code for this doodle and other doodles you can use on your blog can be found at Doodles.

Ottawa Moms: Join the Breastfeeding Challenge!

Did you know that in 2005, the National Capital Region came in first out of 234 participating locations in the breastfeeding challenge, with the largest number of participating mommies? Join us to beat the record in 2008! Moms will be lactating large at the St Laurent Shopping Centre, CHEO, the Monfort and both campuses of the Ottawa Hospital!

I’ll be there, delightedly so. When Lucas and I ran into serious trouble with breastfeeding back in February and March, I desperately wanted to be able to make it to the six-month mark with him before my milk gave way completely. Despite adding two bottles of formula per day to his diet and his newfound love of solid foods, we’re still going strong today on his eight month birthday! Yay us!! I still nurse him first thing in the morning, midafternoon and just before he goes to sleep, and to be honest, it’s going better than ever. Here’s hoping we make it to his first birthday and beyond.

And can I take just one second to say how proud I am to live in a city that officially endorses an event like this? Yay, Ottawa! Moms, babies and boobies unite this Saturday, October 11. I’ll be at the St Laurent location, if all goes according to plan. Hope to see you there!

Edited to add: Doh!! Saturday = skating lessons. Rats!! I’ll be there in spirit, anyway.

Baby-led weaning

A couple of weeks ago, on my post about baby food and the culture of fear, Marianne left a little comment about “baby-led weaning.” (Don’t you love Marianne’s comments? Her perspective as a teacher is awesome!) She suggested I google the term, so I did.

And I was enlightened!

After doing a lot of skimming on the subject, I’ve gleaned that baby-led weaning (or, baby-led solids) is an alternative way of getting your baby to eat solids by bypassing the spoonfed purees and soupy cereals stage. Instead, from as early as baby is able to hold up his (or her, but I’ll stick to the male gender because it’s all I know!) head and grasp something the shape and size of your finger, you provide baby with an array of finger foods and let him pick and choose whatever he wants.

The theory says that baby will first lick and then start to chew on and eat food when he’s biologically ready to do so. The benefit is that baby will learn to listen to his own hunger cues and regulate his intake accordingly. Babies are also (they say) less likely to become fussy because they are exposed to a wide variety of textures and flavours right from the beginning. And finally, they profess that baby will be happier eating at the same time as and the same food as the rest of the family.

I’m skeptical of the latter points above, but have nonetheless embraced a baby-led weaning for most of Lucas’s meals. In fact, I’d been leaning toward this anyway, without being aware of the theory. (Kind of how I stumbled into attachment parenting, too.) I posted before about how happy I was the day that Lucas was able to cram his own Cheerios into his gob, if only for the liberation it allowed me. Now, I find that the ideas encapsulated by baby-led weaning mesh rather nicely with my own new eating habits and ideals. I think a lot of this is strongly influenced, too, by the fact that as a family we are eating much more healthily that we were back when Tristan and Simon were babies. Baby-led weaning liberates me to eat my dinner while it’s relatively warm AND saves me preparing a completely separate meal for him. In other words, it’s better for me, and it’s ALWAYS about what’s best for me, right?

The result is that Lucas’s introduction to the world of solids has been considerably different than that of his brothers. For one, I waited a little longer. (Tristan and Simon were both on baby cereal at four months.) Second, I’m offering him foods that I would never have thought a baby of not-quite eight months old can eat — cucumber spears, potato chunks, kidney beans, raw apple slices, broccoli and cauliflower florets, diced ham and chicken and steak, even bits of spinach. And he eats it all, with gusto. There’s nothing that I’ve offered him so far that he’s refused. As a matter of fact, that’s where the baby-led weaning theory falls apart for us. His satiety cues seem to be broken, or maybe he’s still recovering from his early hunger issues, but he will eat and eat and eat until he’s eaten the cubic equivalent of his body weight and then go back for more!

I haven’t completely abandoned the spoonfeeding, though. For one thing, I think one of the great joys of life with a baby is watching that round little mouth in an O of expectation as baby waits for the next spoonful. Second, I’m rounding out his veggie intake with purees because he doesn’t have any teeth yet, and even steamed veggies are a little tough to masticate without them. And third, I still want him to have iron-fortified cereal every couple of days (although he eats tonnes of bread — it’s his favourite!) and we’ve just introduced those fromage frais minis that babies love so much.

But I wanted to say a public and thorough thank you to Marianne for opening my eyes to baby-led weaning, and to let y’all know about it, too. It’s a direction I was drifting on my own, but after a spin around the interwebs I found lots of stuff that’s helped me implement the majority of the theories of baby-led weaning.

