Part 5: My Weapons

Snippets from July 28th, 2009 (1 month old)

I’m sorry that it’s taken me so long to find the time to write. Once again I’m typing with one hand due to the little man sleeping in my arms. He actually woke from a longish nap not too long ago so I wonder how long I have. I fed him a bottle of breast milk and then he just passed out again. Maybe it’s because he was up until 3am this morning. I usually find that he is most active and fussy just before his longest nap. Greg and I took turns holding him so that we each got a chance to do other stuff like shower. He loves to be held and rocked. He especially loves “jumping” when you hold him under his armpits and help him jump (lightly, obviously). He is actually quite strong and pushes up with his legs. At this rate I’m going to have quite the set of biceps soon!

I’m still breastfeeding him during the night and twice in the morning. He really struggles if I try and do it at other times (and even sometimes at the regular times). He’ll literally start thrashing about and last night we had the same breast-shooting-milk incident. He was very fussy and so I was focusing on him as he pulled away. Suddenly the side of my top felt wet and I looked down to find it was spraying all over and I had to let Greg give him a bottle while I changed. No wonder Greg jokingly refers to them as my “weapons of mass PRODUCTION”. I’ve read up about it online and it’s called an “overactive letdown reflex”. There isn”t much you can do (the different feeding positions haven’t helped at all and the other ways are about how to decrease your supply which I don’t want to do – I need to pump as much as I can so he gets enough breast milk via bottle feeding). The best way is to use the pump as you get the letdown and then only let him latch after those 3-5 minutes. Try explaining that to a starving baby, though! Also, even if you do that in the beginning, he is only okay until the next letdown and it’s hard to know when it’s going to happen until it’s too late and he is upset.

So, even though it took me a while to feel okay about it, I am grateful that formula does exist and that I can at least supplement with it and keep him satisfied rather than upset and hungry. They said that often babies don’t thrive if the mother has the condition I mentioned because they’d rather just not eat than put up with the pain of the milk shooting out at them so forcefully. Greg had to tell me a bunch of times that I WAS a good mother before I finally believed it. At least I have a good pump and make sure he gets breast milk daily, but it can be hard finding the time to pump because it takes about half an hour to get a decent amount and half an hour when the baby is asleep is like GOLD – especially now that he is awake for longer. I often have to weigh up the pros and cons of sleeping or doing something around the house. Yes, I’m tired so sleeping would be great, but at the same time – if I don’t do stuff around the house I feel like my whole sense of equilibrium has been upset. Like when I wake up, I don’t feel okay until I know that the dogs have been fed and the dishes are washed and I am dressed. And, of course, that all depends on Jay. Actually it was funny because Annie and I are planning to do lunch on Friday and I said we could decide on the exact time later. Then I added that Jay had “said” that he spits on the idea of EXACT time (or should I say “spits UP on”? ha!). Goodbye time. Hello Jay.

Oh, but I do love him so and it’s all so worth it. He is gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous.

Auntie Carol sent me a funny thing that Liz had written about her trip to the dentist with the kids. I’m so glad she sent it because not only did it make me laugh, but it made me brave enough to share the fact that I, too, have hurt my baby unintentionally. The other day Jay was sleeping and I was trying to trim his nails. I was on the last one, the thumb, and as I went “snip” with the nail clippers he started screaming. I even said, “Come on, Jay, that wasn’t too bad.” (I really, really thought I’d only gotten the nail). I was absolutely horrified when I looked down and saw him holding out his thumb and there was blood!! I mean it seemed worse than it was – there was a lot of blood for only a tiny cut, but at the time I felt like I’d just chopped half of his finger off! Then, of course, I felt like a terrible mother. When Greg came back I had to tell him and the first thing I said was, “Oh, Greg, I’m a terrible mother!” He reassured me that it looked better already and that I wasn’t terrible. I told one of the ladies online what had happened and she said that raising kids is like making pancakes. You always wreck the first one, but by the time you’re on the third – they’re perfect! Ha ha! Of course she was just joking, but it was funny and I wanted to share it with Greg. I’m not sure if he really got it, though, because I think the only thing he heard was the word, “third” and then his eyes kind of glazed over. I had to reassure him that it was merely a funny analogy and that I definitely didn’t want three!

