Trashboat

Fiona weighs almost 17 pounds; she's 27 inches long; she's crawling backwards like a champ and pivoting all about; she's getting up on her toes while she's down on all fours like she's trying to stand up; and two weeks ago, her bottom two teeth started to poke through. If you ask her to give you five and stick out your palm, she'll slap it. Josh's dad taught her to say, "Hey!" and wave, and she's babbling so consistently, that I feel pretty sure some more words are on the way. We fed her solid food for the first time tonight and she ate that rice cereal like a champ. Swallowed it all--no gagging or spitting. She was super stoked about it. She's still waking up to eat once in the night and not sleeping all that great; I think being sick the entire month of November had a lot to with that. She essentially didn't gain any weight for a whole month, poor baby. She is always on the verge of an ear infection and we're trying to manage that with nasal steroids. I think they have had some positive effect. Emma loves her sister to bitty bits, and Fiona lights up for Emma like nobody else.

I am enjoying the hell out of being a mommy, y'all.

Fiona is ten weeks old tomorrow. Have a list detailing the past month and a half that I neglected to post about.

1. I am completely recovered from the birth, and the blood vessel tumor thingie on my lip has almost entirely disappeared. Yay!

2. I am ten lbs below my pre-pregnancy weight.

3. Fiona had a lot of trouble sleeping to begin with. She took very, very few naps during the day and never for longer than 45 minutes or so. For example, from 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. one day she slept a little over three hours broken up into 30-45 minute increments throughout the day. As babies should be getting a metric fuck ton more sleep than that, the upshot was that she would get fussier and fussier and fussier as the day progressed because she was exhausted. She also did not want to sleep in her crib, and she would only sleep at night if someone held her or if she laid next to someone in the bed. Gradually over time, she got much better about sleeping in her crib. She's been taking all naps in her crib for a few weeks now, and the frequency and duration of her naps has increased. She's also sleeping for much longer stretches at night, and last night she slept the whole night in her crib with nobody having to hold her (only waking up to eat and going right back to bed). The relief we feel is indescribable, especially since our first child was (and still is) a champion sleeper. Josh has said on more than one occasion that if Fiona had come first, he would not have been so eager to have another. LOL

4. Colic is totally managed. She doesn't do any more colicky crying. We give her prevacid every morning. I don't get why they don't make a suspension of it; crushing up the pill and mixing it with water is annoying. I know tons of babies take this medicine, so they'd do well, I think, to make a version that caters to that market. We've also elevated the head of her crib and are using the Playtex Ventaire bottles which reduce fussiness, gas, and colic.

5. I stopped feeding her from the breast last week although we are still feeding her breast milk; I'm pumping. After a couple weeks of life, she started having trouble nursing--fussing at the breast and crying--and I attributed it to the colic since my research indicated that many colicky babies fuss at the breast. When we started giving her occasional bottles (and she had her first bottle at the end of the first week of August because I had a surprise meeting to go to), she never fussed. We started giving her bottles at night because she didn't fuss and so that she would drink more and hopefully sleep more. I finally had a hysterical fit last week when every single time I nursed her she just screamed and screamed. It was incredibly frustrating because I am making tons and tons of milk. I have no production problems, and the doctor can't find anything wrong with Fiona to make her fuss at the breast like that. She doesn't have thrush and he can't see anything weird in her throat to make her do that; plus, if she did have some throat problem, it would affect her when she's drinking bottles as well as from the breast. We've gone exclusively to bottle feeding now, and we've started transitioning her to formula. We're using Similac Alimentum; we started Friday with a 3 oz breast milk to 1 oz formula ratio and upped it to 2/2 this morning. We'll do this for a few days, step down to 1/3 for a few more, and then I'll be done breastfeeding. I'm a bit relieved, actually. I'm glad that I'll have been able to give her almost three months of breast milk, but trying to nurse her became so nerve-wracking. I'm also ready to start eating dairy and soy again (although I have discovered several non-dairy items that are worth eating), and I'm ready to wear a bra that actually supports my titties once more. I know it's incredibly vain, but these nursing bras make me look about 10 lbs heavier than I really am.

6. Fiona and I are taking a walk around the neighborhood every morning. I am so out of shape, it's not funny. I'm concerned that once I stop breastfeeding and my metabolism slows (and I start eating dairy again!), that I'll gain back the weight I've lost. I do not want that to happen. I'm also using wii-Fit to measure my weight loss.

So, we had two and a half weeks of perfect bliss with a baby, and then Fiona started getting fussier. And fussier. AND FUSSIER!

