New Blogger ate my post

And it was a long one too.

I'm feeling so defeated by this.  Don't think I like the new blogger format, it doesn't automatically save.   And I kinda poured my heart out about what to do with Cupcake's sleep, what's going on with her teething, and how maybe the stress of moving is getting to us all, including her.

Sucks I guess.  I can't rewrite it, if feels futile to do so.   boooo

Breastfeeding and mole scratching

I am in need of some advice. Cupcake is at a phase where she's started to pick at some of my moles while breastfeeding.  I originally tried to distract her , but she's pretty relentless.   I've tried to cover up, but unfortunately, I have a large mole above each boob, and another right below them in the middle of my stomach.  So no matter what one of them ends up uncovered at all times.  And these are the slightly bumpy moles, they hurt when she scratches them.

I've read that nursing necklaces are recommended for this.  For the uninformed, this is a necklace who's sole purpose is to give the baby something to grab while nursing, not to be confused with a teething necklace, which we have, and they rock.  Anyone have experience with these?  Have they worked for you?  Any easy ways to make one at home?  I hate the idea of buying yet another baby gadget, specially if it doesn't work.  We have enough craziness at home without having to add a shopping trip to our day.   (I don't like shopping, unless it's for home wares and furniture, it's strange, I know.)

I'm feeling a bit frustrated with this development.  I originally figured I'd let her play with the mole and she'd get bored of it. But it seems moles are like cell phones, babies can't get enough of them. I've thought of covering them with band aids, but it doesn't seem like that would solve the actual problem.

I've made it 11 months now, and there's no reason to stop breastfeeding at this point.

Life changes - we're moving

I've been neglecting this blog, but it's with good reason.  We are moving across the country in a month, and this is all happening so suddenly that it's hard for me to catch my bearings.

Going back "home" is something we'd had in the back of our heads since Cupcake was about 3 months old, but it was more abstract.  As in, wouldn't it be nice is we had grandparents nearby.... let's deal with that later.   But then our crazypants landlord decided to not renew our month-to-month lease and basically gave us less than a 60 day notice to leave the apartment.  Which.... is legal but kinda wrong.  It came out of nowhere, and we still don't know why she's doing it.  In fact, she's avoided us since she sent the letter, and yes, she lives right below us.  It's a stressful situation to say the least.

So here we are, going back to Texas.  Trying to figure out how to pack up our lives and move them, get new jobs, and do all this while keeping our almost one year old sane.  Or maybe just keeping us sane, she'll be okay.  We are also super excited to live near family again.  Cupcake's grandparents want to babysit, and take her out, and give us a break.  Maybe we'll get a few nights of sleep here and there?

This also means we'll have to get a new metabolic doctor, which stresses me because I really feel we got 'in a groove with our current doctor.  I fear our new doctor might be stricter, or treat Cupcake's MCAD as something scary and debilitating, which is not an attitude that works for me. Oh well, we'll figure all this out when we get there.  It's not gonna stop the move from happening.  We HAVE to leave our apartment, and Nate has put in his two weeks.

As Martin Lawrence said in the climax of Bad Boys II, "$hit just got real'.

On having a constant snacker

I've made a great discovery these last few weeks that hopefully should help us deal with the days better.  Turns out that Cupcake is much more of a snacker than I ever imagined, and needs less naps.

In fact, it seems that half the time she looked tired and I thought she needed to nap, she was actually hungry.  I began to realize that she was tired but not actually going to sleep, and if I gave her food/breast milk, she'd perk right up.

So we've been doing a new experiment.  Cupcake is down to two naps, at noon and at 5 pm.  If she seems to be tired earlier than that, I try to feed her first.  If she's still tired after getting the blood sugar rush, then she's probably having a sleepy day.

It's a curious thing, and probably related to her MCAD.  When she's hungry, and her blood sugar goes down, she seems to crash more than other babies.  She whine, gets cranky, tired, rubs her eyes, is pretty much insufferable.   But once I give her food her entire demeanor changes.  She smiles, the color comes back to her face (I hadn't even noticed she was looking pale!), her energy comes back, and her entire demeanor improves.  It's such a change, and pretty remarkable.

It makes me wonder how many times I've tried to put her down for naps and she fought them, when she was actually only hungry.

Does your kid need to snack constantly?  Could it be FOD related, or is it just common infant behavior?  What are easy healthy snack ideas?

Sleep Chronicles

It's been a busy last few weeks, both in Cupcake's life and in ours.  The main issue with Cupcake is a bizarro sleep regression that I'm having a hard time dealing with.  Please forgive the dangling preposition, my mommy brain isn't functioning very well.  Sleep deprivation is a b-ch.

