To Breast or not to Breast?

Moms who read this blog...I'm very curious to know whether or not you were pressured to breastfeed over formula feed -- and, in the case of the older generations, were you pressured NOT to breastfeed back when it was out of vogue? How did you make your choice? What were the factors you based your decision on -- work obligations? Physical difficulties?

I've been reading many articles on the matter, this being the most recent one to get me thinking: Are the Benefits of Breastmilk Oversold?

Moms-to-be, dads, those with no intention of ever having children...what are your feelings on the matter? Do you feel strongly one way or another?

I find the current debate today over breastfeeding to be fascinating. Moms who formula feed complain of pressure, guilt, from society, even if they have legitimate reasons for having chosen formula over breastfeeding. And who is to say whether a reason is "legitimate" or not? Is it selfish to "deprive" your baby of breastmilk simply because you didn't have the time to do it properly, or you had difficulty with the process and weren't willing to put yourself through weeks or months of pain?

I can offer my own story: I was lucky enough to want to breastfeed and to have the opportunity -- I've been working from home, my daughter had no difficulties latching on. I did NOT choose to breastfeed because of the insistence of our birthing class teacher, or La Leche League, or anybody else, that breast is best. I already knew I wanted to try, on a very personal level.

My reasons for continuing to do it, to be honest, are mostly selfish at this point. I love the experience. If I had a need to switch to formula, then I would be reluctant -- not because I feel that formula is not as good as breast milk, but because I've enjoyed sharing the time with Sadie. (I suppose I'd also miss the convenience -- heating up a bottle at 3am is never as easy as opening up the nursing bra.)

However, with that said, I always feel annoyed when people ask me if I'm breastfeeding and then, when I say yes, nod with approval and say, "Good for you!" Why do I need their approval? What are they thinking when someone responds, "No, I'm not?" Why is it any of their business how I nourish my child?

If you feel so inclined please leave a comment, I would love to hear your thoughts.

Doing Her a Solid

Sadie's five months old today, and to celebrate, we're starting solid foods.

If you'd asked me a few months ago I'd have said I had no desire to start solids until she was at least six months old. That's easy to say when you're banking 8-10 oz. of extra milk every day. But things are changing. I can't remember the last time I froze spare milk. Everything I pump just winds up being fed back to her by the babysitter. And the frozen supply, no matter what I do, is slowly dwindling. Now that my schedule is getting busier and I need a babysitter more often than I used to, that supply is going to dwindle even faster.

There's a list of requirements a baby must meet before a she can be considered "ready" to start solid foods. They should have doubled their birth weight AND weigh at least 15 pounds, be at least 4 months old (the AAP recommends 6 months), be able to hold their heads steady, be able to sit well while supported. Of all of these, Sadie has not hit the first two. She's still only 14 lbs. and change -- and is not even close to doubling her birth weight, which would put her near 16 lbs.

Regardless, everything else tells me she really needs to start taking in more calories. It's the lack of weight gain that has me concerned -- although she's hungry all the time, she isn't putting on weight except for the intermittent growth spurt week (and those are exhausting for both of us). And frequently she'll just want to eat all day, and no matter what I do -- eating oatmeal, pumping more often, waterloading -- has made much of a difference. The girl wants to EAT. My sister-in-law suggests drinking a pint of Guinness every night as a surefire way to up my supply, but my barley allergy (or is it hops? I forget) makes that a less than ideal option. I don't think Scott would appreciate dealing with the digestive issues that drinking beer gives me, on a nightly basis. He already puts up with my garlic obsession.

So, I admit I broke yesterday. I just wanted to see what would happen. I waited until dinnertime, put Sadie in the Bumbo, mixed half a tablespoon of rice cereal with 2 tablespoons of milk, warmed it up and offered it to her. And...what can I say? The girl is a Slurry. She ate it up like she'd been waiting for it her whole life. Well...by "ate it up," I mean she ate about half of it and the rest of it wound up on her bib and all over her face. You could see her trying to process this new style of food consumption as she wrapped her entire mouth around the spoon and tried to suck the cereal out of it. It was messy, but we got a few good spoonfuls in there. When we finished she was hungry for more.

Tonight I'm going to up her serving to a tablespoon of cereal, 4 tablespoons of milk. This is all per her doctor, by the way -- I didn't just decide out of the clear blue to start feeding. But now that we've started, I have a feeling we aren't going to be stopping.

Happy Baby

Portraits2-12-10_02



Originally uploaded by AstroCry

Our babysitter likes to take pictures of Sadie while we're out.

I'm glad she does.

You Like Us, You Really Like Us

Two things I learned on this trip:

1. A surefire home remedy for teething pain is gnawing on a frozen mini bagel. I was told this by not one, but TWO sets of relatives, and neither one was aware that the other had given me this same advice. Which means it has to be true. And as soon as we've got Sadie started on solid foods, I plan to try it out.

