Baby Bits XI

I wonder if this is a common problem. Apparently, I’ve got a baby with too many plans.

As I write this, I feel quite sure this is a common problem. Tracy Hogg (the Baby Whisperer) even said so, and what a relief to see it in print: at this age, you just need to “ride out the inconsistencies”. We’ve basically gotten rid of the catnap, but recently the tendency is for E to stay up all evening, much longer than he used to, then sleep for the length of a catnap and wake up again. He’s all yawny and eye-rubby, but also arm-wavy, air-strummy, and rolly. (Except when he’s very very sleepy, he is intolerant of his swaddle, the thing that most helped him settle.)

Tracy has solutions for the not-sleeping thing – her method, which is preferred by someone like me who wants my baby to be able to fall asleep independently but doesn’t want him to cry alone, is called Pick-Up-Put-Down. The trouble with this method is that it’s based on a crying baby. In theory, when E cries, I pick him up, and put him down again as soon as he stops crying, and repeat as necessary. We do this sometimes; however, most of the time E isn’t crying. He’s strumming or rolling.

Ah, well. I guess we’ll figure this out as we go, and do our best for now. Thank goodness for maternity leave.

In other baby news: today, February 16th, there is finally evidence of tooth #3! Teeth #1 and #2 have been waiting almost four months for upper counterparts, and now, at long last, there is a tiny ridge of toothiness on the upper left. Woo hoo, top teeth! Gonna be so cute!

I just hope he doesn’t suddenly remember about nipple-biting. We’ve been doing so well on that.

Most of the hair lies down these days...

Little Potty Adventures, a.k.a. Elimination Communication

For those of you wondering what we are doing putting our 7-month-old on the potty, allow me to explain.

(I don’t really talk about this a lot with people because they invariably start out thinking it’s freakish: “You’re toilet training already??”  But once you explain, it makes a lot of sense.)

Raise your hand if you’ve ever changed a diaper on a baby boy.  Now keep your hand up if you ever got peed on in the process.  See?  Now put your hands down.  Some of you may have even been peed on by girls, since they do this too, only less fountainously.  Now raise your hand if you prefer to remain not-peed-on.  Yep, that’s what I thought.  (Okay, hands down.)

Most parents learn that this happens, and have strategies to deal with it, such as letting the air hit baby’s bits and then covering them up again, quick as a flash, to absorb/block the pee.  We noticed this too, and in fact were expecting it – but sometimes he was still too fast for us!  Luckily, we knew what to do.  Well, at least where to start.

A good friend of mine had told me about the technique called “E.C.” or “elimination communication” – she’d read a book about it but felt her boy was too late to be starting.  Sean and I got the book, “The Diaper-Free Baby” by Christine Gross-Loh, while we were pregnant.

The idea behind this book, and the EC movement in general, is that babies are born with an awareness of when they’re peeing and pooping (“eliminating”), and that it is instinctive for them not to want to soil themselves.  According to the theory, this is why babies pee when the diaper’s off.  In lots of countries, EC is the norm: diapers are not readily available to everyone, so parents learn to read the signals that their baby needs to eliminate, just like we read signals that their babies are hungry, tired, etc.

In this part of the world, instead of working with this form of communication, we generally train the awareness out of our children by diapering them all the time and expecting them to soil those diapers… and then we train it back in a couple years later.

Some parents are really hard-core with this – their babies spend a lot of time undiapered, they have wool pads in abundance, they know lots of tricks.  When E was newborn, I wanted to try what I’d read about, but felt overwhelmed by the idea of full-on EC.  E was a very frequent eliminator.  Then I was on an EC forum somewhere, and a mom had written that she just gave her daughter a “pottytunity” whenever she changed her diaper.  That seemed do-able.

So we got E a Baby Bjorn Little Potty when he was a few weeks old, and began holding him on it for a short while whenever we changed his diaper.  Within three days, he had his first pee on the potty.  YAYYY!  The next day, we got another one.  This continued and then became more frequent; pretty soon we were getting two or three pees a day in there, sometimes even a poop!  It was very exciting.  Who cared if it was kinda flukey (and flaky)?  There were no more pee fountains, so that had to mean something.

Sometimes he’s peed in big potties too; the first time was at the wedding of some friends of ours when he was not quite six weeks old!  I was changing him in the washroom cubicle with the change table in it, and thought, No little potty, can’t hurt to try to big one…  And he PEED IN THERE.  I was so proud!

Bonus: EC is cute. Right??

