Afternoon in the Life...

I follow a really great group on Facebook called Toddler Approved. It's always chock-full of great ideas, and having done several of them, I can say that it's one of the best sites for toddler sensory/art/behavioral techniques.

I saw a great post about "Fizzle Pumpkins" that I thought Avonlea would really enjoy. We painted a couple of our pumpkins a few days ago, and she really enjoyed it, so I thought it would be fun to step it up a little.

We paint at our house at least once a week, and Avonlea really enjoys it. She's also pretty good at keeping the paint off of herself and on the paper/other surface we are working with.

At 4:45 I got the painting equipment together. I mixed the paint up while Aria played on the floor peacefully. Avonlea was excited about painting, so she was running back and forth in and out of the house. I brought Aria out and put her in the Bumbo seat, along with our metal colander and a spoon. She enjoys "making music", so I thought she would enjoy it while Avonlea and I painted.

We started painting, and right away I found out that my paint/baking soda ratio was off. It wasn't gliding onto the pumpkin like paint would normally, it was looking more like clumpy cottage cheese, and sliding off. I was frustrated, but we pressed on. Avonlea seemed to be enjoying herself, so I just let it go.

Aria took a really great nap today, but she slept early, so she was ready for another nap early. She started to get fussy only a few minutes after getting outside. She had tossed aside the spoon and was instead leaning over as far as possible and playing in the dirt (of course).

I decided to speed the process up and bring the vinegar out in a cup with a straw. Of course, Avonlea couldn't manage the technique, so I was helping. But because the ratio was off, I'm pretty sure it wasn't as spectacular as it would normally be.

During the entire time we were painting, we were being buzzed by flies. I'm not sure what it is about our house, but the flies and the ants are TERRIBLE. We have a fly trap that we have been meaning to put out, but just haven't yet, so I decided, after 10 minutes of trying to swat the flies, that I would put up the fly trap.  So I left the girls outside and went in to get the rope and fly trap.

I came back out and Avonlea had taken the paints in her playhouse. While I was hanging the fly trap onto the roof, I was trying to yell to Avonlea not to pain the inside of her house. I finally got the thing hung up (it is full of water, so I couldn't just set it down to stop Avonlea), stepped off the chair, and my knot came undone and fell to the ground, completely breaking apart and splashing stank water all over me.

At this point, I am frustrated. I look in the house, and Avonlea is disobeying and painting the inside of her house--with her fingers. I carry Aria inside and put her on the floor with some toys. I go back out and carry Avonlea inside and rinse her off and wash off my legs, which had been sprayed by fly trap stank water. I put Avonlea in time out, and gather Aria, since she was angry about being put on the floor.

After Avonlea's 2 minute time-out, I take her back outside to clean up her mess, which of course she can't clean up well, but I have to follow through on in order to be a good mom.

The whole time I am thinking, why did I even attempt this nonsense??

This happens to me SO OFTEN. I have good intentions, and then it all gets mucked up somehow. *sigh*

Grr....Arrgh

I have been trying to put Aria to sleep for the last hour and a half. She has been crying off and on that whole time.

See this girl?

She no longer exists.

She has been replaced with a she-wolf who acts like she needs no sleep yet cries like a banshee when she doesn't get it.

She has literally changed her sleep behaviors 180 degrees since she was 0-3 months old.

0-3 Months

• Would sleep anywhere--on my chest, in our bed, on the floor, on a chair, in her swing, in her rocker--except her car seat, where she would scream.
• Took 34 naps a day (or, more accurately, was awake a total of 3 hours a day).
• Did not need any special blankets/swaddles/sound machines/pacifiers
• Slept 5-7 hour stretches at night
• Could be laid down and fall asleep without any interventions

Currently (almost 6 months)

• Only sleeps in her car seat.
• Wants to take 3 naps a day, but will only really take one--maybe two if I'm lucky. Depending on car rides for extra naps.
• It's sleep machine plus sleep sack or no sleep. Really only wants to sleep in our bed, but we've been working on moving her to the crib. It isn't going well.
• Sleeping 2.5-3 hour stretches at night
• If she falls asleep with the pacifier in, God help us if it falls out.
• Averaging a 35 minute go-to-sleep intervention, involving nursing, rocking, shushing, crying it out (completely ineffective), laying in our bed, laying in her bed, pacifier, no pacifier, tag-teaming with Dad, tagging back to Mom, falling asleep and then putting her down and having her wake up to have to do it all over again.

I seriously HATE this. After the 1.25 hour mark tonight, I just said "goodnight" to the screaming baby, closed the door and had to leave. I was SO PISSED OFF.  Just &(^^@(*ing sleep already, kid. You're pissing me off.  Nick went in and got her to sleep finally. (Thank you, husband!)