2. A lot of people read this blog. I mean, not a LOT, but more than I thought. Many times over the course of our vacation, people told me that they enjoyed following the Slurry Baby Blog because it reminded them of their own kids growing up, or found it funny, or appreciated the photos and videos. Some even told me that they had forwarded it on to friends who might enjoy it. This was really nice to hear. Readers, feel free to leave me a comment here saying hello, even if you don't know us personally. We promise not to get creeped out. As proof, here is a video of Sadie in the Jumparoo, not being creeped out.

Sadie in the Jumparoo

Wedding Bells and Lobster Rolls

Sadie at wedding

We've been out of town for the past week, traveling first down to Fallbrook for my sister's wedding, then up to the Bay Area to visit all of our friends and family. It was a great but exhausting trip, as evidenced by the fact that the baby has been sleeping with very few breaks from the time we got home yesterday evening, up until now. As I write this post, she's been asleep for 2 hours. Of course, now that I'm in the middle of a project I predict she'll wake up about two minutes from now.

I'll post again with more details, but for now the broad overview of the trip: it presented a ton of challenges, and we managed to conquer almost all of them. How, for instance, do you sleep in the same room as a baby who is used to having a room all to herself since she was 4 weeks old? Answer: you stick her in the closet. Or, if a closet is not available, you rig up a makeshift wall by thumb-tacking three sheets to the ceiling and draping them over the crib. (Then you proceed to stress about the baby having enough air to breathe at night.) In the first case it worked like a charm; in the latter case, not as great, and she woke up a bunch of times during the night. But it could have been much worse.

In all other ways, she behaved like an angel, considering she was besieged by new faces every single day, all getting up in her grill to go, "Oooooooh!" On a couple of occasions she did get spooked by this, but for the most part she handled the barrage of new information with good humor and curiosity. She charmed my old college friends, reunited with her aunt, met her great-grandfather, and attended a wedding reception where she was unfazed by the loud thumping baseline of Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance."

Car travel was made easier by our recent upgrade from the Snugride infant seat to a larger convertible carseat. We went with the Graco MyRide, which Scott insists has the best ratings and wasn't super expensive, either. Sadie definitely prefers not having her feet poking out over the edge of her carseat, and not having her head flopping from side to side helps, too.

In development news (I love posting the new things she's doing), Sadie now reaches her arms out towards you when she wants to be picked up. She yells at you when you leave the room, and leans into you when you hold her. I'm teaching her how to kiss -- that is, I'm covering her face in kisses while saying, "Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!" I'm not sure if she's learning anything new from it, but she definitely thinks I'm crazy. Still no rolling over, but I'm learning to appreciate her immobility while it lasts.

The Light at the End of the Tunnel

Sadie had a bad week last week.

It's funny because I didn't actually realize it until it was over; it doesn't really work that way. She'll often have an off day, where she's especially fussy or sleepy or otherwise bad-tempered, and it's usually followed by a better day. When I think back on last week, though, it was a progression of really tough days.

She cried a lot. They say babies are too young at this age to experience separation anxiety, but try explaining that to a baby who screams every time you leave her line of vision. (After all, as far as she knows, once she can't see me anymore I have ceased to exist entirely.) She managed to completely wear out our otherwise saintly babysitter with nonstop fussing. She'd cry when you put her on her back to play. She'd cry before naps. She'd cry upon waking up from naps.

It all culminated in a day that was worse than all the rest -- Super Bowl Sunday. She fussed pretty much all day, refused to go to sleep, then got overtired and fussed even harder. She just seemed miserable. She wanted to nurse constantly, and eventually I ran out of milk and that REALLY pissed her off.

That's the other thing about this past week -- her stomach, like, doubled in size. Quite literally, she went from taking 4 or 5 ounces of milk at an average feeding to taking 7 or 8. That's a big enough jump that my body can't adjust right away, which means I'm just nursing steadily trying to up my milk supply, while supplementing with frozen milk. I try to pump an extra feeding's worth of milk every morning, but most mornings last week I would just wind up feeding it right back to her in order to satiate her, and was starting to panic about running out of milk entirely.

This week, fortunately, things have finally leveled out. I'm producing enough milk (the key is drinking an assload of water and never letting yourself get dehydrated), so that helps, but more to the point, I think Sadie's just come out the far end of a wicked growth spurt.

And what is our reward for having toughed it out? Oh, it's pretty awesome. She emerged from her growth spurt a brand new baby. Instead of a laugh here and there, she now belly-laughs for minutes at a end, amused by surprising little things like the way we pronounce a word or a toy being bounced across her line of vision. She utterly adores her Jumparoo, and instead of melting into the seat and bobbling like she did last week, she now holds herself up and jumps up and down so enthusiastically that she has, on occasion, freaked herself out. And until you have witnessed a baby who's shrieking with joy and crying with terror at the same time, my friend, you have not LIVED.

