allergist times

I took Nathaniel to the allergist yesterday. He was a champion for the nurse, and let her take his blood pressure without even a peep. He just sat there and looked at the pressure cuff and chilled. Here he is in his ADORABLE baby hospital gown.

Our doctor was ~1 million years old, and almost completely deaf. Examine this excerpt of our conversation:

Doctor: Tell me about his reactions.

Me: Well, when I gave him a Gerber Graduate Garden Tomato crunchie, he got hives everywhere the crunchie dust touched. It's dusted, like a Cheeto.

Doctor: What kind of food was that?

Me: a Gerber Graduates tomato crunchie.

Doctor: What?

Me: A crunchie. It's like a Cheeto.

Doctor: What?

Me: Cheetos.

Doctor: What?

Me: A kind of snack food.

Doctor: What?

Me: SNACK FOOD.

Doctor: Seafood? [with a look like, "WHY would you give your baby SEAFOOD?]

Me: No, SUH NAH KUH FOOD!

Doctor: Oh, snack food?

Needless to say, it was a super fun appointment. I told him about the foods Nathaniel had reacted to, and then about some other random rashes I've found on him--including a raised rash he STILL has from a band-aid his doctor put on him after a shot on April 16th. Yes, he has had a rash for over 2 weeks from a baby band-aid. I'm not sure the doctor was listening/could hear me/noticed. But I did mention it.

In the end, he had a skin test for all sorts of things, like oranges and dust and pork and so forth. He got a giant hive for milk, and a giant hive for peanuts, and a smaller hive for eggs.

The doctor said to keep breastfeeding as long as possible, and to cut out those things from my diet. Sadday. I did have pasta carbonara for breakfast this morning, but I guess maybe I'll have to start cutting down on my dairy and egg intake. I already gave up peanuts, and I have always loathed milk and yogurt, but I have eggs with cheese for breakfast every morning. So I guess I need to find a new breakfast food.

nursing clothes tip!!

Okay! I feel compelled to share this with the world, because I had to figure it out on my own.

I decided that if I'm going to nurse my child for anywhere close to the medically recommended two years, I needed a nursing-friendly wardrobe.

I started out buying legit nursing clothes. But it turns out, those are often way expensive, and also they are often not even cute. Most of the time, nursing clothes from motherhood stores also double as pregnancy clothes. So on a non-pregnant woman, they look baggy and shapeless.

Fortunately for me, though, fashion has dictated the return of the cross-wrap top. Here are two examples:




They're both from Target, although the first one is from Target years ago (it was my mom's).

Anyway. I've started stocking up on those, and additionally taking scissors to my old $2 camisoles from Forever XXI:



The camisoles now end right at the bra line (the picture above shows an uncut camisole and one I've taken scissors to). So when it's time to nurse, you pull up the camisole on the appropriate side. You're still totally covered on the other side, and I've found that with the stretch in the camisole fabric, most of the side you're nursing on stays covered too, if you're careful with it.

This solution is way, way cheaper than buying legit nursing clothes--and bonus, you can use these clothes even after you're not nursing, and you won't look like you're drowning in excess shirt! Yay!

Here is a nursing outfit that I love. It's a pencil skirt with a cross-wrap top and a homemade nursing tank as I showed above. I think it's a way cuter alternative to the kind of nursing clothes you would get from a maternity store.



That's my tip for the day.

mostly better

I'm mostly better now--just very, very tired!

Six days into my sickness my mother told me that I had better wean my baby, because my body was CLEARLY diverting so many nutrients to my breastmilk that it didn't have enough left over to heal.

Um.

How long is a normal cold? I asked.

Seven to fourteen days, she told me.

...

Come back to me in eight days, I said.

FYI, I'm pretty sure nursing had nothing to do with the fact that my cold took a normal amount of time to heal from. Although I am sure it has 100% everything to do with the fact that Nathaniel didn't get it.

funny nursing story

A night before Christmas Eve, all of us in Carl's family were gathered together for dinner and games and family time. During a game, Nathaniel got hungry. So I stealth-nursed him, which is what I call it when I have to nurse uncovered in public and just count on my nursing clothes to keep things discreet (which they thankfully do--apparently. Hence this story).

My little cousin Henry was next to me at the time, and he kept on poking Nathaniel, wanting to play.

"Please stop. He's eating," I told Henry.

"Oh," said Henry. He looked at Nathaniel, then back to me.

"Why is he eating your shirt?" he asked.

Good question.

"Well, you know--" I started.

"Why is he eating your shirt? WHY IS HE EATING YOUR SHIRT???"

"He's clearly the youngest child," his mom told me.

I never ended up answering the question.

answer to breastfeeding question

Over the weekend I discovered the answer to my question: it's eggs.

I've still been eating the leftover pasta carbonara, but I drink a lot of water with it to dilute it, and I give him some simethacone drops before nursing. He hasn't freaked out since I figured that out.

breastfeeding question

In the past week, I have had pasta carbonara twice. Both times, about an hour after I had some, Nathaniel got super upset. Something in the pasta must disagree with him, but I don't know what! Here are the ingredients:

- spaghetti noodles
- eggs
- parmesan cheese
- olive oil
- bacon
- granulated garlic
- salt
- onions

I'm assuming it must be the onions--but here's the problem. I have cooked onions in just about everything. We have tacos like 2x a week (love those things). Ground beef n' rice pie. Regular spaghetti.