Life before baby

Life after baby

 I also seem unable to organize my thoughts into a standard essay-style blog entry, so maybe I'll just try to touch the highlights of what's going on with us.

- We tried a form of modified sleep training.  Basically, my arms gave out and I just couldn't rock her anymore for as long as she needed.  The new plan was to rock her for 5 - 10 minutes (which seems reasonable, since she is, after all, a baby), then set he down on her crib.  At this point, if she cries, just sing to her and pat her and reassure her that I'm there.  She cried, and wailed, and looked very angry, but never more than 15-20 minutes.  I would stay in the room with her, not wanting the issue of sleeping of her own to get confused with separation anxiety. 

It worked, I admit.  Hearing her cry felt terrible, but she would fall asleep, and stay asleep for an hour.  Then proceeded to be in a wonderful mood the rest of the day.  I had feared that she'd hate me for doing this to her, but a baby's short term memory is bliss.  Mostly, I felt like I had no choice, since I couldn't rock her.

- I'm not sure how I feel about crying to sleep, even though we had to do it.  It seemed to me that Cupcake started waking up from naps mid cry, as opposed to the cooing she used to do.  Am I projecting?  Probably.  Reminds me of Dr Horrible's Sing Along Blog, when Captain Hammer is frozen mid song, and when he unfreezes he finished the note where he left off.  Yes, I just compared my 10 month old's napping pattern to Dr. Horrible, what of it?  In any case, even though my arms were finally getting rest, I wasn't fully convinced that this was the best approach for us.  A week and half later, she was still crying 10 minutes per nap.  Is that normal?  Shouldn't she be happily self soothing by now?

- She's learned to stand on her crib.  She's known how to pull up for long time, but she finally figured out how to go from laying down to sitting, and from there the rest is easy.  So now, I can't even let her cry as an option, because as soon as I put her down on the crib, she immediately sits and stands.  It's so quick, I could blink and I'd miss it.

Which leaves me with some options, rock her to sleep until she's really good and zonked out.  Which.... no, this is what got us in this predicament.  My arms can't rock a 22 lb baby.  Not gonna happen.   Or I could take her out to nap on the stroller.  Or I could just leave her to cry and figure it out for herself.

I've tried to let her fuss it out, and it's just not working.  She cried, gets completely red and snot nosed, and just doesn't let down.  At what point do I throw in the towel?  So far I'm stopping the torture after 20 minutes, I just assume she wasn't tired and we can try for a nap again later.

- Have I mentioned that she's just kinda not sleeping during the day but stays in a great mood?  She looks exhausted, will fall asleep within 30 seconds of me rocking her, and wakes as soon as I put her on the crib.  But once I pick her up she's all smiles, plays well on her own, and largely shows no signs of being tired or overtired.  I'm trying to remind myself that at this age many babies only need one nap, so as long as she gets one nap in there, it's all good.  She'll fall asleep when she's tired enough, right?

- The sleep training has had one awesomely positive side effect.  Cupcake now sleeps on her stroller again.  After a 5 month stroller strike, she now will happily zonk out in her umbrella stroller, her neck bending to utterly uncomfortable looking positions.   Freedom.   I can now leave the house without worrying about coming back home for naps or risk total breakdown while out.  Is it related to the sleep training, or simply a developmental phase?

- Could she possibly be transitioning to one nap?  And if so, she's gone from 3 naps to 1 in a matter of weeks.  Not sure how to handle this.

- Now with the the crib standing, she's back to waking up 4+ times a night.  We'd managed to cut it to 2, by letting her fuss it out for a few nights.  We're regressing.  And the worse thing is that Cupcake seems to be sitting up in her sleep, and then her body wakes her up.  None of us, baby included, are happy with this situation, but are at a loss on what to do.  The night we let her sort it out herself, she just cried while standing for a half hour.  I was so exhausted I let her, but we share a room, so this just wont work.  Should we set up an air mattress in the living room?  Would that work better?

I'm having a some tough weeks, where I feel like I'm doing it all wrong.  She doesn't sleep well, and it feels like a direct reflection of my love and parenting abilities.  It's hard to convince me otherwise. 

Blog makeover

I've been trying to upkeep this blog, reformat it some, and figure out what to do with pictures.  Because, really, pictures are always better, but I still want to respect my child's privacy.   Anyway..