THIS is why I don't want any more kids. THIS is why I cried big bucket tears when we found out we were having another one. I didn't want to have to go through this AGAIN. Yes, babies are cute and snuggly and have squishy cheeks and pinchable thighs, but the incessant sleep training/loss/nonexistence is enough to make a woman go crazy. I need this kid to go to bed at 7pm. If she doesn't, then that's just more time in the day where she is latched on to me. And I completely love my kids, but if I don't get a good, solid 2 hours away from them before I go to bed, I become a bad mom.

(Edited to add: her first tooth pushed through yesterday, and it is a full moon--which might explain the last two nights--but not the three weeks prior to this.)

Bait and Switch

Sadly, this post has been a few weeks coming. I wish things would show signs of changing course, but it doesn't appear to be headed anywhere else.

Aria pulled a bait and switch on me. 

She spent the first three months of her life sleeping peacefully anywhere and everywhere she had the chance. She slept so much I actually thought something might be wrong with her. But no, she was just an amazing sleeper.

She hit three months, and the sleeping overnight started to get messed up. She started to have swaddle problems.

She hit four months, and she went down to three naps a day, and decided that she wanted to sleep on her side (but couldn't stay in that position on her own).

She hit five months, and decided she no longer wanted to sleep in her own bed, but in ours.

Now at five and a half months, she decides that going to sleep is going to be a battle every. Single. Time. Not only that, but she sleeps so fitfully that she wakes herself up constantly.

I thought I had a baby that was going to be amazing at sleep!  Nope. Bait and switch.

She still needs a lot of sleep. She is REALLY cranky when she gets tired.  But she will no longer go down easily. It takes me feeding her laying down, plus staying with her holding the pacifier in her mouth for her to sleep. And then, she will still sometimes wake up every 45 minutes (even though she isn't ready to wake up) and I will have to come back in and roll her onto her side and stick the pacifier back in because she can't soothe herself.

Avonlea was awful for the first several months, but at least I could put her in her own bed and she would get herself to sleep relatively easy. She would scoot and travel around the bed, but never really wake up. Once she woke up, she was actually ready to wake up. Aria is NOT this way. She needs constant coaxing to get to sleep, and then if she rolls over at all she wakes up angry and needs more coddling to get back to sleep.

I know you're not supposed to compare your kids to each other, but it's hard not to in this case, when one is doing so terribly, and you have fond memories of the other.

Someone told me that it is really helpful to do your best to get your kids napping at the same time. And thankfully, this actually works really well for us. Aria usually goes down for a second nap at noon, I fix Avonlea's lunch and she goes down between 12:30 and 1. Aria sleeps for about 3 hours, Avonlea is down for 3 or 4 hours.

The problem is that Aria has no idea how to soothe herself--because I am constantly trying to keep her from crying out during naptime because Avonlea is sleeping, too! Since Avonlea takes such a long nap, you can imagine how ROTTEN she is if she doesn't get a nap. Aria cries and wakes Avonlea up, so I am doing whatever I can to make sure that doesn't happen. I kind of wonder if all second babies are like this--terrible at self-soothing because moms don't want them to cry and wake up the older kid.

I would like to do a little bit of cry it out, but there just isn't a good time to do it. We are in a 2-bedroom house, and the bedrooms are so close together. I wish there was an upstairs, or some separation between the rooms or something so I could work more with sleep training Aria without messing up Avonlea.

*sigh*

Unhinged by the UnGame

Nick and I recently returned from vacation. Actually, I should probably call it a "vacation", as it was a LOT of work, and not a lot of rest, or escape from my daily reality, as often a vacation purports to be.

But I can write about that (and about how Avonlea did with it) at another time.

In this post, I'm going to write about the sad realization I came to on vacation (and, in the days since our return, have continued to dwell upon).

In the car, whenever we have long drives, Nick and I play the "UnGame".

This isn't really a game (hence, the name UNgame). It's a box of two sets of cards. Each card has a question or a statement on it, and you take turns answering the questions or responding to the statements.  For example:

We got the game as a gift from my friend Jenn for our wedding, and it is one that we carry with us on all of our trips. It's good to pull out when someone is getting tired, or we have a long distance to travel.

Well, for the first time since we have had this game, a question really stumped me. It's a question that, prior to maybe 9 months ago, I would have had a ready answer for. Definitely one I could have answered 3 or 5 or 7 years ago.  That question was,

What are 3 things you would like to be doing in three years?

Now, perhaps I am being overly dramatic. Perhaps pregnancy hormones are getting the better of me, and making me all down and dreary. Perhaps I just had a brain fart.  But I could not, for the life of me, think of 3 things.

Even now, a few weeks later, I can't think of anything.  Why is that??

I've been dwelling on the "why" of this situation for weeks. Why am I having so much trouble thinking of what I would like to be doing? It's not like this is a life or death question. There isn't any money on the line. No one is going to be recording my answers--after all, how I would have answered this question 1 or 4 or 10 years ago is no longer relevant.

But the fact that I have trouble answering the question disturbs me.

