Hooray!

I took Baby Bean to the doctor today for his 1 month check-up. I was worried because he had started to put on weight last week but still hadn't quite hit his birthweight. I was so nervous about whether we would finally have made it to the 10 lbs, 2 oz mark. The scale my doctor uses is metric so when the numbers came up, I had no idea what they meant. It wasn't until my doctor did the conversion that we found out that he is now ... 10 lbs, 10 oz!!! That's almost a pound in a week. It looks like we have made it without formula!!!! The even better news is that now, I can do totally "on demand" feeding, no more trying to feed every three hours, even at night! While he feeds constantly during the day, I often struggle to wake him at night - now, I don't have to!!!!

Thank you, God!!!!

Keeper of the Home

As a Christian woman, I have struggled a bit in terms of my identity, most especially around what my roles as wife and mother are (and whether I should be stay-at-home). Sarah, at Emerging Mummy, has written a brilliant post on what it means to be the "Keeper of the Home." It's worth reading and you can see it here.

Baby Favourites

As I have baby on the mind, I thought I would share a few more of my absolute favourite baby gear items. I don't know what I would do without each of the three of these.

The first is the Arms Reach Co-Sleeper. I discovered this via Dr. Sears when I was trying to figure out how to get Pk to sleep. I was a bit unsure about the whole co-sleeping thing (I have since gotten over all of that but I still love our co-sleeper). This attaches on the side of the bed so that baby can be right there safely when you don't feel comfortable having the baby actually in your bed. We bought this model, the Universal, which functions like a Pack-n-Play - it can be a playpen as well. It's not cheap but the quality is outstanding. Baby Bean sleeps with us most of the time but when he is on his own, this is his bed. As an aside, it's interesting how quickly things change. When Pk was born, three years ago, I felt all this pressure to get her bassinet out of our room and into her own room at three months. I saw a student doctor with Baby Bean last week and she pointedly told me that the baby should now be in the parents' room for the first six months (and I know that is what the pediatric societies are now saying). Given that Pk is in with us a lot of the time at almost three, I think we can last with Baby Bean at least six months!
This is Baby Bean and I in our Sleepwrap. I am a committed babywearer (research shows that worn babies cry less, bond well with their caregivers and if you have a child who isn't a good sleeper or is hard to get down, you will know how wonderful a carrier can be - this was almost the only way I could get Pk down for naps at all). This one is WONDERFUL! I was really intimidated at the idea of tying a baby wrap style carrier but this is amazingly easy (although the first time I tried to put it on with all the fabric, Dh called me Obi Wan). Baby Bean LOVES this and when he is fussy, he is so happy to sleep close to mummy (and to be honest, I kind of miss the closeness with Baby Bean so this is a nice halfway point). We have worn it out a few times to shop, to the local farm and to the CBC open house and it has been wonderful. I never found a ring sling or a pocket sling very comfortable but this, I love. It was worth every cent!
This is the Ergo baby carrier and with Pk, it was a lifesaver. You can buy a newborn insert but I have heard that it isn't so great - we started with this when Pk was about 5 months old, I think. When she turned two, I was still wearing it with her to hike with the dogs. As far as I am concerned, this is truly the BEST overall carrier for the older baby/toddler. There is more back support than with any other carrier and the position is best for baby, as the child is in a sitting position rather than hanging by the groin, as with some other carriers (which I have been told is actually not so great for the spine). I find that some of the more structured carriers need a degree in engineering and an extra arm to get the baby in whereas this carrier is very easy to put on. It is approved for carrying a child up to at least 40 lbs so you will certainly get your money's worth.

Motherhood Update

I haven't been around here much and I thought I would just post a little update about where we are at right now, since I don't seem to be able to get around to emailing people personally who are so kind as to check in to make sure that I am o.k.

Baby Bean was born on June 17th and that was a wonderful day. I was so proud of myself and the fact that I was able to have a vaginal delivery of such a huge baby. Pk was not an easy delivery (she ended up being a forecep delivery and the entire thing was pretty awful) so to have things go so smoothly had me come away on quite a high. To be honest, it's been kind of downhill from here.