We’ve continued with EC this whole time.  Some weeks we’ll get off-kilter and will hardly “catch” anything, but some weeks we get something for practically every chance we give him.  Solid food threw everything out of whack for a little while, but now that he’s used to that, and it’s slowed down his system, I swear he is getting it.

In the past ten days, only two poops have ended up in the diaper.  His signals are stronger, and I think he actually waits and holds it for the potty: oftentimes we’ll put him on there and he immediately does his business.  WHAT A SMART BABY.  Just goes to show, most babies are much smarter than we realize, in more ways than we know.

Survey Question I – Please Weigh In!

Talking with my friend recently – this is a friend with a baby son only a month younger than mine – we realized something.  Moms (and, it must be supposed, dads as well) do gross things in the name of parenthood.  We were talking about when babies get congested, which led to the topic of boogers.

She said, “What do you do about those?”

I paused.  What do I say?  The truth, or something else?

She beat me to it: “I usually just pick them for him.”

Me, with relief: “Me too!!”

Then I confessed that I had been considering making up some more civilized response, one which would have been untrue.  Wondering to myself, what do most moms do?  Am I, like, the gross mom, all alone? But hooray!  Now we can be open about this.  We’re all in this together.  I’m sure we’ll have to do lots more things that make you go eewww in the name of parenthood.

My Survey Question is this: what gross things have you done for the sake of the children?

Solid Sunday

We did it!

A special trip out was made from my parents’ house, specifically to purchase baby rice cereal.  (Apparently Heinz has bought the Pablum name, because this box of deliciousness affiliated itself with both.)  I know I said avocado, but I guess I’m just more comfortable with tradition – almost everyone says to start with the rice cereal, so who am I to argue?  And my parents’ house was the venue, because apparently Grandpa was really hoping to see the faces E would make.  (And nobody else would mind seeing them either.)

Of course I had a pang, feeding him his first bites of “food” food.  I always have pangs.  It’s like when we had to put him in his car seat to take him home from the hospital – in all of his 39 or so hours of life up to then, it was the first time we had to fasten him into something instead of holding him.  The black buckles and straps seemed so big and harsh against his tiny baby self.  I also had a pang giving him a pacifier for the first time, when he was about four weeks old – giving him a plastic nipple when he’d only ever had mine, the real thing.  Also when he ate breast milk from the bottle with Daddy for the first time – it was both wonderful and heart-tugging when he eventually accepted it.  (I felt a surge of possessive satisfaction when he still preferred my breast after the bottle.)

We have good reasons for doing all these things… it’s just that parenthood is full of happy little sorrows.  We sigh that he’s growing so fast, wishing we could hold onto that tiny newborn – but then, imagine how very sad it would be if he somehow didn’t grow!  I guess love that’s seated so deep and blooms so beautifully can’t help but pain us sometimes.

Anyway, back to the eating solids….  E sat on Daddy’s lap, a cloth napkin arranged over his front, and I did the honours.  As it turns out, he just rolled with it.  Didn’t seem confused or surprised, nor particularly thrilled; just took the whole episode in stride.  He did want to grab the cut-glass bowl or the spoon (a tiny silver one my mom used as a baby) – they’re shiny.  I know we got some cereal into his mouth, and a couple times he actually seemed to understand what we were doing and take a bite.  Flashbulbs were popping.  (Scratch that – we don’t have actual flashbulbs anymore.  You know what I mean.)  And then he seemed to get tired of the process, so we didn’t push it.

We’ll try again tomorrow!  I’m so proud of my little boy.

The Solids Odyssey

He must be ready – all the signs are there.

He watches the journey from fork/bowl/fingers/spoon to mouth, he reaches for it and grabs if he can.  Everything he grabs, he directs straight for his mouth.  He is even distracted from breastfeeding by this.  The other day he suddenly stuck his hand right in my bowl of curried rice and grabbed a handful.  And he has two teeth, for crying out loud (which I do sometimes, when he accidentally uses them on my nipple).

It’s time for solids.  Or whatever you want to call mashed-up, watered-down big-person food.  Yay!  Yay?

