Lump Lament

Tonight Scott was playing with Sadie, lifting her up into the air with his hands under her armpits while yelling "WOOOO!" A minute later, he said, "Hey, did you notice that she has a lump in her chest?"

Um...is there something he could have said that would make me panic more? Maybe, "Look, Pepper's burying Sadie out the backyard." Perhaps, "Aw, how cute, Sadie found my beard trimmer." No, I think Baby Boob Lump pretty much tops the charts.

He took off her onesie and put a thumb on her right...well, I guess you'd call it a breast. It's really just skin with a little tiny pink nipple on it. (Sorry, honey, that you'll be reading this one day.) "Feel here," he instructed. I put my finger where his finger was and felt the small lump there, mushy and small like a raisin.

"It doesn't seem to bother her," I said, and my voice was calm but inside my chest my heart started beating fast. I made Scott Google "baby breast lump." I remembered the way I felt when I was fourteen, lying in bed one night, and found a lump in my own breast, tiny and painless but undeniably there. I remembered how dry my mouth got, how I spent the rest of the night sleepless, certain that my fate was to die of breast cancer before I'd even had a chance to lose my virginity. My mother rang up the doctor, who reassured me that cysts are normal and go away on their own, and I remember the relief I felt, even as I had a hard time believing that something that felt so alien and strange under my own skin could be harmless.

"They say it's normal," Scott said. I demanded he read me what the internet said (because that, of course, is where you should get all your facts from.) Luckily, the internet seems to have reached a consensus on baby boob lumps: they are quite normal, they come and go, and unless it becomes inflamed or swollen or hot, it's nothing to worry about.

It's odd to have this feeling now of loving something so hard that the least hint of something wrong leaves you nearly frantic with worry. How could we ever deal with it if something happened to her, if she was hurt or got really sick? Our friends' baby just spent a week in the hospital with RSV, a disease I'd never even heard of until a few months ago but which is apparently common, manifesting itself as a mild cold or flu in adults but very serious in babies. What would we do if Sadie got that sick? Yet I know all we can do is allow her to live in the world and try to keep her surroundings fairly clean, cross our fingers and hope for the best.

Baby Camoflage

The problem with this kid is that she tends to just blend in with her environs.

Sadie Camo

New Routines

Tomorrow Sadie turns four months old. She continues to change every single day. Just when I think I've figured out who this little person is, she changes into someone completely different. The baby she is now is not the baby she was at three months old. Hell, she's not the baby she was two weeks ago.

The biggest change is her new sleeping schedule -- she no longer goes down for a nap after 90 minutes, but stretches it out to two hours at a time. The short catnaps are becoming longer, and the long afternoon nap, which used to be reliably 2-3 hours long, is now spotted with constant wake-ups. Luckily, she does go back to sleep again, but no more uninterrupted stretches of blissful daytime sleep.

The swing, which used to be her best friend, she now treats with disdain at best. This is definitely a recent change that happened in a big hurry when it did happen. It used to be that if I wanted her to nap I'd bundle her up in a blanket so that her arms were pinned to her sides, pop her in the swing, turn on the overhead mobile and within a few minutes she'd be out.

Then, she began to fuss before falling asleep. Turning her head side to side, wriggling, then finally sleeping. Things began to wake her up more easily -- Pepper barking, me opening the back door -- and when she woke up, she had no desire to be in the swing anymore.

Finally, this past week, she has let us know loud and clear that she does not want to nap in the swing anymore, ever. Put her in there and she screams bloody murder. She'll be in the swing for playtime -- MAYBE. For a little while. But sleep, no. Fortunately, this refusal of the swing has come hand in hand with a newfound tolerance for hanging out in her crib, something she never used to do unless she was swaddled and already drowsy.  So there you go -- nap time is now in the crib, permanently.

The second change -- and I NEVER saw this coming -- is that she has decided she likes a pacifier after all. The first time I discovered this was right before I wrote my last blog post, in which I expressed frustration over why it was so hard to get Sadie to fall asleep.