Sounds Amazing

One of the awesomest parts of watching a baby grow comes when they learn something new. Sadie seems to pick up most skills somewhat gradually, like reaching out and grabbing. She had to figure out how to work her fingers, how to arrange them around an object depending on its shape, how to extend her arm outward; finally, she got the hang of it.

When it comes to making sounds, though, she picks up on new things quickly and hilariously. What happens is she'll stumble upon a new sound as it comes out of her mouth. If she likes it, she'll try it again. Then 40,000 more times over the course of a couple of days, at which point she'll get bored of it and stow it away in her vocal arsenal for later use. The last time she made a discovery like this it was the raspberry, which she proceeded to blow in my direction for several hours as we ran errands. (One of my favorite memories, I think, will always be watching her raspberry at me repeatedly as she sat in her car seat in a shopping cart at Costco.) Another time it was the gargle -- she spent all day gargling like she was making her way through a bottle of Scope, then got tired of it and I haven't heard her do it since.

Anyway, this is her newest sound. She stumbled across it yesterday as she lay on my lap, and this afternoon when I put her down for her nap she decided that instead of sleep, she was going to work on her dolphin impression. I think she nailed it pretty good.

I should issue a quick warning before you watch the video -- Pepper got right up behind me and barked right before I stopped shooting video, so if you have your speakers turned up loud be prepared right around 0:30.

Sadie baby squeaks

Stroller Madness

Of all the shopping decisions we had to make when I was pregnant, the one that most intimidated me was the stroller. In my mind, I'd always assumed that a stroller was a stroller was a stroller -- it has four wheels, you put your baby in it and you go.

Silly, silly me. Stroller shopping is very much like car shopping. Would you go and buy the first car you saw at the first dealership you happened by? Of course not, you stupid person. What if you ended up with a Chevrolet? So why would you do that to your child? What if you wound up buying him the Chrysler Sebring of strollers? You've got to do COMPARISON SHOPPING.

Of course, being eight months pregnant, sore and grouchy is not the best time to test drive a car, and so naturally it is not the best time to test drive a stroller, either. We walked into Kids Land, into a veritable sea of strollers, and you should have seen the looks on our faces. We just meandered up and down the aisles, silent and confused. There were jogging strollers. Umbrella strollers. Full-size strollers. Double strollers. Travel systems. Strollers with infant bassinets that converted to toddler seats. Orbits and Quinnys and Stokes and Bugaboos and Uppababys and Peg Peregos and Maclarens and... (Any new parent reading this journal entry is nodding sympathetically right now, I guarantee.) How were you supposed to know what to buy?

In the end, we wound up doing the easy thing: we bought a Graco Snugride carseat that converts into an infant stroller, and then accepted the stroller part of it secondhand from friends. This, my friends, is the Snap n Go:

Snap n Go

I call this the Honda Civic of strollers. It's classic. Easily recognizable. Affordable, but sturdy and well-reviewed. Very few frills, but you'll always have somewhere to stick your water bottle. And the trunk space is actually quite generous.

So this is what we've been using with Sadie up until now. And while it's been dependable, there are things you just don't do with the Snap n' Go, just as you wouldn't do them with a Honda Civic. You wouldn't go off-roading in your Civic, for example. And you maybe wouldn't take a long road trip in your Civic, because while your Civic is great for driving to the supermarket, it is not so good for 9-hour car rides when you want to stretch out your legs and take a nap.

And similarly, the Snap n' Go was limiting our baby-inclusive activities severely. A hike through Griffith Park turned embarrassing when the trail turned rough and we were suddenly spinning our tires up a steep incline. A simple walk down the sidewalk could turn into a sudden challenge if the sidewalk buckled. More than once, I hit a bump I thought I could simply push the stroller over, only to have it stop sharply and tip forward, sending me, the baby and the dogs all pitching forward comically.

And so finally, it became time to add a second stroller to our arsenal. A bigger one, with big fat wheels that can handle dips and holes and buckled sidewalks. And this time, we were better prepared. We'd seen the strollers our friends had, we'd figured out what we needed, and we knew our budget. In addition, we had a secret weapon: CRAIGSLIST. Once you  figure out that strollers are usually outgrown long before they physically wear out, it can often make more sense to buy a perfectly good stroller secondhand than to pay for a brand new one.

But of course, we still had to go back to Kids Land and test drive again and decide on a favorite stroller. While we were there, we spotted several pregnant couples with the exact same haunted looks on their faces as they wandered the aisles, clueless and overwhelmed. Oh guys, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

What we eventually ended up with, if you're curious, was a secondhand Baby Jogger City Elite that is, in a word, rad. We got it inside and looked at it and admired it and took the baby out for a test walk and she loved it because the canopy hides her face from the sun and the dogs love it because it's quiet and we love it, love it, love it.

