Monsters in the Bathroom

For the first three months Sadie was a bubbly, gurgling angel in the mornings and slowly developed into a fussy, angry demon as the day wore on. This is normal for a newborn, apparently, for reasons not fully understood. Whatever the reason, ever since she began approaching the 3 month point that routine has begun to flip (along with sleeping schedules, feeding schedules and every other kind of schedule I've managed to successfully establish, but that's a topic for another post). Last night the kid was Miss Congeniality, and this morning she rapidly devolved into a ball of angry yelly-ness.

When she gets this way she wants to be held and comforted, which is new. Before, it was motion and constant noise that soothed her and it didn't matter too much whether she was being rocked in my arms or in her mechanical swing. Now when she's fussy, putting her down anywhere makes it considerably worse. While I kind of dig knowing that I'm now the source of ultimate comfort for her, it makes doing anything requiring the use of my hands...well...difficult.

Her entirely new perspective on the world has led to other changes I hadn't expected. Typically, for example, I bring her into the bathroom with me while I shower. She plays in her bouncy seat, knocking a little purple hippo back and forth with her fist, and is cool as long as I've got some kind of loud noise going on -- the shower, the hairdryer, whatever. The hairdryer, in fact, as always been a source of comfort for Sadie, putting her into a kind of dream-like trance.

But this morning when I fired it up, she got a look of utter terror on her face and burst into sobs. You'd have thought I'd left her alone on the African savanna in the middle of lion territory, that's how upset she was.

I picked her up and she immediately quieted. I tried turning on the dryer while holding her. No problem. Put her back down in her bouncy seat and turned it on again.

"WAAAAAAAAHHHHHH."

Now, here's the thing. I get to look decent maybe one day out of every month, and this month I would like that day to be Christmas Eve when I get to have dinner with my 80-something grandparents, so DAMN IT I was going to dry my hair and nothing was going to stop me.

So picture this: I wind up drying my hair with Sadie in the Moby wrap curled up against my chest, while trying to hold the hairdryer angled away from her so that I won't fry her head. (This activity is probably not recommended by the APA.) Meanwhile, copious amounts of drool are getting all over both of us because her saliva glands just kicked into overdrive this past week. Also, there are boogers.

But my hair is now shiny and dry, the baby is not screaming, and I can chalk up one more tiny victory in this crazy parenting process.

Right Now I am Bored

And it's for a miraculous reason. The reason is, Sadie has been sleeping for the last three and a half hours.

Before that, she slept for another three hours.

Before that, she slept ten hours straight last night.

She's eaten a total of four times in the last 24 hours. This, from a baby who up until recently used to eat every 2-3 hours with a break in the middle of the night. Four times in 24 hours.

It's so weird, she's growing up.

Tummy Time Woes

Before I had a kid, I'd never heard of "tummy time." But once Sadie was born, all I knew from reading Babycenter was that it was absolutely imperative that Sadie have some, every day.

This is exactly what it sounds like: you plop the kid upside down on a blanket or rug and basically leave them to their own devices to kick, squirm and flail. The idea is that it helps develop their neck and upper body muscles, allowing them to first lift their heads, then raise their shoulders, prop themselves up on their elbows and ultimately roll over and crawl and all those lovely things you need a full range of body coordination to achieve.

By this point, 2 1/2 months, Sadie is supposed to be making strides in this arena. "By now, your baby is lifting her head and upper body to look around!" proclaims Babycenter's weekly updates, thoughtfully sent to my inbox every week so that I can obsess about what my baby can and cannot do versus every other 11 week old baby in the universe.

The problem? Sadie hates tummy time. Like, hates it with a passion and does not want anything to do with it. At first, she was hating it but at least trying to push herself up for a few minutes before giving up and collapsing into angry yelling. Now? She doesn't even bother to try. She's like, "why continue this charade?" Ever since she discovered her fingers, she's decided that rather than attempt to make progress during tummy time, she'd rather take advantage of the fact that her fists are located conveniently right next to her mouth. Why work for a long-term payoff when fist-sucking is so much easier and more satisfying? In this way, she's much like her mother.

Tummy time

Sadie Hams It Up for the Camera

This isn't the most scintillating footage of Sadie ever taken, but if you feel like staring into the eyes of a cute baby for a few minutes, then it'll be right up your alley.