Well, she doesn't cry any less when she's tired, but we've both discovered that if you pop a pacifier in her mouth, she instantly mellows out and goes into her nice, quiet alpha state. Go figure -- she used to want nothing to do with the "paci." It was like a poor excuse for a boob, and she used to be furious with me when I tried to offer it to her. And I used to appreciate that, because my fear has always been that she would get too attached to the paci and it would be tough to wean her off of it.

Now? Ha. If she wants it, she can have it, man. That tiny piece of rubber and plastic has been a lifesaver. They don't call it a pacifier for nothing.

Yelly McYellerson

Sadie yelling 16 weeks

It still blows me away that two weeks ago, Sadie wasn't a particularly noisy baby. And now she does this.

Sleep Weirdness

I guess this is what happens when you go around being smug that your baby is the best sleeper in the world: your baby decides to mess with you.

The nights of 10 straight hours of sleep are gone. Whereas she used to wake up once during the night on occasion, it's now not unusual for her to wake up twice, once at 1 or 2 and again at 5. She's also started going to bed later, which is really weird. I was under the impression that as they get older, their bedtimes get earlier. Sadie's been predictably asleep between 9 and 9:30 since she was 2 months old, so imagine our confusion when, this past week, she suddenly decided that she did not want to go to sleep at 9pm under any circumstances.

Instead, she wants to fuss and yell. For two nights in a row, we put her in her crib at 9pm, drowsy but awake as usual, only to have her fuss for the next hour. We'd go in, pick her up and rock her until her eyes got heavy, but as soon as we put her back down she'd begin yelling again. The longer we went without soothing her, the more frantic she got.

In addition, her reliable afternoon nap schedule has suddenly become, well, unreliable. She used to go down like clockwork every afternoon around 2:30 or 3, and sleep until 5:30 or 6. But in the last few days, she's woken up at 3:30 and not wanted to go back to sleep. Then she cries all evening because she's so tired. It's now become a routine that before any nap, long or short, she yells and fusses and acts generally upset, and this really sucks, especially because she never used to have troubles falling asleep before.

This is really not like her at all, and we've been trying to figure out what the problem is and how to fix it. We've got it into our heads that she no longer wants to be swaddled, which is why she now protests so hard when we wrap her up in the swaddling blanket for her long nap and at bedtime. But when we leave her unswaddled, she hates that too. (Plus she fusses before her short naps too, and she's never been swaddled for those.) She just recently outgrew her Miracle Blanket, and rather than stop swaddling all together, I went the wussy route and bought a couple of giant-size SwaddleMe blankets, the kind that you can practically fit a kindergartner into, they're so big. She has roundly rejected them, for reasons I cannot discern. When I put her in them, she cries and squirms and eventually her arms break loose and then I've got to wrap her up all over again.

So what to do? Stop swaddling, and hope that after a few sleepless nights she'll learn to stop waking herself up by whacking herself in the face with her hands? Continue to use the SwaddleMe blankets until she gets used to them?

Another related problem I'm now facing is that Sadie is becoming more and more reliant on nursing to soothe. This has become apparent over the last couple of weeks, when I started noticing that she was getting hungry more and more often. Then I realized that when she nurses, she isn't eating very much -- she'll quickly get distracted and pull off to start looking around and smiling. Then an hour later she'll start fussing again, and we nurse again. Because she's been so fussy before naps and bedtime, I've gotten into the habit of letting her nurse herself to sleep and then putting her into the crib once she's fallen asleep in my arms.

This is definitely not the sort of habit I want her to get into, and I think it's one reason why she's been waking us up so often at night -- she used to soothe herself back to sleep, and now she fusses to get me to come in and feed her even though she's not that hungry. Yesterday I found myself nursing her three or four times in as many hours, and today I nursed her, then tried to put her down for a nap an hour later, and she refused to fall asleep until I'd nursed her again. When she woke up again after THAT, I did what I'd promised myself I wouldn't do: I got a pacifier and gave her that instead.

