weaning

Nursing while Nauseous

~ theantelopediaries

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I have been so sick today.  I threw up my dinner early this morning and didn’t recover for 10 hours.  My husband had to go to work and I cancelled my play date this morning.  Polina sensed something was wrong.

“No owie,” she said when I was in the bathroom heaving.

To my surprise, she still wanted to nurse… a lot.  I’m nauseous and my 2.5 year old is nursing.

“I’m sick.  Please,” I tell Polina.

Polina protested when I refused, so… okay.

Later she went to the kitchen and got herself a box of cereal, a bowl, and a fork.  She ate next to me.  Then she decided to dump all the cereal on the floor.  I picked it all up and put it back in the bag, but she did it again.  I was too tired to engage in this battle.  Then Polina decided to go through her clothes drawer and throw all the contents on the floor, on top of the cereal.  Then she rolled on me while I was trying to rest.

I pulled out my flip phone.  “Im so sick,” I texted my husband.

Polina fell on my stomach with her butt.  Ow.

“Im so sick.  Not resting,” I texted again.

“Pls help”

It sucks to be sick.  I felt hot.  Then I was cold.  My husband said he would try to come home after he completes one project.

Polina started going through her books, flipping through the pages, one by one.  She reminded me of my mother, who went through books like water.  Polina likes going through books even when no one is reading to her.

After that, I had a reprieve.  After about 3 hours of self-entertainment, Polina indicated she was tired.  She`nursed again and fell asleep beside me.

Meanwhile, I was nauseous as ever.  I hate vomiting.  I tried not to for about 3 hours by keeping it down.  I continued to feel bad.  No wonder.  It was a choice between vomiting and getting it over with or feeling “better” by not vomiting but continuing to feel sick.  Finally, I had to give in.  I went to the bathroom and threw up a final time.  There, it was over, but in the process, I woke up Polina.  I texted my husband that P and I were going to sleep, went back to bed and slept for three hours with Polina beside me.

I woke up at 5:30 pm and felt A LOT better, though still woozy as I hadn’t eaten anything all day.  The worst was over.  A week ago I was really sick with the cold for 24 hours and felt awful.  I haven’t been so sick within a week of each other in a long time.

I can’t feel my legs as I am lying on the couch typing this.  The vomit is still in the sink in the master bathroom, not going down.  I’m too weak to deal with it right now.  I’ll clean it tomorrow.  Thank goodness we have two bathrooms.

Tip- next time, heave in the toilet.

A Sleep Solution

~ theantelopediaries

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I have been struggling with getting my daughter to sleep for several months. She slept great, waking up only once or twice a night, from about three months to six months. Then, at around six months, getting her to go to sleep became an issue.

Nursing her wasn’t enough. Not only did I nurse her until my breasts couldn’t take it anymore, but on top of that, sometimes she would push me away and begin crying.

Bouncing her on my knee pacified her, until my arms got tired.

We had a routine going- the baby noise that was supposed to simulate the sound of the womb, the dim light, story time, but it wasn’t working. I felt desperate. I became too emotionally involved and my husband would intervene when I let out a shrill. That was when I was at the end of my rope.

There is almost nothing worse than a crying infant that can’t go to sleep late at night. Torture at Guantanamo? They should make them listen to crying babies.

When my daughter finally fell asleep in my arms, she would wake up more than half the time when I transitioned her to her crib, and if she didn’t she would wake up within 20 minutes.

“Lose the transition,” my pediatrician said.

Her kid, she said, falls asleep by her side and she is able to do things- watch movies, work on her laptop- while her child sleeps beside her.

So I tried moving her to our family bed. I nursed her, and then when she fell asleep, moved her beside me on the big bed.

That worked better, except that I had no room on the bed for me. Our king size bed is actually made up of two extra long twins paired side by side. My husband takes up his entire side, and being 5’10”, I need my side too. Unfortunately, the little one, even though she is little, takes up the longitude of my mattress, and it only gets worse as I move away from her to have some space, and her head moves closer to me during the night, until she is a 45 degree angle on my bed, leaving me a sliver of space to rest on… sideways.

She still woke up crying at night, disturbing my husband, who has sleep issues as it is. I needed to move, and so we did- to the living room.

Every night, one of us rolls out the mattress that sits on top of our daughter’s crib. That way, we all have more room, and it worked better during the night in terms of nursing. But it didn’t solve the problem of how to get our daughter to sleep in the first place.

I still had the same troubles trying to get her to fall asleep at a decent hour, or any hour for that matter. At nine months, I tried extinction, aka the Ferber method. I let her cry for 20 minutes. It was agonizing not only for me, but for my neighbors. For the first time, I heard them banging on our mutual wall. Our experiment was over. We returned to what we normally do- let her stay up with us until she is so tired her brain gives way to sleep.

What happened the day after we tried the extinction method, however, scared the daylights out of me. Our little antelope had a hoarse voice, and it didn’t go away for several days. I thought she might have damaged her vocal chords permanently.

“Dear God,” I prayed. “Don’t let my stupidity ruin her voice.”

God was merciful. By the fifth day, her voice began returning to normal, as I remembered it. I vowed never to follow the Ferber method again.