She has colic. A textbook case that began shortly after her two week birthday (apparently, babies don't have developed enough systems until they're two weeks old to have colic). Colic is essentially reflux; even if the baby doesn't spit up a lot (which Fiona doesn't), heartburn is essentially the issue. She had been doing the classic arching her back and pushing out her hands and trying to get away like she was in pain; that was especially horrible to endure while nursing her. She was hungry but also clearly in pain. :(

The doctor prescribed some Prevacid and said that in a couple days, it should completely clear up. I also have to cut ALL DAIRY OMG out of my diet.

She weighed 8 lbs 1 oz; she's too big for newborn clothes now although not for newborn diapers.

In non-textbook news, two days ago fiona rolled over from her back to her belly. I knew she was a genius.

In Emma news, she called us yesterday crying (while Fiona was in the middle of an enraged one and a half hour crying jag) wanting to come home from her grandparents' house, so Josh's mom is bringing her today. :( I knew the trip was too long for her to be away; I should have done a better job of planning her summer out. *sigh*

Cross your fingers for us. If this medicine doesn't work, we may all lose our minds.

Obviously, this post contains graphic commentary on childbirth, breastfeeding, and other bodily functions. :)

( Fiona's Birthday )

My friend who was pregnant with twins had her babies yesterday. She made it to almost 37 weeks, I think, and both babies were over 6 lbs. I am so proud of her. :) I'll be going up to the hospital tomorrow to take a gander at them.

I am also jealous. LOL I am so ready to have this baby. And, yes, I know that once Fiona is out of me, a whole host of other irritations begin LOL but I am so done with being pregnant. I'll be 39 weeks on Monday, and I think part of me thought I'd be done already. Now I'm starting to despair that I'll go past my due date and have to be induced. I do not want to go past my due date OR be induced.

I am completely up-to-date on grading, though, and my students are doing great this semester even though it's a truncated class. So, there's that.

Fiona has dropped. When I woke up a couple days ago, the entire shape of my belly had changed. I had been carrying very high, and now my tummy is visibly lower. I've been having diarrhea for about a week along with some very annoying nausea, tons of cramps and Braxton Hicks, general moodiness and irritability, and an almost total inability to sleep at night. Pretty sure that this thing is about to happen. I am very, very read for it to. LOL

Everything is still going great. I've gained 14 pounds, my blood pressure is good, and no signs of preeclampsia. Whoooooooo!

He checked my cervix and not much going on down there. LOL Boy, is it not fun having your cervix checked. I've been all crampy and contractiony ever since.

In the last week and a half, I suddenly feel terribly uncomfortable. I cannot breathe. I have indigestion and possibly heartburn (it's hard to say as I have never had heartburn before, and this isn't so much a burny sensation as a feeling that I have a constant burp in my throat and am so full, if that makes any sense). I am as exhausted as I was in the first trimester. I have slowed waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay down. I am a waddler. LOL I don't remember any of this from being pregnant with Emma. I think Ems was a much smaller baby, though, and as I was on bedrest at this point in that pregnancy, I guess I didn't really have much opportunity for waddling.

I can wear my swimsuit from last summer! I am so stoked. I am about to hit the pool and stay in it until Fiona is born. My enormous belly will brown in the sunlight. It will be glorious.

The nursery is so close, so close--just piddly shit left to get ready really (a shelf to put up, art to hang on the walls. No biggie.). I feel this overwhelming urge to GET THE ROOM PERFECTLY READY OMG! and then I go in there and just kinda stand around all indecisively. LOL

Next appt in two weeks.

I went to the doctor again this Tuesday and saw my actual doctor instead of the nurse practitioner. My next appointment is in three weeks, and I'm super pleased. I felt like the NP was being a bit hyper-vigilant by having me come in so often, and I'm glad he eased up the schedule of my visits.

My blood pressure was fine with no protein in my urine. Whoooo!

Every other time I've been to the doctor it's been in the morning and I haven't eaten. This doctor's visit was directly after I went to the lab to do the one hour glucose test and I had just eaten a pretty big lunch because I was starving. So I feel like my weight is a bit off this visit because of that LOL but according to their measurements, I've gained 13 lbs at this point which is still really great.

We got another bookshelf and I was able to clean out some things from the closet in Fiona's room. The last major hurdle in there is to get the closet functional, and that will happen when Mom and Dad come to visit in April.

Fiona is super active. She's pretty much constantly kicking and squirming and rolling around. It feels deeply weird and sometimes horrible. LOL I don't remember Ems being this active, but that was roughly a million years ago, so who knows? At least she doesn't do it at night; she doesn't keep me awake with her movement, so that's a good thing.

Other than that, nothing much else to report. :)

I'm glad I purchased this book; I think it offers a great deal of information on how to create and maintain an adequate milk supply through pumping. I think it could benefit from a better editor; the book is repetitious at points, and I would have organized it differently (it's clear to me when reading this book that Casemore is essentially beefing up the original blog posts she made about this issue), but overall it's a pretty good manual for pumping.