On Friday I went to the hospital for Jay’s check-up and second Hep B vaccination. Greg came with me. I like the people at the hospital, but it’s such a mission going there and you have to wait a long time and go to different rooms for different things and there are so many other people and babies all around that I don’t find the experience pleasant. The doctor said that everything was fine and normal. He said that Jay weighed 4.3kgs and was 58cm tall. On Saturday I decided to try the pediatrician up the road. It’s a nice clinic and the doctor can do all the vaccinations and everything so I’d MUCH rather go there. I’m just going to cancel the hospital appointment and start going to this clinic. I mean it literally takes about 5 minutes to walk there which is so much easier than having to mission all the way to the hospital and then stand around waiting for ages. At the clinic, the doctor does everything right there and you don’t get the feeling that you are being rushed. This time Jay weighed 4.6kgs and they said he was 56cm tall. So, I guess he is somewhere around there. The doctor also said that everything is normal, so I’m relieved that he is doing fine.

The school has emailed me my new schedule and some of the hours are quite long, so I really don’t know if I’ll have any time to eat (never mind pump milk) so on Friday Annie is taking me to go and buy some protein shake/ meal replacement stuff so that I can drink that while I teach and won’t be starving. She is also going to take me to a couple of daycare centers so I can check them out. At the moment Greg and I are leaning more towards getting a nanny, though. Then she’ll come here and I won’t have to take him anywhere. He also won’t be getting exposed to a whole bunch of other kids and whatever colds etc. they may have. We’ll just have to weigh up our options later when we know more.

Annie got back from the States on Friday, but I saw her on Sunday for the first time. She bought Jay a whole lot of cute onesies for when he gets a bit bigger. She came and fetched Jay and me and we went to this nice restaurant for breakfast. Afterwards she took us to this huge baby store. Greg and I had been talking about getting Jay a swing or one of those vibrating chairs. I looked at a few and decided on the swing. It’s very nice and he seems to like it. In fact, it is fast becoming an essential item. I just don’t put him in it if he is wide awake, unless I talk to him the whole time and rock it myself. But if he looks drowsy and you put him in, it works like a charm and rocks him right to sleep. It’s also great because when he naps in it he is in a semi-upright position so the tummy winds and gas don’t bother him nearly as much and he can sleep for longer. We are going to go through a lot of batteries. In fact I should probably get some now before they run out. I can just picture sending Greg to the 7-11 in the wee hours of the morning looking all crazy and bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, begging the clerk for batteries and then yelling, “Triple A’s? What am I supposed to do with Triple A’s? I need big ones, man!”

As far as Jay’s poops are going, he doesn’t poop as often as he used to (once or twice a day now), but when he does they’re huge and quite stinky. As I’ve mentioned, I always like to ask Greg to help because I enjoy the facial expressions and silly songs he sings (actually whenever Greg looks after him I hear a wide range of funny songs that have me laughing every time). This time it was his turn to actually take off the diaper and use tissue paper and then bring him to the bathroom where I’d have the water ready at the right temperature to wash his little bum. Greg always holds him butt-first on these occasions and says something like, “Coming through, coming through,” or “Step aside, we’ve got a live one here,” or even, ” Fancy a curry?”. This time it was hilarious because as he walked into the bathroom all I saw was this little bum and then that little bum started pooping more and it just plopped onto the bathroom floor and there was Greg doing some mighty careful stepping around it making all sorts of grossed-out sounds. What’s even more gross is that afterwards when he was clean Greg went to clean up the poop that had been on the floor. When he got there, he turned around and asked me if I’d cleaned it. I said no. That’s when we noticed “the brown one” (which is what we call Rusty when we don’t want him to know we’re talking about him) slinking away down the passage, making some lip-smacking sounds. Ewww!! As Chief Diaper Inspector I guess he felt it was one of his duties.

Okay, let me be off. It’s time I got some stuff done around the house. Jay was asleep in the beginning, but has been awake through most of this email which has made it take hours to finish!

Lots and lots of love

Em x