I guess it is because every time I think of what I would LIKE to be doing in three years, a little voice (or block, or hiccup) in my brain says, "Yeah, but you're going to have a 5 year old and a 3 year old in 3 years--what are you REALLY going to be doing for yourself?"

I think over the 16 months I have spent as a mom, and consider how dramatically my life has changed--the infrequent nights away, the slow loss of personal time during the day (less time to do things for me--more time doing things to just get by), less and less ability to do hobbies that interest me. I have lost myself as I have become a mom, and I guess I don't see that changing at all now that we're having another one--in fact, I only see it becoming worse.

I guess I kept waiting for "the moment" when I would be able to become "me" again. Maybe it was when Avonlea would sleep through the night (still hasn't happened), or when she stopped breastfeeding (still hasn't happened)--I would be able to do some of the things that I loved before I had a baby. I would be able to devote more time to it, instead of squeezing it in during nap time or after she goes to bed, when I'm too tired to do what I love.  But, that "moment" hasn't arrived, and now that we're having another one, that moment seems to have moved so far down my life timeline I can't even see it anymore.

I guess I need to pause and clarify--I love my daughter. I love staying home with her. I love that I have been able to breastfeed her and take care of her daily. Please, in light of everything else I am writing, let that be very firmly said.

I just wish I didn't feel like I have lost myself along the journey. I look 3 years down the road, and I can see myself staying up until 11pm--but I am not watching a movie, or having date night, or having friends over to play games, or reading, or going for a run--all things that I used to love. Instead, I see an exhausted mom, cleaning the kitchen, scrubbing a high chair, scruffy hair and no shower, and wiping down the bathroom counters for the first time in weeks because this is the first chance I've gotten to do it. I see many years of jiggly belly and peeling nails and much-delayed haircuts and gray hairs, and it's discouraging.

I so much want to have an answer to the question--What would I LIKE to be doing in three years?--but right now, my life is getting in the way of being able to answer it.

Food Frustrations

I didn't give Avonlea solids until 6 months. It wasn't some kind of weird stance or anything--it was mostly because I was (let's face it) lazy. It was just easier to cart Avonlea around without a bunch of other food and equipment, and with how my brain is working lately, I would forget half the time, anyways.

At 6 months, we started giving her solids. Purees, mostly--apples, peaches, pears, peas, carrots, sweet potatoes (of which she is now allergic). I would also give her slices of apples and carrots to gnaw on, which worked well.

She took to purees pretty well. She wouldn't eat a lot at one sitting, but she was still being breastfed, so I wasn't worried about the calories.

She figured out how to use the pouches at 9 months, sucking the food out on her own, which was nice and helpful. Again, she still wasn't eating a lot, but she was trying out new foods, and seemed to enjoy whatever we would give her (well, except peas. She hated eating peas by themselves.).  She did show signs of stubbornness--if I gave her a spoonful of something she didn't like, she wasn't eager to try anything else from a spoon that meal. It was like she didn't trust me or something.

About a month ago, she really hit her stride. She figured out how to hold the pouches, and could eat everything in it (or almost everything). I was excited because we were finally to the point where we weren't throwing food away!  She would be quirky, and one week not eat from a spoon at all, and only eat from a pouch, and the following week, it would reverse--but she was still eating.  I continued to give her bits of "real" food, too--a stalk of steamed broccoli, apples, some rice puffs, a bit of pancake, a cracker, some goldfish, some Cheerios.  She would gnaw on them, but she wouldn't swallow anything solid.  If it was too big, she would just work it with her tongue until she could spit it back out.

Well, about 3 weeks ago, she decided she no longer wanted food. Nothing. No purees, no solids, no finger foods.  She won't let me feed her, and she won't take purees from a pouch herself.  I will put some "real" food in front of her, and she will play with it, but next to nothing goes in her mouth (the dogs have learned to sit by her high chair, because she will often drop the food off the side).  If I try to put something in her mouth, she turns her head away quickly, or spits it out immediately--she doesn't even taste it.

Around 9 months, when she got on the food kick, I slowed down her breastfeeding during the day--but as a result, she was waking up every couple of hours at night to eat.  Since she's been on the food strike, I am breastfeeding her more during the day, and she's letting me sleep 5 hour stretches at night. Yes, I know she should be sleeping all night. I KNOW. I was hoping that by bumping up her calories during the day, she would sleep better--but that is blowing up in my face.

I am just really frustrated. I try new foods, she won't eat them. I try "favorite" foods, and nothing. I try purees from a spoon and from a pouch, and I may get her to eat one bite or one sip from the pouch, then she won't eat any more. She won't eat ANYTHING chunky. I have been a successful getting her to eat Greek yogurt--but if she gets any fruit bits, she works and spits them out.

We're on a strict budget, so I HATE buying food that she ends up not eating, and then I have to throw out.

Did any of you experience this problem? Should I just ride it out, or should I worry that I'll be serving my baby a pureed 1-year cake?