The night he was born (he was born at 6:41 p.m.), I was put in a semi-private room, which was really frustrating because we have private coverage but there weren't any rooms available. That also meant that Dh couldn't stay with me that first night. I was terrified because I had no feeling in my right leg from the epidural and I was nervous that I wouldn't be able to get up and care for Baby Bean. I had a good cry and then steeled myself to deal with things. There ward was incredibly busy and the nurses were, to be honest, useless. I still had an i.v. in and I was told to buzz when I was ready to go to the washroom and someone would come to help me and then I could have the i.v. out. I buzzed and waited over 30 minutes after being told someone was coming and then finally buzzed again and got some help. I got a roommate about half way through the night, just as I had fallen asleep finally. Of course, while Baby Bean actually slept (which Pk had not done the first night in the hospital), the other woman's baby SCREAMED the entire night and I didn't get any sleep.

I was finally moved to a private room at around 5 the next day. I had been told by my o.b. that I would be allowed to leave later than night, pending Baby Bean's bloodwork since all was well but since there were no nurses available to do the testing, I was told I would have to wait until the next morning. I didn't feel that he had been latching well and I called the nurses several times for help but the only nurse who did actually come said that I "obviously knew what I was doing" and that when my milk came in, all would be fine. The next morning was horrible. The nurse we had was a misery and when she came in, Baby Bean was SCREAMING. She took his temp and announced to us that he had a fever and that she would have to get the doctor. She then weighed him and told me that we wouldn't be allowed to leave because he had lost too much. By this time, he had stopped crying and she took him temp and it was fine. I was nearly hysterical - all I wanted was to go home and all of a sudden, I was being told that something was wrong with Baby Bean. She then did calculations and decided that his weight was fine after all but she couldn't get the machine to work on the hearing test. She finally got a pass on the one ear but couldn't get a clear result on the other ear so she angrily told us she would have to do a more in-depth test but we would just have to wait. Finally, about 3 hours later, she came back to do the other test and he passed with flying colours but only after she had us terrified that something was wrong with his hearing and that we weren't going to be able to leave.

That really set me up to be worried about things (and before you say it, Kittenpie, yes, I know, I am a worrier). He didn't nurse well at home until the day before our visit to our doctor so of course, when we got there, his weight was down again. She wasn't terribly worried but I was. We were strictly told that we had to feed him every three hours no matter what and come back later in the week. I was fanatically counting wet and soiled diapers and spending a good portion of each night fighting with him, trying to get him to wake up to feed when he obviously wanted to be sleeping. Latching could take as long as 45 minutes because he just wasn't hungry.

Did I also mention that we came home from the hospital to Pk being sick with a raging cold that she managed to give to both me and Baby Bean? We went back to the doctor on Thursday and he had started to gain his weight back. Then, later that day, he got really sick with the cold. Latching became and even bigger nightmare and by Friday night, in the wee hours, he wouldn't feed at all. I didn't know what to do. I really didn't want to give him formula or a bottle (breastfeeding is really important to me and I didn't want to do anything that might interfere) but I didn't want him to dehydrate. I called Telehealth and was directed to go to emergency, which we did. We had a wonderful doctor who finally told us to give him a spitz of Dristan in each nostril twice a day for three days and that seemed to get us started again.

Of course, though, with several days of poor feeding, when we went back to the doctor, he had only put on four oz. Again, the worry. Latching continued to be a nightmare and I really debated just giving in and giving the bottle of formula. To be honest, by that point, I was really wondering whether I was started a good go with post-partum depression - I couldn't stop crying, I felt like I couldn't cope and all I wanted was to walk away. I kept trying to ask for help but didn't know where to turn.

Finally, we got a break. I emailed my doula for the name of a lactation consultant and I found a wonderful woman who was willing to come out that day. I was scared about doing it - my experience at the breastfeeding clinic at the hospital with Pk had been pretty terrible and I was so afraid of getting a "lactation nazi" as a friend likes to call them. T, the consultant, was sweet, supportive and incredibly helpful. She had also spent 6 years working at Jack Newman's clinic, so I also felt like she knew what she was doing. By the time she left, I felt like we had a game plan and she had largely solved our latch problem - now, other than late at night when he is sleepy, we can get a latch in less than a minute. She also really put pressure on me to get back to taking my vitamins and supplements, which I hadn't been doing and I will say, I do feel better with some iron and vitamin B in my system.