Yesterday morning, I placed her on the bed and she started a flood of cooing and gurgling, mixed in with delighted smiles. I ran for the iPhone so I could try to get it on video, and naturally as soon as I held it up, she forgot about me entirely and just stared at the camera as though it were something she really, really, really wanted to put in her mouth.

Baby Sadie at 11 Weeks

We Have a Weirdo Baby

First she drove me crazy these past few days by refusing to sleep more than 30 minutes at a stretch. Not counting nighttime, but still. Do you know how hard it is to get ANYTHING done when your 10 week old baby is only sleeping 30 minutes at a time, every 2 or 3 hours? It is really, really hard.

Because you can't just pop them in the swing and walk away, you see. Babies have lightning-quick attention spans. So you must constantly be entertaining them with a rotating succession of positions, toys, movements, etc.

Here, for your entertainment, is a sample of what Sadie's schedule is like over the course of a couple hours when she is feeling particularly sleepless, snacky and cantankerous:

- Feed

- Burp

- Diaper Change

- Smile at silly faces on the changing table

- Change outfits (then cry)

- Get lotion put on dry spots (then cry)

- On boppy pillow on top of the bed, more silly faces

- Stare at rattle being shaken in face, whack with hand

- Cry

- Sit in bouncy seat, stare at purple hippo

- Cry

- Lie face-up on play mat, stare at flashing lights

- Flipped over for tummy time on play mat

- Cry after 2 minutes on tummy

- Feed again

- Burp

- Into swing

- Cry after 10 minutes in swing

- Placed into "Moby wrap" carrier while Mom does chores around the house

- Wriggle and fuss

- Taken out of Moby, wrapped in blanket and bounced in Mom's arms on yoga ball

- After flirting with sleep, decide instead to barf all over self, onesie, and Mom's arm

- Back to the changing table for onesie change, cry because tired

- Wrapped back in blanket and bounced some more

- Drift off to sleep

- Wake up 30 minutes later and DO IT ALL AGAIN

So this has been my last two days. Can you blame a girl for wishing, a few fleeting moments at a time, that she still lived the quiet, productive, childless life? Luckily, Sadie decided to make up for it on Wednesday night by giving me the best gift I could ever have asked for:

She slept for TEN AND A HALF HOURS straight.

Can I just bask in smugness, just for a tiny minute?

Okay, I'm done. No, wait:

OHMYGODOURBABYISAWESOME.

Okay, NOW I'm done.

10 Week (almost) Check-In

Our baby is starting to grow-up.

Occasionally, she will make huge developmental leaps in what seems like a few short hours, as if she's gone to bed with a certain amount of knowledge and then awakened with more. That's what has happened in the past week.

For one thing, I could swear she's been laughing. Or at least, she's beginning to start to learn how to laugh. It's hard to tell the difference between a smile combined with a delighted gurgle and a true laugh, but perhaps it's the beginning stages of laughter. At any rate, it's causing me to do endless variations of funny faces and silly noises in an attempt to get her to replicate the delight and develop her laughing muscles, and at the very least she finds it amusing when I get real close in her face and go, "Blooooop!"

What's more exciting is that rather than simply sitting back and observing the world around her, she's finally starting to develop a desire to touch and feel it. At first, she expressed this desire by tonguing every object that her face happened to come into contact with. The cloth mat she lies on while she does tummy time, her own fist, my shirt, the Moby, all wind up being poked repeatedly by her tongue.

But now, only in the past couple of days, she's turned another corner. Now when she focuses hard on an object, her hands begin to move in that object's direction. It's incredible to watch. This morning, for the first time, I dangled a rattle in front of her and watched as she began to wave her arm toward the rattle and eventually whacked it with her fist, promptly blowing her mind. She even curled a finger around one of the rattle's plastic rings. She doesn't yet understand the mechanics of reaching and then grabbing, but she's making the first steps.

The other big event this week was her two-month innoculations. Scott and I were steeling ourselves for days in preparation for this, because we've heard so many horror stories about how pleasant babies turn into angry, upset, pained monsters after they get their shots. And the act itself is traumatic for the parent -- I mean, they make you hold your baby's arms down, for heaven's sake, and they tell you to talk to your baby to "distract her." Do you understand how bad it feels to coo at your baby and get her to give you a trusting smile, knowing that in .02 seconds someone's going to jab a needle into her thigh?