Before I had a kid, I was an idiot.

Before I had a kid, I was an idiot.

I wasn't stupid. After all, I got a decent score on my ACTs. I graduated with an acceptable GPA from my high school and college. I graduated from grad school with a 4.0. I have fun impressing people with my Jeopardy! knowledge. I'm a smart girl.

But I was an idiot.

That's the only way I can figure how I would think I had any reasonable idea as to what to expect when I had my own living, breathing human being to take care of day in and day out. "I'm not going to do that." "My kid won't do that." "My baby will be doing this."  Blah, blah, blah, fishcakes.

I wrote recently about how I don't feel like I will ever really have the parenting thing down. I get one thing together, and something else inevitably falls apart.

But these days, I feel like every. single. thing. I am doing is screwed up in some way...and it is my fault.

See, I thought that in order to be a "good mom", I had to do it all. Well, maybe not do it all, but try to do it all right.  Keep the house clean, keep the kid clean, breastfeed exclusively, get her on a schedule, make sure she sleeps in her own bed, don't worry about giving her solid foods until she's 6 months, get dinner on the table every night, yadda, yadda, yadda. Every single thing I was doing I was doing it as well as I could, but also simultaneously feeling like I was doing it wrong.

We have 2 dogs, and one saying that we tried to maintain throughout the puppy years was, "If you don't want the dog doing _____ when they're 150 pounds, don't let them do it when they're 15 pounds."  So, Waldo and Gus don't get on the couch. They get in and out of the car and the bathtub without help. They sit when they come in the house if it's raining, so that I can wipe off their paws.

I feel like with Avonlea, I've screwed up so much, and I've made things so hard on myself. She's a figurative 150lb dog that I didn't train right when she was 15lbs.

I worked so hard on breastfeeding that now, she will only eat from me. She spits out anything with texture, so she doesn't get any nutrients from "real food", and I am wasting tons of money on baby food that she eats one or two bites from. I also feed her before putting her down for a nap, or down for bed at night, so now she will scream if she doesn't get fed before bed.  Know who that messes up? Definitely not the little munchkin happily fed and sleeping in her bed.

I was lazy in the beginning, and once I found out she wasn't going to take a bottle anymore, I didn't press the issue. I didn't work with her to take a bottle. So now she doesn't take one. She does do a sippy cup and a cup with a straw, but I have never tried feeding her with that before putting her to bed. I never tried to have Nick feed her before putting her to bed. So now I am the one who has to put her to bed every night.

Avonlea still only sleeps in 2-3 hour stretches at night. I know I should sleep train her. I do. I have all of this guilt that she's keeping Nick up and he has to work and I get mad because I just want to stinking sleep already, but my boobs hurt if she goes really long between feedings because she eats every 2 hours at night that I just get up and feed her and she goes right back to sleep. And if I don't feed her then she screams for 1.5 hours, or maybe more but I don't know because by that time I lose my mind and just get up and feed her. So now I have a 10.5 month old who gets up at least 3 times every night and so I can't go do anything past 10pm because my kid will wake up and want to eat. Nick and I have tickets to see my favorite musical group on Sunday, and it's going to be a train wreck (pretty sure I can't convince them to only have the concert between 7 and 10pm).

My baby is a sweet, adorable, snuggly pair of handcuffs, and it is all my fault.

I'm already saying, "Oh, I'm going to do things so differently with the next kid," and then I stop myself and think, "Next kid? Oh, #*#& no!"

The Inconvenient Truth

Avonlea is 5 1/2 months old now. She's sitting up all by herself, she's smiley and giggly and overall a lot of fun.

But there are 2 things about her that are really inconvenient.

1. She only sleeps in 4-hour stretches.  I'm working on this, trying to sleep-train, but I am convinced that "sleep training" is loosely translated as "baby is fine and mommy gets no sleep".  Last night, she fussed for an hour before I just got so sick of it, I went in and fed her.  I didn't feed her very long--I cut her off after just a minute or two on each side--but I still fed her.  I was just tired of trying to get her to go back to sleep! But of course, after feeding her, she fell asleep immediately, and I was wide awake.

2. She won't take a bottle.  I've tried. I've done different bottles, different nipples, warm milk, cool milk, from a straw...nothing.  She gnaws on the bottle and gets a little bit, but there's no sucking at all.  Which means, she is handcuffed to me as her primary source of nutrition.  It makes "date night" a non-concept in our household.  Even me going out and doing anything by myself is a thing of the past.  I am limited to sub-3-hour excursions.

Both of these things are frustrating and inconvenient.

But, really, in the scheme of life, is it really that big of a deal?  Yes, it's inconvenient.  But, at most, it is a year. A year in the life of my sweet girl who is learning how to sleep and eat and, you know, live. Aren't there worse things to be handcuffed to than the life of the little one you birthed and are committed to help grow and mature and learn to do things in this crazy world?  Yes, breastfeeding in public is inconvenient, and carrying around an increasingly heavy baby is cumbersome, but when you compare it to the next 35 years when you'll be wishing you were able to control exactly where they go and what they eat, isn't it worth it to just suck it up for a year?