Granny’s Revenge

I was flipping through Tristan’s baby calendar the other day, comparing Tristan and Lucas at seven months of age. (Heartbreakingly, I seem to have lost my 2004 kitchen calendar with all of Simon’s baby milestones. I have every other year since 2001; I’m hoping it presents itself out of the clutter one of these days.) It was interesting to compare my first and my third. I can see, for instance, that they’re nearly the same weight, give or take half a pound on twenty pounds. (Simon, I seem to remember, hit 20 lbs around four months of age!)

What really surprised me, though, was that Tristan was standing and “cruising the furniture” and up on his hands and knees rocking in a pre-crawl motion at this age whereas Lucas has only just reliably mastered sitting up. I’m sure this has everything to do with their own developmental clocks and nothing to do with the fact that every time Lucas begins to lift himself up I sweep his knees out from under him and squash him back down to the ground. Sorry, kid, I’m just not ready for you to get mobile. How’s two years from now by you?

On the other hand, my mother is on the cusp of getting banned from the house. Every time she gets near Lucas, she’s got him standing up on his feet, holding him while he bounces and encouraging him to walk. And muttering something about “Granny’s Revenge.” I don’t think she believes me, but so help me I’ll ban her from the house if she teaches that baby to walk before his first birthday!

Lucas at six months (and a bit)

Did you hear the choirs of angels singing, and did you see the beam of light shoot down from the heavens to glow lovingly over Lucas’s high chair last week? Or maybe that was just me singing the Hallelujah chorus. We’ve made one of those huge developmental leaps that makes Mommy’s day so very much easier. Lucas can cram food into his own gob now.

Aside from sitting up independently, which he is still on the cusp of doing, this is one of the best milestones in babydom, as measured in units of maternal freedom. I’d been slow in integrating new solids into his diet, taking a week or so between each new food, but now that I can give him something to hold and nosh while I eat or empty the dishwasher or put dinner on the table, we’ve progressed quickly through all the old standbys in the course of the last week: Cheeries, toast, Egos, organic cookies, Mum Mums (do y’all have Mum Mums in the States? Best baby cookie ever!) and even pizza crust.

It’s been a while since I’ve given you a Lucas update, no? Lucas at six (almost seven!) months is a dream baby. He’s pleasant, sweet, and friendly. He continues to (*shhhh, don’t tell anyone!*) sleep through the night. He’s only disagreeable when he’s hungry or tired or is not the centre of attention, much like me. When I brought him for his six-month checkup, I was quite sure I’d find out he’d grown out of the baby bucket car seat/carrier. (Maximum is 22 lbs and 29 inches long.) We had only half an inch to spare, but a whopping five pounds of room to grow before we have to give it up – another hallelujah, please! – because he was 28.5 inches long but only 17 lbs. He’s the longest and the lightest of his brothers at six months, on the 50th percentile for weight and the 95th percentile for length.

My only two concerns going in to the appointment were that he still lolls his head a bit, and he still spits up ferociously. The head-lolling is resolving itself quite well, and the ped said he is not at all concerned. While Tristan sat up independently at five months, Lucas is not quite there yet at almost seven months. He does it for a minute or two, sometimes as much as five, but mostly because he’s propped up. He’ll get there, I’m sure.

The spitting up is driving me bananas. He still does it up to ten times a day, or more, sometimes enough to make a “splat” sound as he launches it over my shoulder and onto the floor below. (My apologies to the people at Canadian Tire, where he christened not one, not two, but three aisles in the sporting goods section while I was looking at skates for the boys last week.) We switched his meds from Ranitidine to Zantac caplets, but if anything he seems to be spitting more. Anyone else out there have a champion spitter and if so, when did it resolve? Seems to me that although Tristan and Simon were both like this, both of them dried up a lot when solids were introduced. Lucas just spits up more colourfully now.

One of my favourite things about this age, aside from the tiny increments of independence (tiny is okay, huge is not allowed) is his affection for me. My favourite is the “I love you so much I must grab you by the hair and suck on your face” kiss. It makes me laugh out loud every single time.

And does he ever love his brothers and his daddy. His whole body wriggles with delight when they talk to him or even walk into the room. Tristan can make him laugh just by looking at him. Is there anything better in the world than a baby belly laugh?

Does it get any cuter than this?