 I felt inspired by Dana's blog entry What Were We Thinking?: 10 tips for starting a blog. Not only did she make a pretty nice and clean list with blog starting tips, it also made me realize that my current comment section stinks.  Really, it does.  So I've installed, hopefully successfully, a new commenting software that should allow me to respond to people more efficiently.

Also, at some point I will figure out how to work the Blogher banner ad.  They say it's simple to install, but I beg to differ.  Of course, it doesn't help that we've been going through a baby nap crisis this week (more on that soon), so I'm short on Internet time.

Ambivalent feelings about L-Carnitine supplements

So I'm gonna start off by saying that I'm not a fan of supplements, whatever their form.  I don't take vitamins, and I was reluctant to even give Cupcake vitamin D drops (in the end I was spotty about remembering).  I also don't give her iron supplements, choosing instead to make sure I'm feeding her meats/spinach/legumes.   This might make me a terrible, mom, but I'm cool with it.  :)

So when our doctor told us to give Cupcake daily L-Carnitine for her MCAD Deficiency, I was dubious.  But hey, I'll follow doctors orders if they're necessary.

Cupcake's New Born Screening numbers were very alarming.  So much so, that the Metabolic doctors recommended that we give her the highest dosage of L-Carnitine for her weight, which I believe was 2 ml per day.  Since we were new to the whole FaOD world, we did as instructed, and it was a colossal failure.  She would scream every time we gave her the drops, which was twice a day, and we would all dread them.  Still, if that's what's necessary, I figured we should toughen up.  I believe in modern medicine.

At our follow up appointment one week later we asked the doctor if the Carnitine was strictly necessary.  By this point, Cupcake's new labs were in, and her levels were much more stable.  She still had MCAD (I'd been hoping for a false positive, but no such luck), but the situation wasn't as dramatic.  And since Carnitine is controversial anyway, we made the decision together, with our doctor's approval, to only give it to her when she got sick. 

Our doctors trust us.  We had by that point shown them our anal retentive tendencies of tracking all her feedings and diapers, so I think they felt confident that we'd be able to make the call if anything was amiss with Cupcake.  Each case is different, of course, but I was more comfortable with giving medication only when absolutely necessary rather than as a precaution.

For her next two colds, we gave her L-carnitine from a syringe, and all was fine.  I doubt she liked it, but it was a non issue.

Then we had the recent Roseola fever scare.  When her fever spiked at over 102, we called the Metabolic Center, and they informed us that our new L-Carnitine dosage was 5 ml, two times a day.  That night, after she was done breastfeeding one side, we tried to put the syringe in her mouth and administer the meds.  Forcefully, I might add, since she was refusing it.  And then all h*ll broke loose. 

Firstly, she swatted the meds away, which seems like a normal reaction.  But afterwards, she started refusing all food and liquid.  I just don't think she trusted us anymore, after we had pried her mouth open to put nasty medication in her mouth. (And L-Carnitine smells nasty, I can't even imagine the aftertaste it must have)  Every time I tried to breast feed, she would scream and swat the boob away.  Luckily, she was okay with bottles of formula, and we were able to persuade her to have a couple of ounces.

For two days, she refused almost all food.  And this baby has one of the healthiest appetites I've even known.  It was probably the fever taking away her appetite, but it's too much of a coincidence that all this happened right after the Carnitine.  I think the two issues are related.

So we didn't give L-Carnitine to her again.  It seemed that our best shot to have her eat again would be to not freak her out with forced medicine.  Eventually she started eating, and her fever broke at just about the time we were to see the Metabolic specialist.

We discussed with our metabolic doctor what to do about the L-Carnitine next time she got sick.  And we all agreed that it's more important to have Cupcake eat real food (calories!) than take the medical supplement.  Her advice was to mix it with something to mask the taste, and she specifically recommended Hawaiian punch as something that has hides nasty medication flavors  I vowed right then and there to never judge another mother again if I see them feeding their babies nasty unnatural foods.  You never know the whole story...

So we'll be taking a break from Carnitine unless the Hawaiian punch business works out.  I understand that L-Carnitine supplementation has worked wonders for other children with metabolic conditions.  But in our case, we'll be playing it by ear for a while.

We had Roseola

So one pediatric appointment, a Metabolic appointment, a scary fever, sleepless nights, and lots of fussiness later, we have confirmation: Cupcake has/had Roseola.

This is what our regular pediatrician suspected from the beginning, but we wouldn't know for sure until she got the tell tale rash.  By yesterday her fever was gone, and this morning she woke up with a gentle red covering on her skin.  I've never been so glad to see a weird rash, because now it means that it's over.  Done.  Fever broke, the rash should not be painful, and she's no longer contagious.  We can go back to our regular programming.