A year is nothing. It goes by so quickly, it can seem like it is a vapor. You look back and realize that the years have vanished, and you wonder what happened. I just think of the lyrics to the Trace Adkins song:

You're gonna miss this.
You're gonna want this back.
You're gonna wish these days hadn't gone by so fast.
These are some good times,
So take a good look around.
You may not know it now,
But you're gonna miss this.

There are so many things that I will look back on and wish I could do over again--and getting to snuggle with my baby is definitely one of them.

So while it is inconvenient, I do not regret it. I choose not to be angry or frustrated by it. I choose to embrace it, and hold my little girl for as long as she'll let me.

No More of This!!!

Last night was my breaking point.

Avonlea was up every hour or two throughout the night, writhing and crying out in her uncomfortable cry. I tried several different swaddlings, and she was breaking out or trying to break out of everything I did.

Finally, at about 4am, I took her into the family room and stuck her in the swing where she slept for 3 hours, and I was able to get some sleep.

I can't do this anymore. So, today started the "sleep without a swaddle" training. It took her 45 minutes to fall asleep during her nap today, but then she slept for 2 hours out of the swaddle.

Tonight, she was EXHAUSTED. I put her in a sleep sack, and she fell asleep within 5 minutes. But we'll see how long she stays asleep.

Of course, I can't sleep now.

Bad Day

Things have been going really well. Avonlea has been sleeping well, eating well, and fussing less. I got her new toy out a couple of days ago, and she has been fascinated with it, laying under it for 20 minutes or more without skipping a beat.

Until today.

She usually sleeps about 5-6 hours during the day. Today, she slept less than one.

She is currently in her bed, fed, washed, changed, and crying because I couldn't handle her yelling in my ear anymore.

She cried if I put her down. She cried if I picked her up. She cried while she was eating. She cried if she wasn't eating. She cried during her bath. She cried when I was changing her. She cried if I put her under her toy. She cried if I swaddled her.

I am exhausted. When Nick got home, I asked him to take her so that I could go and get something for us to eat, since I couldn't get anything done today.

I have learned that babies sleep well at night when they sleep well during the day. I'm so screwed tonight.

The Day I Took My Sanity Back

There have been so many things I have wanted to write about over the last 3 weeks, but just a lack of time has prevented it. I'm sad, because I have forgotten many things, and I wanted to have that record of how I was feeling.

I have had it suggested to me that I might have some postpartum depression.  I can see how that might be the case. But I really don't feel like I'm spiraling. I'm getting out of bed every day without any problems. I want to take care of Avonlea. I want to take care of my house, and Nick.

This was not the case when we first came home with Avonlea.

The first 2 days we were at home (Friday, Saturday and Sunday), I was spiraling. I felt myself falling into this pit, and not seeing any way out of it. I was crying constantly. I was in pain (a little from the surgery, but mostly from breastfeeding), and the pain was directly a result of my daughter's latching problems--which, in turn, made me hate her.  Have you ever experienced what it is like to hate your daughter?

At that point, I decided to stop breastfeeding. Avonlea was extremely frustrated with each feeding--she was breathing fast and crying and getting angrier and more frustrated at each feeding, and I was bleeding and in pain throughout the entire feeding. And, she would cry constantly between feedings, too.

I kept pumping, but Sunday afternoon I decided that I had to stop, for at least a day. I needed to let my nipples heal, and I needed to take a step away so that I didn't continue these feelings of resentment towards Avonlea.  I was crying non-stop throughout the feedings at that point.

I felt like a failure. I mean, I couldn't even breastfeed for 3 days!  But on Monday, I talked to a lot of momma friends. And they assured me that no matter what happened with breastfeeding, I was still a good mom. I was the best mom for Avonlea. And she was healthy and was going to be fine, whether I breastfed, or fed breastmilk from a bottle, or had to go back to formula.

Monday was hard. But it was also good. Because by the end of the day, I gave myself permission to not breastfeed. I gave myself permission to do what was best for my mental sanity. And though it hurt my heart, and was yet ANOTHER thing that didn't go the way I planned, I felt myself leaving the downward spiral.  I was okay. She would be okay.

She did well on the bottle, and I felt my sanity slowly returning. I was able to look at things rationally again, and though I was still tired and emotional, I was able to be that way without feeling like I was drowning.

But I didn't want to give up on breastfeeding.  I made an appointment with a lactation consultant separate from the hospital. I tried to contact the lady from the hospital several times, but couldn't get in touch with her. So, I got some recommendations from friends in the area. I made the appointment on Thursday, and so I decided to continue to bottle-feed until the appointment.