Since then, things have been improving. Baby Bean was just shy of his birthweight at our last appointment and had put on 10 oz that week and is latching well. Sadly, the signs of his being a sleeper were misleading and I am starting to have worries that we are going to go the route we did with his sister. He dozes a lot in the day without being willing to sleep deeply unless we are in the car and he nurses A LOT. Once 7 p.m. arrives, all he wants to do is nurse and we get quite a bit of crying. Some evenings, I can get him down by about 9:30 although last night, he cried off and on from 8 until 11:30 and the only thing that would console him was nursing. He is having longer waking periods after the feeds, too (he used to go right back to sleep) and I am starting to get pretty desperate about my chances to sleep at all. At least I feel like I can cope and he seems to be doing all the growing and bathrooming things he needs to do.

You may not hear much from me - it's hard to type with one hand and/or while breastfeeding and at times, I am feeling pretty sorry for myself. It is getting better, though, and, as I said in my previous post, I am going to try to "bloom where I am planted". This is a hard time but I will feel even more miserable when the time comes to go back to work and leave him behind. I can't have this time back and the one real gift from God is the intense love I manage to feel for Baby Bean, even as I am sleepless and frustrated and overwhelmed. And hey, we should get our first smiles from him fairly soon...

Expectations

I have a really bad habit of setting myself up for disappointment. I am sure that I am not the only mother who does this and I really need to work on it. I decide that there is something that will be wonderful and I build it up in my mind beyond reason and then when it flops, I am so disappointed. I really set myself up for failure.

This week was a prime example. Most people would probably say that taking your almost-three year old down into the city along with your husband and your almost three-week-old baby on the hottest day of the year to see something that you KNOW will be crowded and probably too busy to enjoy isn't the best idea. Not me, though - Pk's favourite t.v. shows were being featured at an open house at CBC in the city and I thought that it would be a wonderful thing for her to do. Like most second time around mothers, I think, I have been battling a lot of guilt at not being able to do the things that I feel like I should do with my eldest and I really wanted to give her a special outing. We talked about it for days in advance and she was really excited about being able to go to "Mamma Yamma's house". Afterwards, we planned to swing by my parents' house so that mom and my brother could meet Baby Bean (that's become his nickname, I am not sure why). I even drove right into downtown, something that I loathe doing.

Of course, the day did not live up to its expectations. The crowds were HUGE, it was horribly hot and honestly, there wasn't much to see. We got in, ditched the stroller, got Baby Bean into his Sleepywrap (that's another post, it is wonderful!) and started to tour. There were several people dressed in large costumes of the most popular characters and when we took Pk up to one to have her photo taken, she attached herself like a barnacle to my leg and would have nothing to do with him. To see the performances they were doing, she had to be up on Dh's shoulders since the crowd was so large and she really wasn't very interested. By the time we left, after only about 45 minutes, she was being a royal pill, not wanting to hold our hands, trying to run around in the crowd and generally being belligerent, the way that she goes when she is feeling "off". To cap it all off, after we got home, after dinner, I asked her whether she wanted to watch her show (we PVR it for her daily) and she had a complete and utter meltdown. It eventually become obvious that not only did she not want to have her photo taken with the character but he had scared her so much that she was afraid to watch the show. Strike one, mummy!

This pattern of blowing things up in my mind and then being disappointed is a bit of a pattern for me. I can think of so many examples, holidays being the quickest to come to mind. There was the year that I went crazy at Easter and did a "Martha Stewart". I decorated everything, had personalized gifts for everyone with hand-stamped cards - if I do say so myself, everything was lovely. I was so excited. That is, until the family actually arrived - dh's sister couldn't eat anything because our butter was unsalted, my b.i.l. wouldn't eat because we had mint sauce instead of mint jelly and m.i.l. kept saying that she was nervous to eat off the china dishes (we had set the table with my grandmother's china). I can think of example after example and I come away feeling so let down -outings, special meals that don't turn out as planned, knitting projects that don't fit the way I want...

This all is on my mind right now because I just started the Kelly Minter Ruth Bible study I am doing with the Bible study girls and through the LPM Blog (although I am way behind for obvious reasons). I think it was the third day, the emphasis was on trying to be happy where God has put us as opposed to always trying to find happiness somewhere else. For obvious reasons, that really hit home for me. I do try and make these "big" events extra special, I try and do things that are totally exceptional for Pk (and, honestly, for myself) instead of looking for the little joys in the every day. I thought that the expression "To bloom where you are planted" was Biblical but when I tried to look it up, I couldn't find it so I gather that it must just be a saying. It resonates with me. Instead of trying to look for joy in the exceptional, I should just try and find the joys in the very ordinary, in the ground in which I am supposed to be growing. I want to teach Pk to learn contentment and how can I teach what I don't know myself?