Though we did learn a lot from the experience.  Cupcake actually started refusing food for a whole day, going so far as to violently swat away anything we'd try to offer her. This was new for us, and left us at a loss of what to do.  Somehow she managed to eat some snacks here and there and drink a bit of breast milk at just the right times, so we avoided any type of crisis, metabolic or otherwise.  Even non FaOD children need to eat and hydrate if they're feverish.    

I will go into more detail about our metabolic appointment, as that deserves its own post, and our new found frustrations and opinions about L-carnitine (in short, we're not fans of carnitine at the moment).  In the meantime, we will rejoice that Cupcake did not have Coxsackie, a virus that still terrifies me and is probably lurking in the playground shadows.

Fevers

Cupcake has a fever or 101.5 today, and she feels very warm.  So far she's still eating like a champ and cruising the furniture like no one's business.  Then again, she's also been clingier, and looks under the weather.

Thank God it's a weekend and Nate is here.  We can trade holding her, and bounce our worries off each other.  But because it's Sunday, the doctor's offices are closed, so we'd have to wait until tomorrow to have her checked.

I've called our metabolic center (they have a 24 hour line), and they told us to follow her illness, and keep feeding her every 2 hours (breast milk or solid food), and call them back if she starts vomiting or refusing food.  But otherwise, give her L-carnitine, fever reducing agents, and lots of TLC (that's Tender Loving Care).  Not much more we can do.  MCAD doesn't make Cupcake more susceptible to illnesses, nor does it make her body deal with the virus/bacteria any different.  It's not her immune system that malfunctions.  Rather, when she gets sick, we need to watch that she doesn't go into fasting, which could cause a metabolic crisis.

So it seems that everything is "under control", but man, it's hard seeing a 9 month old miserable with a fever.  She's alternating between happily energetic and whiny sleepy, depending on how much we sing to her.  We'll just take it easy today, play in the house, and make sure she's getting plenty of rest and food.

And here comes the mom-guilt.  I fear she has the coxsackievirus that's going around.  Why, oh why did I take her to that play-date on Wednesday?  Is that when she caught it?  Should I have protected her more from infections?  Last Wednesday, I made the conscious decision to take her to the picnic in the park, even though some babies had come down with coxsackievirus.  Since the infected kids wouldn't be there, I figured it was okay, and I just make sure she didn't share toys with any of the other babies.  Maybe that wasn't enough.  We also went out to the playground every day this week, even though we're having a crazy heat wave and this virus is making the rounds.  Could it be the extreme temperatures that affected her ability to fight off infection?  And if this illness gets worse and she ends up in the ER, I'm gonna have a hard time not blaming myself.  I've always believed that we can't keep children in a bubble, that it's our duty to expose them to the world.  Illnesses at a young age result in antibodies and healthier adults, right?

I just feel so bad for her right now.  She seems physically uncomfortable, and there's only so much Tylenol or ibuprofen can do.  Any other tips for a feverish baby?

Re-reading The No Cry Sleep Solution

A friend gave me Elizabeth Pantley's The No Cry Sleep Solution when we went through our 4 month sleep regression.  I read it along with Ferber's "Solving Your Child's Sleep Problems", and Weissbluth's "Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child."  Of the there, Pantley's words and advice were the most relatable, and I liked her gentle parenting approach to a baby's nighttime needs.  Overall, I highly recommend it.

I've written about my opinions on Ferber (liked the theories and research, not so much the CIO methodology), and Weissbluth (hated his close minded one-size-fits-all admonishments), but I realized that I've never blogged about the No Cry Sleep Solution.  Probably because I was actively taking advice from the book, so it felt like it deserved several pages of analysis and thought.

Well, I'm ready now.  If I am to be honest with myself, Cupcake never recovered from the 4 month sleep regression.  She has some good days and some bad days, but the good days are still only 4-5 hours of sleep a night, and on the bad days she needs to nurse every 2 hours (she doesn't have nighttime needs beyond food, it seems).  The bad times are not too terrible, compared to some other stories I've heard, but still, I'm getting worn out.

I want to respond to my child's needs, and if she needs to eat at night, then she shall have milk.  However, I also want to help her self soothe to the best of her abilities.  Nothing wrong with gently directing the child towards more sleep independence, right?

Over the next few weeks/days I plan on going over the book again, and hopefully writing about our experiences with it.  What worked for us, what didn't, and what things don't work because we might just have totally unrealistic expectations.