Baby Jogger

Last night we lay in bed talking about the stroller. "I really like it," I said. "It's perfect for going for walks. And now we can walk to Farmers' Market on Sunday mornings, and hike up to the observatory."

"Yeah."

I paused. "The only thing it isn't good for is, like, shopping or meeting someone for coffee. Fitting into tight spaces. Because it's so big."

"Well...we should probably get an umbrella stroller for things like that."

"Yeah, probably. The Peg Peregos have that double handle you like."

"Well, I was thinking we'd probably go with a Maclaren..."

And it begins again.

 

4 Months and Growing

Last week Sadie had her four month check-up. She continues to be about average to slightly above-average in weight (clocking in at 13 lbs. 12 oz now), but the real shock was her height. She went from average length at her 2 month check-up, to 80th percentile this time around (25 1/2"). "She has the legs of a nine-month-old," our pediatrician informed us cheerfully. Well, that explains why her feet are busting out the bottom of her 6 month sized pajamas. Unfortunately, she's also pretty skinny, which means that even though her legs are long, her body is thin, so all the material in her clothes bunches around her body and occasionally into her face. She'll be rocking the 6 month size awhile longer before I can move her into the next size up.

Sadie was none too happy to get her vaccinations. I think it was worse than last time, in fact, because her lungs are better developed and she's a lot more in the moment than she was at 9 weeks. I made Scott be the one to hold her arms down this time, so he could know what it feels like to be the bad guy. That turned out to be a mean thing to do -- I think it really upset him. At any rate, she was fussy for a few days afterward, but went back to her normal happy self fairly quickly.

I don't imagine there's an actual connection, but it seems like her vaccination weeks always come hand in hand with some new developmental leap. Last time, the day she got her shots was also the day she first laughed (not at the same time. Naturally). This time, she seems to have discovered her feet. Her new favorite pasttime is lying on her back, grabbing her legs and attempting to shove her toes in her mouth. Still no rolling, though.

The doctor also told us that starting at 5 months we can start feeding Sadie solid food. My emotional response to this news was about the same as it was to the news that we were going to be having a girl: I got all weepy inside and thought, "Oh my God, I'm catching a glimpse of the future." The thought of sitting Sadie in a high chair, spoon-feeding her strained peas, just does not jibe with my mental picture of her, in which she is perpetually very tiny and has no upper body strength.

While I'm excited to move to that next stage, I'm also saddened by the thought. For more than 4 months now, Sadie has been exclusively breastfed. I never set out to do it that way -- I was always open to the idea of supplementing with rice cereal or straight-up formula feeding if breastfeeding didn't work. But it was never necessary. Breastfeeding, from day one, has been a pleasure. It wasn't always easy -- yes, it hurt the first few weeks (especially at the beginning of mealtime when Sadie would first chomp down and I would involuntarily wince and make what Scott referred to as "that face"). And pumping, of course, is a giant pain in the ass, especially when you have to travel hundreds of miles with a giant mechanical breast pump and dozens of accompanying tiny plastic parts in your suitcase.

Those things aside, though, I can honestly say that feeding Sadie has always been the best part of the day. I love the little "ah, ah, ah" sounds she makes when I sit her down on my lap and she knows the milk is on its way. I love the memory of her when she was only a few weeks old, bobbing her head like a chicken as she tried to locate the right body part to latch onto. I love her "milk drunk" face, where milk dribbles down her chin and her eyes get all heavy and she looks like she's thinking, "ohhh man, I overdid it again." I love the intimacy of it, and how together we've gotten it down to a science, and how convenient it is, and these are all things I will miss one day when she doesn't need the boob anymore.

Sigh...okay, emotional sniffy-ness over, I promise. Several people have asked us what kind of sleep schedule we keep Sadie on, and now that she's becoming consistent, I thought I'd write it down here. I should warn you in advance, though, that Sadie's a very nappy baby and apparently needs more sleep than your average 4 month old. All times are variable by an hour or more:

6:30am: wake up, eat, go back to sleep

9:00am: wake up for good

10:30am-11:30am: morning nap

1pm-1:30pm: midday catnap

3pm: here's where things get dicey. We used to be able to count on Sadie to go down for a solid 2.5 or 3 hours here, but more often now she cries and gets cranky but won't actually sleep until 4pm.

4pm-6pm: afternoon nap, often with wake-ups. I put her paci back in and she goes back to sleep, or sometimes I have to bounce her until she stops crying and gets sleepy again. I've been known to nurse her back to sleep even though according to the doctor this is a no-no.

9pm: bedtime

We've tried to experiment with the schedule, but this seems to work the best. She refuses to take a nap between 6 and 9pm, so if she wakes up at 5pm instead, we just put her to bed an hour earlier and she's cool with it.