Bottle feeding was easy in some ways, and difficult in others.  Nick could feed her--definite ease. I knew she was getting nutrition--definite ease.  One difficulty, though, was just the timing. While Avonlea was awake, I pumped while she ate--definitely glad this was happening while Nick was home for the week!  But overnight, she would eat at 3-hour intervals, and I was needing to pump every 2 hours. Needless to say, I didn't get a lot of sleep.

Thursday came, and I was extremely nervous. Would going back to breastfeeding make me a crazy person again?  The appointment went well. Mina noted that it was a combination of the time on the bottle in the NICU, plus my overproduction (making it difficult for Avonlea to latch), plus Avonlea's narrow latch that was making things so difficult. She recommended using the nipple shield while breastfeeding, at least for a little while. Working on Avonlea's lip positioning during feeding would help protect myself.  She also suggested breastfeeding during the day and pumping at night for a little bit, so that I could continue to heal.

I left the appointment feeling good, but when we got home, the familiar sinking feeling started to creep over me--it stems from wondering if what I am doing is right, and the logistics of timing and other things breastfeeding-related.

I eventually realized I just need to relax in it. I didn't read any books--that was one of the first good pieces of advice I got--I realized the books I was reading were helping to make me feel inadequate, so I stopped reading them.  I just needed to trust my body and what Avonlea was telling me.

I did the breastfeeding during the day and pumping at night for 2 nights--but quickly went to breastfeeding exclusively after realizing how much more sleep I would get. As I posted before, I cherish my sleep.

The feelings of drowning stopped on Friday. I just started trusting myself. I was having some fever (which was production-related), so I wasn't feeling 100%, but at least I felt like my brain wasn't mushy.

It's been over a week now, and it is going well. My production is evening out--Avonlea has gone 5 hours at night between feedings, and I don't feel like I'm going to die quite so much anymore. But, I think I'm going to start waking her up at the 4-hour mark anyway, so that she sleeps better, and so that I sleep better, too.

She eats every 2 hours during the day (when she stays awake), or every 3-4 hours if she takes a nap. At her appointment last week, she was up to 9lbs 6.5oz, so I know she's getting plenty of nutrition.  Now, I'm just thinking about her face--she gets horrible acne after feedings--and her tummy--she seems to be really uncomfortable, and is often squirmy during feedings. She's been spitting up a little bit, and is in a general state of fussiness all the time.

I'm not eating dairy right now, and I've been working on other things to make her tummy happy. She burps really well, but she's still fussy a lot, especially in the morning (before 10) and in the evening (from 6-9ish).

But she's been a champion sleeper--last night was the best yet, with her sleeping from 10 to 9, getting up three times to eat.

Figuring Out Our New Normal

Finally getting my head above water enough to write something.

My doctor was not concerned with my fever...at least, not yet. He believes it is related to my overproduction of milk. As for my other symptoms, I believe they are from lack of nutrition. I'm taking my vitamins every day, and I can tell when I don't take them.  I'm 9lbs away from my pre-baby weight. Nick is keeping an eye on me.

Life has been....going.  That's really all I can ask for, right?  I am managing to get a shower every other day. Avonlea is sleeping 3-4 hour stretches at night. Today marks one solid week of breastfeeding (tomorrow will be one week of exclusively breastfeeding), and it is finally getting better. My supply is evening out, and I am able to go 4 hours without feeling like exploding.  I'm using a nipple shield exclusively--hopefully I'll be able to wean off of using it soon.

I guess I'm just trying to figure out how to be a mom.

Sometimes I look at this little person and wonder if she's really mine. I mean, she doesn't look like me at all. She's the spitting image of Nick.

I wonder about those women that see their babies for the first time and have this instant connection to them, and have this overwhelming feeling of love. I didn't have that. I mean, I think I could have--the first night, sitting up with her and loving on her and getting to know her--I could see where that feeling comes from.  But after spending a week away from her, and having the feeling that she's not my child anymore, it created this disconnect.  I'm hoping that the feeling will come with time. Just right now, loving Avonlea is a choice, not a feeling.

I hope that doesn't make me sound like an unfeeling mom.  I really do love my daughter (and the fact that she's not hurting me every 3 hours when she eats is a big bonus). I just don't have these googly feelings whenever I think about her.

Mostly, I'm just tired. And she's not easy. She's pretty fussy a lot of the time. It's hard to love a baby that cries in your face so much. I'm working on figuring out the best way to soothe her, but it's a process. Maybe the lovey-dovey feelings would come easier if she were an easier baby.

I do have moments, though.  Yesterday I was able to do some baby massage for about 15 minutes without her crying. She was looking up at me with these big eyes, like she was figuring out who I am.

And maybe that's part of it--she's trying to figure me out, just as I'm trying to figure her out.