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Lukey’s boat is painted green

When he’s really frothed, I can rely on three songs to calm Lucas down. “You are my Sunshine” is my lullaby standby, and I have sung it to all three boys. It reminds me of my Granda, my grandfather on my mother’s side, and I cringe when I hear it used to huck orange juice. Chet Baker does a much better version of the song than I do, but Lucas seems content to listen to me serenade him endlessly as he fights off sleep.

The second song is Great Big Sea’s “Lukey.” Beloved sang this to him ’round about the time he was a week or two old, and in those first colicky weeks we must have sung it hundreds of times since then. I like this song because it comes with many verses, and Lucas doesn’t seem to mind if you mix and match them so long as you just keep singing. On a good day, humming may be permitted.

I have one failsafe song in my arsenal: I have never seen him so worked up that “Head and Shoulders, Knees and Toes” doesn’t immediately calm him. (Yes, it’s weird. Don’t judge me, it works!) He will settle and listen as long as you keep singing, and will resume his histrionics with renewed vigour if pause for so much as a quarter-rest worth of time between repeats. I have bellowed it across the back yard to him, trying to yank just a few more weeds from the backyard jungle while he demands attention from his swing; I have blushed rather furiously while singing it to him in a crowded waiting room over and over again; I have danced a little jig while singing it in the grocery store, just to spice things up a bit. Did you know that the song comprises only 10 words, and even with repetitions the whole thing only draws out to 23 words? Do you have any idea how many times you can sing a 23 word song in the average trip to the grocery store, let alone when traversing a highway across a national park? Many, many, many.

Anyone who has had the misfortune to hear me warble in person knows I’m no Amy Winehouse (which, all things considered, may not be such a bad thing), but I have to say there is something sweetly empowering about being able to soothe my baby simply by singing to him. One of my favourite memories of this age will be of Lucas with his face red from bellowing against some indignity, chin trembling and tears held in abeyance. “Well, okay then,” his teary gaze says to me. “I’m righteously ticked off, but as long as you keep singing, I suppose it’ll be alright. But don’t you dare stop. And no, as a matter of fact you may NOT sing any other song. Don’t even think about trying that Old Macdonald had a farm shit with me.”

For the record, it has not escaped me that the song my son best loves me to sing has no actual melody to speak of. And no, I do not accept this as a criticism of my inability to carry a tune.

Two reactions

I’m not overly shy about breastfeeding in public, but I’m also not very good about being discreet. I have to be able to see what I’m doing, yanno? Even so, through two and a half boys worth of nursing wherever I had to do it, I never really had any reactions that I’d noticed. Mostly people seem to try to ignore the fact that I’m doing anything at all, which seems a reasonable enough reaction.

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve had two notable reactions. On Canada Day, we were out at the festival at Andrew Haydon Park with my mom. There’s a chip stand with a little covered patio, and we were sitting at a picnic table having some fries and surprisingly good hamburgers. The place was crawling with people, and the picnic table was larger than we needed. A mother with her young son were sharing the table with us, with the woman sitting beside me and her son across the table from us.

I’d just finished wrangling Lucas to my breast when I looked up to see her gathering their half-eaten meal up to quickly hustle her son off to another table. At first, I simply assumed they were moving to join friends — the idea that my nursing would cause someone that much distress didn’t even cross my mind. But no, they were just moving to another table to get away from me nursing Lucas.

I get that it’s a free world, and people can do whatever they like. I suppose it was the best possible reaction for someone who didn’t want to be near someone who was breastfeeding — she didn’t, for example, say “Ewww, could you please put that away” or something like that — but I was still kind of sad for her and for her son. He looked to be about eight, maybe nine. What kind of message does that send to him? What possible harm could be done by me feeding my baby in front of him?

Earlier this week, I took all three boys to the Experimental Farm for the morning. The sheep and pig barn is closed for renovations, but we enjoyed the horses and the tractors, and found two calves that were born the same week as Lucas. (For the record, they’re a lot bigger than him!) We had a wee snack, and the boys were climbing on the play structure when Lucas woke up from a little nap and started fussing for a snack of his own.

I was again sharing a picnic table, this time with a woman busy pulling tupperware boxes of fruit and crackers and cheese out of a backpack. She looked over and noticed me nursing Lucas and said a quiet, “Awwwwwww.” I looked up at her and she smiled, and we started chatting. When the boys wandered back from the play structure and needed help unwrapping a fruit bar, she did it for them because I still had my hands full. It was a lovely little interlude in a lovely little morning. I wonder if she has any idea that she made me feel good about myself, and my boys, that day?