Tough Choices...

http://www.parentcentral.ca/parent/familyhealth/article/831884--controversy-reignited-over-benefits-of-male-circumcision

Not being one to shy away from controversy here, I have wanted to write a post about circumcision over the last couple of weeks, I just haven't had the time. When I saw this article in the Toronto Star today, it gave me the motivation to wade in. This is one of those issues that parents, especially mothers, oddly enough, seem to have such intense feelings about. I spend time on Mothering.com and some attachment parenting groups and there, you wouldn't raise the topic unless you were prepared to be viciously attacked. Here, I feel a bit safer.

Five days after Ij was born, he was circumcized. For us, it was a no-brainer. While we don't judge other people's decisions, for us, we felt that it was something that NEEDED to be done. Dh was not done as an infant because he was so premature and then, at age 9, he developed problems that ultimately led to it being done. Just try and picture the shame, the pain and the fear faced by a boy going through that procedure. From the little that he has said about it, the experience was nothing short of a major trauma. We were not prepared to take that risk with our son (and we did later discover from the pediatrician that did Ij that the problem Dh had is probably genetic and Ij would have faced an increased risk). We did not have it done at the hospital where he was born - after some research, we found a pediatrician whose methods seemed the most humane and we were very happy with our choice. Ij slept through the entire procedure and there was very little issue after the fact. He did not need stitches, he did not seem upset and the doctor used freezing. It was entirely worth the $200 and the drive to the pediatrician's office.

What really angers me in the discussion of male circumcision is the "head in the sand" position of some who are against it. I had a woman on one of the groups I am on tell me that while Dh was done as a child, that "it is almost always unnecessary, even when done later", it's "just an easy way for doctors to deal with things." Easy? Really? Would you, as a parent, find anything easy in your son having to have part of his penis removed, with fourteen stitches and a three week recovery period involving attempting to keep bandages from becoming stuck to his wound and potentially needing to be peeled off? Would you, as a doctor, suggest that as the "easy route"? Would you, as a parent, lightly undertake that with your child???

My doctor and I had a good discussion about this last week. Her take on the situation was that while many boys can be uncircumcised without a problem, we can't guess which boys will have a problem and need to be done later and a number of them WILL have problems. Dh and I were pretty quiet about the fact that we were having Ij done, just because we knew that many people were so intensely against the procedure. Even so, we have heard about four other boys who had to be done later, and we have heard about that just in the last week or so. If even in our small group of people we have seen and talked to, we have heard about multiple cases, can it really be that rare?

I realise that those who are vigorously opposed to the practice will continue to maintain that it is child abuse, that it is the same as female genital mutilation and that it is entirely and completely unnecessary. Nothing that I say will changed their minds and I will be vilified for having "mutilated" my son. I don't care. My son will not have to go through the trauma of chronic infections, he will not have to have the procedure done later and heck, if he decides that he wants to convert to Judaism or Islam later in life, we have spared him the trouble of a later-in-life procedure. And, if you follow the studies in the article above, we may have reduced his risk of HIV infection by up to 60%. I am not sorry for that.

I will not judge other parents choices in terms of what they decide. I respect their rights when it comes to making decisions for their own children. It's too bad that other parents aren't as willing to show that respect to others (a bit like with breastfeeding - it's an issue that brings out the worst judgementalism in people... but that's another post). I would like to see those with strong feelings on the issue admit the complexity of the situation and not over-simplify. There ARE reasons to support the practice and the fewer boys are done, the more we will get a clearer picture of the potential risks of not doing it. It's not pretty and I will admit that driving to the doctor's office, I started to have second thoughts but in the long run, I believe it was the right thing to do. I just wish we could discuss the situation in a clear-headed, respectful way.

Keeping Up

I have very little time to post right now - Ij has discovered the joys of nursing after a slow and frustrating start (a post of its own, if I ever get time!) and it's hard to type with a baby at your breast. In the meantime, I am hoping to get more active in posting to my private blog - I am taking so many pics these days. If you stop in here and would like to join me at the other blog, leave a comment and I will send you an invite.