Adventures In Breastfeeding

One of the most amazing things about the birthing process to me is breastfeeding.  This tiny human comes out of you, having spent the last 9 months eating through their stomach, and with a whack on their back, they suddenly are able to eat, breathe, and cry out of their mouths.  Really, the whole system just makes evolution seem more and more ridiculous.  But, anyways...

Though breastfeeding is miraculous, it is far from easy. For me, it was not natural, not instinctual, not easy. When they handed the baby to me a half-hour after the surgery, and told me to feed her, I was so lost as to what to do. If there was any part of the baby process I wasn't ready for, this was it. I hadn't read enough books (or, any books for that matter), and the whole thing seemed so....confusing. I had no idea if I was doing it right, and no idea if she was getting remotely what she needed to survive. I took comfort in the fact that babies don't need a ton of nutrition right after they are born--but was I going to be able to do anything to get her what she needed?

The first night, Nick went home, and Avonlea and I did our best. She would go where she was supposed to, and suck a couple of times in a row, and then be done. It seemed like a victory to me, but I wasn't really sure. Then, she slept like a rock for 6 hours--and subsequently, I did, too--right before we were admitted to the NICU.  I knew I was supposed to be feeding her every 2 hours, but no one came to wake me up, and Avonlea didn't wake me up crying, so I guess she wasn't hungry.

I might have been okay if Avonlea hadn't needed to go to the NICU. Maybe I would've figured out the latching thing (I mean, how do you know what it is, exactly--when you have no context for what it's like in the first place?). Maybe I would've had an amazing lactation consultation the day after her birth, and we would've sailed on with flying colors.

But, it wasn't meant to be that way. Avonlea had to go to the NICU, and I had to tell them exactly how much she was nursing, and for how long she was latched on. The NICU is nothing if not precise in their measurements (they even measure how much each diaper weighs!). I started guessing. "Umm...well, I felt tugging on the left side for a couple of minutes, but it wasn't repeatedly tugging, so I guess maybe 5 minutes on that side?"

This doesn't sit well with NICU nurses. They want to know how high you jumped, and what shoes you jumped with, and what you were wearing at the time, and if your hair was wet or not--oh, and did you poop beforehand, because that might've made a difference in your height?  When they asked me when the last time she ate was, and I had to tell them, "6 hours ago", they looked at me like I was the worst mom ever. Seriously, there were bugged eyes. One of the nurses said, "you should have woken her up to feed her--she's a newborn."  Add to the fact that I was already crying because they were taking my daughter away, and it wasn't a good admission process.

It wasn't but a few hours into the stay at the NICU that they had Avonlea on bottled formula. Inside, I am screaming against it--but what can I really do? She's on antibiotics, so she has to have nutrition going through her system to get the kidneys flowing. And I'm only producing colostrum at this point (I knew that much, at least), so she's not getting that nutrition from me at this point--and I don't even know if she's getting my colostrum in the first place, because I don't wake up often enough, and mostly because I don't know what latching on is.

It was another area where I felt like a failure. Not only did I not get to have the birth experience that I wanted, but now I wasn't going to have the feeding that I wanted. I didn't want her to have sugar water--she got a paci dipped in it right after she was born. I wanted to breastfeed exclusively--I had no idea what I was doing.  I didn't want her to have formula supplements--she was on it as soon as we got to the NICU.

A nurse came and dropped off a pump to me, and told me I needed to pump every couple of hours. I had no idea how long I was supposed to pump, and I wasn't getting anything during the pumping. Is that normal? Or, I would get one or two drops. The NICU nurses told me to bring down anything that I was able to get--did they really mean for me to take down two drops of colostrum?  The NICU nurses seemed to indicate that yes, I should--but then the nurses on my floor rolled their eyes at my pithy little 5 droplets, and told me that they couldn't do anything with it.  The first time I threw away my vial with more than 2 drops in it, I cried.

Over the course of Friday, between running down to the NICU any chance I got, and back up to my room to eat or sign papers or go to the bathroom or get examined, I pumped. I pumped for 15 minutes on the dot, maybe every 3 hours or so.  And slowly, I started to get some production. Not a lot--less than 5cc's each time, and more from one side than the other--but it was a start.  The nurse who told me to throw away my little bottles of colostrum now told me that she was wrong and that I should take down anything and they would make it work--so I started feeling more confident. Friday night, I commented to Nick that I felt like my milk might be coming in, because my breasts felt a lot heavier and fuller.  When I went to bed, I got a raging case of the chills, and then in the middle of the night I had the sweats.

Then, Saturday morning, I woke up and my breasts were as hard as rocks. Like, I thought my skin was going to tear apart. I knew, if I wasn't on my pain medicine, I would probably have woken up screaming in pain.  Yeah, you guessed it. I was completely engorged on both sides.  I called my nurse, who came in and checked me and confirmed that I was engorged. She got me an anti-inflammatory drug (but not a lactation consultant).  I went online and looked up engorgement treatment, and started doing 15 minutes of heat, then pump for 20 minutes (while Nick massaged me), then 15 minutes of ice. My time away from my daughter was getting longer and longer, and now I wasn't getting anything out of my breasts.