***

The nursing is still not going as smoothly as it did with Simon and Tristan. The good news is, Lucas is not so voraciously hungry as Simon and doesn’t wake up every two or three hours through the night like Simon did. The bad news is, he still fusses a lot more than either of the other boys did with nursing. Some days are fine, other days he howls when I try to nurse him like I’m putting hot pokers in his ears. Some days he drinks contentedly for 15 or 20 minutes at a time, other days I almost have to force him to drink, and he sips and pulls and chews on my nipple until I’m sure they’ll be down to my knees by the time he’s weaned.

It might be the reflux, it might be that he doesn’t like the taste of whatever I’ve recently eaten, it might be the alignment of Pluto in the seventh house of Capricorn. Who knows? With two formula bottles a day, we’re still on a 1/3 formula and 2/3 breastmilk split, and he’s plenty healthy with just the right doubling underneath his chin, so it’s working out overall. We still get a lot of green poops, though. I just hope we can keep nursing for a while longer now that I’ve started to introduce solids. We’re almost to the six-month mark, which is the bare minimum I wanted to achieve, but I’d be happy if he kept up at least a little bit of nursing through his first birthday. So far so good and one day at a time, I guess.

Lucas’s first cereal

Every now and then I feel the need to conform to the expectations of those who castigate mommy blogs as self-reverential shrines to minutiae. What could be more self-indulgent than four minutes of baby’s first cereal posted to YouTube?

But seriously, could he BE more adorable? If nothing else, watch for the infectious baby giggles in the second minute.

(or, click thru and watch it here)

The next plague: mastitis

My vexatious breasts are at it again, finding new and horrific ways to cause me grief. I suppose I should know better than to tempt fate with a question like “what’s next.” The answer is a rocking case of mastitis. Fever, chills, wretched body aches, and it feels like I have a ball of hot lead tucked into my right breast. Good times.

What really surprised me was how fast it came on. I had a bit of tenderness Tuesday night, and Lucas was being fussy feeding on that side. I figured I would have another blocked duct by morning, but had no idea how quickly it would become an infection. By midmorning yesterday I knew I was in trouble. Luckily, my GP saw me last night and I’m already on antibiotics. Yeah, lucky me.

Mastitis has always been my personal boogeyman, something I’ve been terrified of throughout my breastfeeding years. And as Stephen King observed, while the monster exposed can never be as frightening as the monster in the closet, it’s still pretty darn sucky. One more experience to add to my mothering portfolio. Pass the Advil, willya?

Solids: now or later?

As I mentioned, we had Lucas’s four-month checkup this week. He’s doing great! He’s maintaining his string-bean physique, bang-on the 50th percentile for weight, but 90th percentile for height at 14 lbs 12 oz and 27 inches long.

He’s still on the twice-daily rantidine for reflux, and still spitting up quite a bit. The ped asked me if I’ve considered starting him on rice cereal yet, as it must just help with the reflux. While I had considered it, I had pretty much decided to wait — but now I’m waffling. And now a certain influential person in my life has opined that Lucas might fuss less during the arsenic hours around dinner time if he had something to “stick to his ribs” and observed that I was on pablum at eight weeks and turned out okay. (Hi Mom!! *wink*)

Six years ago when Tristan was born, the wisdom of the time said start them on cereal at four months. By the time Simon came along two years later, “they” were advocating waiting until six months before starting on solids. I ended up starting him on apple sauce at four months anyway, because we were starting him on zantac for reflux and we sprinkled the contents of a caplet onto the applesauce.

I have also heard that the prevailing wisdom now says you start them on fruits or veggies first, then cereal. The ped said this is mainly for exclusively breast-fed babies, especially in families where allergies may be an issue, as there is formula in the rice cereal which can exacerbate milk allergies. We’re already supplementing Lucas with formula and have no known (touch wood) allergy issues, so he said to go ahead and start with the cereal when we do.

I may start him a little earlier, around five months or so, but he simply doesn’t seem to be ready to me. And, rather selfishly, starting solids is just one more extra bit of work and time in what’s turning out to be an incredibly busy time for us. That should start improving soon, now that Beloved is almost done for the summer. And watching a new baby eating from a spoon for the first time is one of mothering’s great pleasures, isn’t it?

(Ha, it occurs to me as I’m typing this that there may be psychological issues behind my reluctance to move Lucas on to the next phase. Think if I keep him off solids forever he’ll stay the cuddly, cute, bright-eyed little bundle that he is now for the rest of time? Never mind Lucas, it’s ME who isn’t ready to move on yet!)

Just curious — what did or will you do with your babies with regard to starting solids?