I have mixed feelings.

a) I can’t believe how fast time is flying and how he’s already almost six months old.  Soon he’ll be riding a bike and dating girls and… let’s not go there.

b) Goodbye, relatively sweet-smelling breast-fed poop.  I know once you add “real” food to the mix, things get much stinkier.  And stickier.

c) I look forward to seeing the faces he’s going to make!  So many tastes and colours to explore… it’s gonna be interesting for everyone involved.

c.2) I think he’s going to get a kick out of the process.  Even if he doesn’t like many things at first, he is so interested in food right now.  I was eating bright-coloured raw vegetables tonight, at a party (for him) while I was holding him, and felt bad, like I was leaving him out of the fun, because he seemed so fascinated by the food but wasn’t getting any.

d) I want to be sure he’s getting what he needs.  I know breast milk is a wonder-food, but other foods are wonderful too.  I’m sure his growing self will make excellent use of nutrients in new forms.

e) This does seem like something I will need to be organized about.  Keep track of what foods I’ve made, when I made them, when he tries them, whether he likes them, how many times he tries them, what order he tries them…

f) There is also much conflicting advice on this.  Start with veggies or rice cereal?  Fruit because they’ll like it or NOT fruit because they won’t like anything else?  Each food one at a time, for days at a time, to watch for allergies?  Or, as I recently read, change up, try all kinds of things in succession, thus developing a wider range of foods he’ll like?  (So he won’t be horribly picky, like I was as a kid…)

g) It will be nice for the onus to be lighter.  Don’t get me wrong: I love breastfeeding.  I love the connection and being needed.  I love the time we spend canoodling when he gets distracted while feeding.  I even love him grabbing my sweater and stretching my necklines all to hell.  BUT, it will be nice for there to be other options, and more chances for others to be in on the process.  From here on in, my role is less essential.  Smile, sniff.

I’m thinking… avocado.  Mmmmm!

Well, shoot.

Now I’m all grumpy.

I just logged in to find that the post I spent a long time writing yesterday I somehow neglected to publish… and then when I went to get it, less than half of it was there.  Now I don’t feel like writing the rest of it again – that post has passed.  So let it be known that I DID blog yesterday.  It was all about the late, great Tracy Hogg, aka the Baby Whisperer, and how I love her book and how she has basically all the answers and a great style that’s no-nonsense but full of love for babies.  Even if it’s not all the rage with hard-core attachment parents.  And how I’m especially grateful to her right now because while the world has many different “cry it out” methods and many parents who feel obliged to use them, Tracy offers a different approach that would never have moms, with their biological imperative to comfort their crying offspring, leave their babies alone to cry, even for short periods.  Whew.  Because I hope never to have to do that.

Whew!

Bit of a tough day today.

I guess no first-time parents get everything right.  We love our children to pieces and want them to be happy, so I believe almost everything we do with them is well-intentioned.  But then, sometimes what the Baby Whisperer would call “Accidental Parenting” comes into play.

E is five months old, and he has always been a good napper and a pretty good night sleeper too.  But we have always helped him with it quite a bit… and now I’m afraid he’s not much of a self-soother.  So we have to help him learn about that.

This will probably come up lots of times in this blog, because parenting issues are such rich food for thought.  Techniques for proper baby sleep: is there anything more varied and debated?  There’s so much conflicting advice and it’s so hard to know what to do.  And it’s such an important thing – there’s no getting off the hook.

Therefore, no well-thought-out blog post for today… just a sigh before we go to bed (to harmonize with the experimental squeals from E), because when a certain amount of mingled baby tears and drool have dried on the shoulder of your shirt, nuance goes out the window.  The love takes over.

A few of today’s thoughts

• It occurs to me that I might seem conceited to choose the user name dilovely.  I wanted to emphasize the love part, since I’m very aware of love, and like to make sure people hear about it when I love them.  Okay?
• Wait, why do I care if the ether thinks I’m conceited?  Shoot, I guess even in this anonymous blogiverse I have insecurities, shyness.
• Hey, what’s the matter with me??  Dilovely, own this!  I am lovely.  I have thick hair and a nice singing voice and a mean hip shimmy.  And I’m nice to people, I know my manners, and I give great hugs.  Lovely.

And on a more random note,

• How weird is it to get passed on a country road by two white-haired seniors in a zooming white Buick?

And on the opposite of a random note – on the topic that currently consumes my life,

• Parenting is a hard job.  It never has break time, and every single decision you make, there are one jillion different opinions on it from books and peers and parents.  And it’s like teaching: the more you care about doing it well, the more difficult it is.
• Been visiting with mom friends and their babies three days this week, and I must just say this: women’s birth stories are as unique and amazing as the women themselves.  That baby onesie that says “Who needs superheroes when I have my mom?” is not a joke.
• I know it’s a total cliche, but is there anything more beautiful than a sleeping baby?
• and is there anything more gratifying than a baby smiling hugely at you?
• or any greater joy than baby chuckles?

I doubt it.