He's never had a problem with garlic, bacon, eggs, noodles, onions, salt, or cheese separately. But the combination seems to just drive him crazy. Any ideas? I guess I just won't have any more carbonara (sadday!) but I'd like to know if there's anything else I should be avoiding.

Baby D and the Eye Infection

Ever since he was born, Baby D has had eye problems. Mostly just green gooeys, which I figured were normal. Over time, the gooeys dried up and stopped being a problem--in the right eye. Three days ago, though, his left eye got way worse.

When I saw "way worse," I mean that he had so many gooeys that unless I was washing them off his eyes every hour or so, he couldn't open his eye because his lashes were glued to his cheek. Also in the mornings he would wake up with just a giant encrusted line of green goop, dried, on his lashline. Poor kid.

But this morning it seems to have cleared up. Here is what I did:

1. Prayed

2. Dripped breastmilk into his eye every time we breastfed, and also used it on tissues and cotton balls to clean out the goopies

3. Massaged his tear duct every time we nursed (I tried to at other times, but he wouldn't hold still--but given a choice between nursing and having his tear duct rubbed or not nursing and not getting it rubbed, he picked nursing)

I will say that we only started the tear duct massage yesterday morning after some Google research, but it seems to have worked.

Yesterday I took him over to my mom's house so she could see him, and while he was sitting in his little chair his eyes got all goopy. So I used a tissue to wipe all the goo away. He didn't cry or anything, and he didn't really move that much. My mom noted this and said, "He trusts you."

That kind of melted my heart a little bit. She's right. This baby does trust me. Every time he gets goo in his nose I grab the nose bulb and suction it out. He hates it but he'll just look in my eyes and hold still while I do it, despite. I'm so glad he knows, at the tender age of, what? eleven weeks, that I only do things he hates because they're good for him.

That level of trust has come from a bunch of things: our breastfeeding relationship in which I feed him with my own body every time he shows signs of hunger (I try to catch it before he has to cry). Our bedsharing that means we basically cuddle all night long and he never has to be cold or lonely or scared or hungry in the night. Our showers together. How promptly I try to change his diaper (he hates being wet there so much!). How I carry him all the time, either in my arms or in a sling or wrap, so he never has to be lonely or bored.

And really, all those things have made my life infinitely easier. He rarely cries, because he never really needs to. It makes things way less stressful around here. I'm so glad I stumbled across natural parenting. It has been a real blessing.

why we chose attachment parenting

Nathaniel has slept so strangely tonight I just can't sleep. Strangely in a mostly good way--he went to sleep at 11 pm and has only gotten up once to nurse. But that's unusual, and my body is up, and so I'm blogging at 5:30 in the morning.

I've been meaning to blog about attachment parenting for a while. It's something I randomly discovered online while I was pregnant, and I am so glad I did.

Attachment parenting has seven basics, seven B's:

1. Birth bonding (bonding with the baby immediately after birth)
2. Breastfeeding
3. Babywearing
4. Bedding near the baby
5. "Belief in the language value of your baby's cry"
6. "Beware of baby trainers"
7. Balance

We did the whole birth bonding thing, and now we've been doing breastfeeding for a full 10 weeks. I wear Baby D pretty frequently in slings and my Moby wrap, and we co-sleep. I always try to remember that he only cries because he needs something, and I find myself ever more wary of those who say to put my baby on a schedule, or let him cry it out, or whatever. I feel great about all these choices, and I think Carl does too.

I picked attachment parenting after a lot of incidental research. I first stumbled across the idea on a random blog my friend sent me to on a day we were both bored. From there, I researched it a lot. For me, right now, this seems like the perfect parenting style. It addresses everything I didn't like about how I was raised, and in a way that I feel is easy and instinctive.

Breastfeeding was hard for the first few weeks, but every day it gets easier and it is one thing I truly cherish about my relationship with my baby. I feel like I wouldn't know him as well as I do without that.

A lot of people gasp in abject horror when they find out that our baby sleeps in our bed with us, but I wouldn't have it any other way. My body has been so attuned to his from the very beginning that there is no chance I would ever roll onto him. It was a million times harder to sleep when he was apart from me, in the hospital.

Attachment parenting isn't a checklist of steps to do or anything like that; it's a guide, or an approach to parenting that is all about helping your kids form an attachment to you.

To me, it's about helping my baby establish trust. I want him to always know that he can come to me and I will help him. To me, that means not pushing him away if he comes to me in the middle of the night with a nightmare when he's older. It means nurturing him with loving touch even when he's not a baby anymore. And right now, it means keeping him close to me always. My body is his natural habitat right now. I am his only source of nutrition, I am the one who reads his cries for what they are, and I am the one who changes and washes all those diapers. I am his safety.

I think we all like it that way.

nursing is awesome

I was just nursing Nathaniel. At one point, he let go and started cooing at me. When I cooed back, he erupted into the biggest smile ever, and stayed smiling for such a long time.

It melted my heart. <3