I was tired, I was frustrated, and I was wishing I had some clue as to what was going on.

After reading some more, I went to only a few minutes of heat, then pump with massage, then ice. And again, slowly I started to get some production, and some relief from the stretching and the painful knots and lumps.

As my milk production grew (about 10cc's a day), I got more and more happy that I was able to provide some better nutrition for my daughter. Downstairs, she was not doing well with the formula. Yeah, enough of it was staying down for her to be doing fine health-wise, but she was getting a reputation as the pukiest, poopiest kid on the block.  There were 2 nurses who literally had to change their scrubs from top to bottom because Avonlea puked so violently on them.

She was also POUNDING her food. She would drink an entire bottle of formula in 2 minutes.

I was so excited to take down this bottle one morning:

Only to watch in dismay as she ate it in 35 seconds.  It took me all night to get that, girl!

Finally, on Saturday, a lactation consultant came to my room. She asked me a bunch of questions and handed me a bunch of flyers. When I told her that I wanted someone to come to the NICU and help me with Avonlea hands-on, she made an appointment for me the next day.

On Sunday afternoon, I finally had my first lactation appointment.  And it was hellish.  I stayed pretty cool the whole time--more than I can say for the lactation nurse--she was frustrated!  See, since Avonlea had gone so many days on the bottle, she was used to eating the easy way. Also, in the NICU, they feed "ad lib". So, basically whenever she started crying, they would feed her--so by Sunday, whenever she didn't get fed, she screamed bloody murder.  I mean, outrageous, purple-in-the-face ridiculous screaming.  Surprisingly, the screaming doesn't really bother me--but it did bother the NICU nurses. I learned this on one of the first days down there trying to breastfeed her. She started to cry, and 3 different nurses came to check on me to see what was wrong. (I felt really pressured to get the feeding thing right from them, and so when it wasn't going well, I felt really pressured to give in to the formula thing quickly--mommy guilt at its finest.)

We ended up feeding her the bottle, but the lactation nurse said we would try again. She had a couple of things she wanted to do.

Well, when we finally got together on Tuesday, it worked, and I finally learned what REAL latching on feels like! We used a breast shield to help us, and I think it really helped Avonlea to get hooked on right. I was excited and happy, and Avonlea actually ate from me for 15 minutes on both sides! Victory! She was only doing 5 or 6 sucks at a time, and she would stop every 5 minutes or so to fuss, but she was doing it!  Tuesday was the first day that she had enough milk (from a bottle) from me to last all day--and she didn't vomit at all the whole day.

I had a lingering doubt, though. Nick tried to help me put the nipple shield on the other side, and it was really hard to do. And I was thinking, "what am I going to do when the nurse isn't here? I'm not going to be able to put this thing on by myself."

In fact, today when I went in, I didn't think I would be breastfeeding, because I couldn't do it by myself.

And that's when God sent Vicki.  I have had a different nurse every day with Avonlea--but today's nurse also spent 27 years with her own lactation consultation business. She graciously stepped in to help me. A no-nonsense Hispanic lady, she quickly took charge and told me exactly what we were going to do. She told me to put the nipple shield away. She helped me to hold her the right way, to calm her before feeding, to talk quietly to her, to lead her nose-first to the breast. All things that the other consultant had told me, but this time it really clicked. I was doing it on my own--and Avonlea took to it like a charm. It took maybe 5 minutes of re-working my hold, and guiding my nipple to her correctly, but she totally got it.  She latched on to me sans nipple shield, and ate for 20 minutes without stopping. She went up to 10-20 sucks in a row, and not once did she let go of me.

Vicki actually suggested only feeding Avonlea on one side for a while, that way she can get used to the hold, get used to opening her mouth wide, and get used to working a little harder for the food. Vicki explained what I needed to be doing while pumping in a language I could understand, using her hands to demonstrate what she meant. She didn't come in and take over what I was doing, but she guided me to the right technique. She was a fabulous teacher.

When Nick came to pick me up, I wasn't ready--I wanted to stay and feed her again! This time, Vicki didn't help me at all. In fact, I didn't even know she was watching--until I had gotten Avonlea latched on, and I heard her praise me from the side of Avonlea's bed, telling me I had gotten an A+.

Tonight, when Nick and I went back for our evening with Avonlea, I couldn't wait to show him what I had learned. And Avonlea stepped up like a champ. She ate for 25 minutes on one side, and then used the bottle for the rest (which we'll do until I feel like I can take her to my other side). I was so proud to see her little Momma's Milk Mustache:

Breastfeeding has been a struggle, but I am loving where I am at now. I know that there will be hard times ahead still--but now I know that I can do it by myself, without any tricks or special tools. Just her and me, the way it's supposed to be.

(I left out a few details of this story, I am sure, but I am tired and I need to go and pump.)