And hey, what do you know? It worked like a charm. She's never wanted to take a paci from me before, but today she took it immediately and was asleep a minute later. She hasn't made a peep in over an hour, and I just went back in to her room to check on her, to see she's still got it in her mouth. So it looks as though in order to wean her from the comfort nursing, I'm going to have to start using a paci after all. So much for my predictable baby.
 

Baby Talk

Around three days ago, it was like a switch flipped in Sadie and she started vocalizing. It started with her discovery of the shriek/squeal, which I mentioned a few entries ago. She was apparently very proud of her newfound ability to make a sound other than crying, because she has since begun a torrent of baby talk that doesn't stop.

"Talk" is probably not the right word -- it's more a long sequences of "aaaaaahs" and "ow-wooooahs," but the interesting thing is that she does it in a way that mimics adult speech. She only "talks" when she's looking at you, and is much more likely to make her noises when you're responding to them -- making the conversation two-sided, as it were, rather than a random string of vocalizations that she's making just because she can.

Baby Sadie speaks 15 weeks

Shadowboxing

Ever since we got home from Washington, Sadie has decided that falling asleep is the thing she hates most in the world. Not actually sleeping -- just getting there.

I live by the 90 Minute Sleep Solution, which suggests putting the baby down for a nap after she's been awake for 90 minutes. It's this book that has enabled me to work out a daytime napping schedule for Sadie, and the consistency has been great to see. She stirs around 7, wakes up for real around 9, then goes back down at 10:30 for about half an hour. Around noon is when I take my long daily walk, and she'll usually snooze in the stroller. Then she goes down next around 2:30, which is when she takes her long afternoon nap until 5ish, and on an ideal day she'll take one final catnap from 6:30 to 7, then is awake until her bedtime at 9.

Great schedule, right? As long as she keeps to it, Sadie is a happy girl. She's generally good-natured anyway, and her meltdowns tend to be few and far between. That's why this new shift in behavior has me so baffled.

It first happened the day after we got back in town. As I wrapped her up in her miracle blanket, she began crying. Nothing unusual, but when I picked her up and started to rock her, instead of calming down instantly as she usually does, she only cried harder. I was convinced that something was wrong and went through the whole cycle: checking her diaper, massaging her belly in case she had gas, offering her something to eat in case she was hungry. But she just wanted to cry -- a lot.

Now, this seems to be her new routine, and it breaks my heart. She doesn't want to go down for a nap without sobbing for several minutes first, as if she's afraid of what will happen when she gets to dreamland. Even on her walk in the stroller yesterday, she wailed -- and she NEVER does that. The moving stroller is like her little zen world where nothing bad ever happens. And again this morning, as I wrapped her up for her 10:30 catnap, she utterly freaked out. I can't tell you how much it hurts my heart to see tears running down her cheeks, an expression on her face as she looks at me that says, "Mom, why won't you make this better?" She sucks her hands, she roots at my shirt but isn't interested in eating. She chokes, she's crying so hard. If I put her down, she cries harder. And finally, after she's worn herself out, she gives a few little hiccups and sobs and her eyes close.

I hope this is temporary. I hope this isn't the way things stay. We've been so lucky to have a happy baby who rarely cries and is easily comforted. Could it be the beginning of teething already, even though she's only three and a half months old?

Passin' Milestones

Sadie reached another milestone today: the ear-splitting shriek. This came out of nowhere, as I was putting on lotion after my shower while Sadie sat in her bouncy seat, batting her hippo back and forth. Of course, once she did it once, she proceeded to shriek another 467 times. Approximately. I wasn't really holding my breath waiting for her to reach this particular milestone.