The beginning is totally skippable. I don't need a whole chapter about how breast is best complete with charts and graphs, nor do I need tips for how to get over guilt about not breastfeeding directly from the breast. I do get that that info is useful for some women; after all, many women who decide to exclusively pump do so because they have premie babies or because they have breastfeeding issues that cause then to abandon their original plans for feeding their kids. I was surprised but happy that she mentioned that some women just think it's weird for a baby to suck on their boobs and don't want to do that since I fall into that camp.

Now that I'm a bit more informed about how exclusively pumping works, I realize that more was going on to sabotage my attempts to pump and feed Emma than just my diet. Yes, starving myself was not conducive to producing breast milk, nor was post-partum depression. However, I wasn't pumping frequently enough or for long enough, and I started skipping that middle of the night pumping session after only a few weeks--all pretty much sure-fire ways to get your milk to dry up, which mine did. I also was given medication to increase my milk supply which probably exacerbated my post-partum depression, and one of the things Casemore emphasizes is that stress, anxiety, and depression all contribute to poor milk supply. Once again, I wish that someone had helped me figure this stuff out instead of leaving me to flounder and fail.

I have to say before I get into the nuts and bolts of Casemore's book that I'm a bit more daunted after reading. I'm worried that the time commitment necessary to make exclusively pumping truly work for feeding Fiona long term is going to end up being unmanageable for me. In addition to the daily time requirement (roughly two hours a day) for pumping, at least initially the frequency of pumping is a bit overwhelming. Add in washing equipment each time, and it starts to seem like I'll be doing nothing but pumping and washing the pump kit. I don't remember pumping being a really intrusive or time consuming thing when I was doing it with Emma, but that's because I was doing it wrong LOL and if I want it to work with Fiona, I'll need to be able to make that commitment. Part of me wonders if I ought to just try to feed directly from the breast, pumping afterwards from time to time to build up a little supply so that others can feed her sometimes, to save myself some time and energy. I'll have to be getting up to pump anyway and then have the added washing and etc. to go along with that. Another part of me wonders if I ought to just pump what seems doable to me, and if (or when really) my milk dries up, just switch to formula like I did with Emma. I do believe that any amount of breast milk is better than none, and I think if I eat and hydrate properly and incorporate some of the techniques that Casemore mentions without going overboard with the pumping frequency that I can probably stretch out my milk viability for longer than the five weeks I went with Emma. I don't think I'd be able to make it six months, but I think two, possibly three would be doable that way. When it comes right down to it, formula is so much easier. You're not tied to a baby or a pump and anyone can feed the baby. You can sleep through the night starting so much earlier if you have a partner or a grandparent willing to take night shift, and you can go places without worrying about having to breastfeed the baby or find some place to pump. It's pretty tempting to just not worry about it. IDK

I need to talk to Josh and get his opinion. I really don't want to directly breast feed just because it felt so weird with Emma. She was a premie and so tiny; my boob was bigger than her whole body LOL. She couldn't really latch properly (and again, nobody spent any time helping me with that or trying to show me how; I tried to breastfeed her for like two seconds and then they shoved a pump at me; don't get me wrong; I was relieved and grateful for the pump and I know that getting food into a baby that's less than five pounds is a priority, but still), and it did feel weird and wrong somehow to have a baby sucking on a part of my body that I had always considered sexual. All that being said, everything has been so different with Fiona that I'm willing to believe that breastfeeding her could be an entirely different situation. I'm willing to try it with the understanding that if it really skeeves me out or if it doesn't work, I'm going to move on without guilt. At that point, I'd have the option of exclusively pumping. I'm so indecisive!

( Notes from the text )

I had the 24 week appointment yesterday, and everything was fine. I've gained 6lbs total at this point, so yay! Not gaining too much weight! the only downside is that my blood pressure was a little high. I have to start going every two weeks now instead of four so they can monitor me for preeclampsia. *sigh* Everything else has been so fantastic that I was hoping we could skip the preeclampsia this round. I am going to remain optimistic, but I guess I better start thinking about transferring my classes to online instruction if I have to go on bed rest again (which will be easily done because they're already web-enhanced). We are also scheduled to go to a wedding in April followed by my defense, and those might need to be canceled if my blood pressure worsens. I just don't want to have another premie, and I really don't want to have a C-section. Bah.

I have noticed that I am way more emotional, crying for no reason, tears welling up for any emotion, even positive ones. I think a lot of it is the dissertation, and once that's over, I can relax and not be so wound up. We'll see.

Other than that, nothing much different to report.