I returned to doing the same things to help her go to sleep- holding, singing, humming, reading, nursing, playing the white noise- and expecting a different result. Finally, about a week ago, I came up with a novel solution. At least novel for me, because I haven’t heard or read anyone talk or write about it.

I don’t know why anybody hadn’t thought of this before, or if someone has, why it’s not more talked about.

During one of the nights I was exhausted from the day and not able to sleep because of my daughter, I suddenly remembered a sow I once observed a sow nursing her piglets. All the piglets were resting except one, who was fidgeting, and the sow, perhaps in exhaustion, raised her head to look at him, snorted at the piglet and then dropped her head back down. I think she pretended to be asleep because her closed eyes still twitched.

I decided to try that. Instead of snorting, I firmly told my daughter that it’s nighttime and “I’m going to sleep.” Then I lay down on the mattress and pretended to go to sleep. When my daughter wanted to nurse, I provided the goods, but my eyes remained closed.

In pretending to go to sleep, I actually did fall asleep. But when I woke up an hour or so later, my daughter was asleep, with no crying! Tonight, when I used the same technique again, I could feel my daughter pushing at me and using me as leverage to stand. When I peeked through my eyelashes, I saw her shifting about like an orangatangue, but I also saw her put her head down, buttocks up. She did this a couple times, and then, she fell asleep.

Her sleep time is still late (tonight it was 10:30), but she gets about 10 hours each night. My next task is to see if I can get her to bed earlier, so my husband and I can watch a movie or I can work on this blog, for instance.

This is a work in progress. But I am so glad she is asleep. Unless you’ve gone through it, you can only imagine how exhausting it is to be with your kid all day, and have that extra umph! to give to your child at night when they are being fussy. We need our child to go to sleep so that we can recover and be sane for the next day.

Originally written June 11, 2013.

Wailing about Weaning

~ theantelopediaries

As I was eating a salad for dinner this evening, my nearly seven-month-old daughter reached her hand into my bowl.  When I gently removed her hand, she giggled, and tried to reach in again.  When that wasn’t successful, she engaged in a tug of war with my plate.  She grabbed one end, and I had to hold my ground to prevent her from toppling the salad with balsamic vinaigrette over my futon.  My daughter will be seven months old this Sunday and thus far I have not given her solids, unless you count the sip of chai tea when she was four months old that my husband made me do and a taste of pistachio ice cream when she was five months old (also, might I add, courtesy of my husband.)  My daughter is a happy, healthy kid, weighing in at 16 lbs 4 oz at her six-month check up. She is in the 50% weight and 75% height brackets, so she is actually tall and thinner than most babies.  You wouldn’t guess that by looking at her though. She has big puffy cheeks and her wrists slightly bulge from her hands.  Her legs, if they were on an adult, would be considered overweight.  But she isn’t.  She has no body issues.  She is just happy.

The WHO recommends exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months, and preferably continued breastfeeding for the first year.  I knew that breastfeeding would be my choice in how I feed my baby.  At my daughter’s six month check up, the doctor, a naturopath, gave the go ahead to start solids.  No citrus, dairy, wheat, nuts, or, of course, honey.  Wait three days to see if there is an adverse reaction, and if not, introduce another food.  I knew my daughter was ready, as she had already eyed up our food for the last two months and been disappointed that she wasn’t able to partake.  I thought I was ready too, until it finally came down to actually handing over the food.  I was scared.  Scared of the poop that would start to smell and scared that we wouldn’t have the same bond that we had before.  I know that the transition to solids is gradual, that it can be baby-led, when she’s ready, but she was ready, and I wasn’t.

A father that attends Baby Storytime at our local library told me how his daughter transitioned to solids quite suddenly.  His wife returned to work, and the event was pretty traumatic for their daughter, who refused to take a bottle.  This father had to resort to using one of those droppers they use to give medicine to pets.  She was still breastfed, but in this particular way.  It wasn’t long, however, before she transitioned to solid foods completely. The day his daughter refused the breast, he told me his wife knew that was the last time she would breastfeed.

To make sure I was doing the right thing, or perhaps seeking reason to forestall this transition to solids, I came across an article that recommended exclusive breastfeeding for 6-8 months to avoid allergies.  My husband developed allergies to wheat in his forties.  I didn’t want that to happen to our daughter, I rationalized, so I kept on breastfeeding.  Everything, or almost everything, in her body right now came from me.  Her cheeks, her arms, her legs, that all came from my booby milk.  There is a certain awesomeness that my breast milk made that happen.  But when I ate my salad this evening, I saw how eagerly she wanted to play with my food bowl.  I gave in.  I tore off a piece of a bell pepper and gave it to her.  To my surprise, she completely ignored it.  I tried again.  Nope, not interested.  She wanted to play with my food.  According to authors Gill Rapley and Tracey Murkett, authors of Baby-Led Weaning, that is precisely what babies do with their food first- they play with it.  This is part of a natural course of development, they say, that leads to eating by themselves.

So this weekend, I am going to offer my daughter a piece of cantaloupe on a plate.  I already have the cantaloupe.  It has been sitting in my fridge, and now I have a good use for it.  We will partake in a family meal-eating cantaloupe.  If she doesn’t partake in it, that’s fine, but at least I would have done my duty by doing the right thing.

Originally written March 6, 2013