The crying was short-lived, fortunately. By the time the nurse left and I'd bundled Sadie into a blanket, she was done with the tears. She fell asleep in the car on the way home and Scott and I looked at each other and shrugged, all, "Huh. That wasn't too hard."

And then. And then, she woke up.

Oh, lord. The anger.

The fury was epic. She was in pain, and she would try to stop crying, but then it would hurt again and she would burst into a fresh round of sobs. In between, she would look at me with an expression on her face that read, "Mom, why won't you make it STOP?" I wanted to die. Instead, I gave her 0.4 ml of Children's Tylenol, wrapped her in a warm blanket and held her tightly. She eventually went back to sleep and slept most of the afternoon. And when she woke up, she was the happy girl she'd been earlier that morning.

We have a great baby.

Life's a Gas

It's early morning. I change Sadie, powder her butt with cornstarch and wrap her in a nice warm blanket. I carry my sleepy, squinty-eyed child over to the glider for a feeding. The house is quiet and peaceful; the only noises are her tiny sighs. When she finishes, twenty minutes later, she looks up into my eyes and smiles.

Then she unleashes a tremendous fart. It's immediately followed by a wetter, deeper fart, signifying that she has just crapped a giant load in her diaper.

"Good girl!" I say, thrilled, as she beams at me, and I know it's going to be a good day.

Not every day is, though. On other days, Sadie wakes up fussy and gets progressively fussier. When I try to feed her, squirms and squeals with pain. Her face screws up, turns tomato-red and she grunts and cries out and kicks. All I can do is rub her belly and bicycle her legs and wait it out. We tried Mylicon, which is a mild version of adult antacid and is supposed to break up gas bubbles in the intestinal tract. They had no effect that I could see.

We got ourselves into this child-having way with the basic knowledge that babies pass gas, and that for the first few months they often suffer indigestion. So when Sadie started having stomach pains at a few weeks old, I figured it was normal. I tried to combat them by cutting out certain foods -- sushi, chocolate -- if the day after eating them I noticed she was battling indigestion.

But this method seemed imperfect at best. Sometimes I'd eat a giant, spicy meal and the next day she'd be fine. Another day I'd eat nothing but bland food and she'd still be squealing in pain the following morning. One night I ate sushi for dinner but cut out the wasabi; the next morning she was happy as a clam. We decided that it was the wasabi that had been bothering her, but something about that didn't make sense to me. Why would wasabi upset her stomach, but a plate full of five-alarm lamb vindaloo go down just fine? How could it be that a few bites of chocolate could be enough to cause her 24 hours of pain? What was the secret to curing my daughter's discomfort?

The whole time, I was actively and purposefully ignoring one item on the list of problem foods for breastfeeding moms: dairy. There's a good reason for this: I drink a lot of milk. It does a body good, so sue me! It goes into my breakfast cereal every morning, and sometimes I enjoy a nice glass of milk with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and apple slices for lunch, and occasionally it accompanies dessert in the evening. It's a good substitute meal, too, which is what my mom used to tell me when I was snacky as a kid (sorry I didn't believe you then, mom).

The thought of cutting such an essential food item out of my diet completely was repellent enough that I just decided not to even try. Besides, Sadie's drinking milk, so why would putting milk into my body be a bad thing? I researched milk allergies, discovered that they are relatively rare, and made the decision that Sadie probably didn't have one.

But over the last couple of weeks, it became apparent that something would need to change. I could no longer chalk up Sadie's one-day-great-the-next-day-in-terrible-discomfort to everyday indigestion or fussiness. The difference was too obvious: on bad days she was irritable, scowly, prone to crying and unable to nap for very long. On good days she slept like an angel, and was nothing but smiles when awake.

So a week ago, I made a decision: I'd cut milk out of my diet for seven days. That was far long enough to see an effect or lack thereof.

The first day, she was fine.

The second day, fine again.

By the end of the week, there was no doubt about it: a milk-less milk-fed Sadie is a happy Sadie. She's been utterly great all week, with no discomfort when she feeds, no need to endlessly bicycle her legs and massage her belly and run around wringing my hands when she won't stop crying. So there you have it: no more milk, and one content baby.