She's almost 15 weeks old now. I went back and reread all my old blog entries yesterday, just to remind myself of what she was like when she was younger, because it's already difficult to remember. (Unlike the pregnancy itself, of which every single day is etched in my mind because they were all so damn long and uncomfortable). I'd forgotten that it used to take her so long to get her back to sleep each time she woke up in the night, or that she didn't always used to love bathtime. It used to be that every time she woke up at night, I'd have to unwrap her miracle blanket, change her, feed her, wrap her back up and then bounce her back to sleep -- a process that could take as long as an hour. Ha! Now when she cries I stumble out of bed, pick her up blanket and all, nurse her while still half-asleep, then lay her back down in her crib and have my head back on the pillow within 15 minutes.

I remember the nights I used to sleep in the nursery, getting up with her every hour or two and then soothing her back to sleep. By five or six, I'd walk down the hall to our bedroom to wake up Scott, who would take over watching her while I tried in vain to catch a few extra hours of sleep. I remember being too worried to introduce a bottle until she was four weeks old, afraid of that spectre known as nipple confusion, afraid that one day I'd try to nurse her and she'd refuse, wanting only the bottle. Now we know that not only will she take anything that's offered to her as long as it expresses milk, but she doesn't even mind if it hasn't been heated first.

The one milestone she seems nowhere near to approaching is rolling over. By this, the fourth month, she's supposed to be supporting herself while lying on her stomach, able to prop herself up and look around. We're making very slow progress in this area, due to her aforementioned hatred of "tummy time." We were making no progress at all, until my sister gave us, as a Christmas present, a tummy time mat with a little half-doughnut-shaped pillow Sadie can drape her arms over. This definitely helped -- instead of just lying there crying, she can actually pick up her head and look around. She'll even find me and smile at me. But her tolerance for any sort of belly-floor contact is very limited, and if you remove the pillow she still mostly just grunts and fusses and sucks her fist, then finally loses it completely. Plus I don't know how much the pillow is actually helping her develop her upper body, since she doesn't need to flex her arm muscles to hold herself up. Oh well...I'm sure in a few months I'll be wishing that she was still that immobile little 3 month old who stayed put.

Where Did Her Bottoms Go?

RehearsalDinner01



Originally uploaded by AstroCry

We spent the New Years holiday up in Quincy, Washington, attending the wedding of my old college friend Heather and her fiance, Jared. Neither of us had met Jared before, but upon meeting him it was clear that he was just like all of the men the rest of us "Mills girls" ended up with -- smart, bespectacled and kind.

And how did Sadie do on the trip? Great, actually. We were incredibly nervous about flying with her, despite assurances that three months is a great age for traveling. My hope was that she'd sleep on the plane the whole way there. Well...she didn't. But she only had two meltdowns, one in the Gladstones at LAX when she decided she was hungry and didn't want a bottle, and another once she got on the plane. You could almost hear the collective groan from people around us. Fortunately, a little bouncing and she quieted right down.

The trip itself was a wild adventure, from spending one whirlwind night in Seattle, to battling the rental car people for an hour the next morning in an attempt to switch out our rented minivan for an all-wheel-drive SUV, to braving snowy conditions on the Snoqualmie Pass as we crossed over into central Washington.

The place we stayed is located on the Columbia River, an alien landscape of sharply-cut gorges and flat prairie-land punctuated with steep hillsides. Everything had a light dusting of snow when we arrived, and another storm moved in that night and dumped several inches on the resort. It was magical and beautiful, every minute. And words can never express how much I love getting together with the old college crowd to share memories and gape over how much everyone has grown up.

Of course, everything was made tolerable solely because of the presence of Scott's sister, who babysat Sadie while we attended the rehearsal dinner and the wedding.

So, my advice for traveling with a young infant? Pack lots of diapers, prepare for some meltdowns when the schedule is inevitably disrupted, and expect the unexpected. In our case, the unexpected was Sadie conking out at Sea-Tac and sleeping all the way home, through the landing, even as I carried her through LAX, right until my dad picked us up and I handed her over to him so I could install her carseat. The next day, she slept like the dead.

Congratulations, Heather and Jared.