Instructions Don't Cover All Contingencies

Most of Daughter 0.5's toys have specific, gentle cleaning instructions. "Don't immerse," they say. "Surface clean only," they say.

However, they don't say how to clean off copious amounts of spit up which is the consistency of pudding and which was generated while Daughter 0.5 was enthusiastically chewing on the toy.

Baby Monitors Don't Monitor Just The Baby

I left Husband asleep in our bed and Daughter 0.1 asleep in her crib (which is in our bedroom) to do some online shopping and catch up on LOLcats when I heard this horrible noise through the baby monitor. I rushed to the crib worrying I'd find Daughter 0.1 coughing hard to keep from choking or vomiting worse than she ever has in her short life.

Instead I find her squinting with her hands in front of her face and body language that clearly said "Mom, I was sleeping. Why'd you turn on the light?"

Surprised, I stopped and listened. The shower was running. I walked into the bathroom to catch my husband sneezing. And sneezing again.

So through a closed door, over the noise of the shower, the baby monitor picked up my husband's sneezing fit while our baby was sleeping peacefully.

Motherhood Has Turned Down My Gross-O-Meter

I used to think that urine and feces were categorically gross. My own was acceptable when it went directly into the toilet and was flushed promptly and successfully. Anything else was gross.

Feel free to stop reading now. Really.

[If you know how to do a cut, jump, fold, "Read More", or whatever it's called in Blogger, please leave a comment and let me know how. I can't seem to figure it out and I have yet to find anything about it in Blogger's help articles.]





Daughter 0.1 spit up a lot early this afternoon. Repeatedly. Since I was walking around the house holding her at the time, she spat up on my shoulder, down my back, on the back of my right calf, and on the floor. When she seemed to be done I figured I'd change my shirt and give her a quick bath.

Did you read that? "Quick bath." That was foreshadowing.

Bath time always includes some risk of a mess because the diaper has to come off before the baby goes into the bath. So far we've been lucky with the naked baby transportation.

This time she peed on me. Since I was holding her upright against my chest she peed on my shirt and shorts. For a small creature she can let loose a lot of urine. My pre-motherhood reaction to being peed on would have been quite vocal and I would have gotten the pee off me before doing anything else. Instead, I finished putting the baby in the bath* and thought about how I would pick up my clean baby after the bath without getting her pee back on her.

*Her bath is in the laundry room sink for now. She fits, it's more comfortable than bending over a tub, and it has a vegetable sprayer.**

**Clearly these aren't foot notes since they're in the middle, but I'm not sure what to call them. Asterisk-ized digressions?

So there I am, half-soaked with baby pee, holding the baby in one arm so I can wash her bottom when she starts to poo. And poo. And poo some more.

For the first few weeks, babies poo often. The tracking sheet from the hospital says 4 to 12 times a day. But once their digestion matures enough breast-fed babies poo much less often since they absorb most of what they take in. One baby health book says not to worry if they only poo once a week. Today is Friday and until this afternoon Daugher0.1 hadn't pooed since Monday. I don't think she was absorbing; I think she was saving it up.

She's still pooing in the sink and I'm using the vegetable sprayer in one hand to wash the poo down the drain and off her feet while I'm holding her partly upright with the other hand. I'm not saying "EWWW!", I'm not thinking "This is gross." Instead I'm thinking, "My arm's getting tired. I hope she's done soon." After some more pooing I start to think it's a good thing she's pooing in the sink because this much wouldn't fit in a diaper and a leaky diaper is a bad, surprising kind of mess.

Becoming a mother has drastically increased my tolerance for things that come out of babies.

Burping Baby Baboons

Do other species than humans have to burp their babies? Do non-human primate mothers walk around all day patting their babies on the back?

If not, why do human infants need help getting gas out?

Breastfeeding: Tricker than I'd expected

It never occurred to me to wonder about the functional details of breastfeeding until recently. I figured that hormones Did Things to the mother's breasts, infants suck instinctively, and it would work as simply as an adult drinking through a straw. I'd heard about women having trouble with not producing enough milk or with sore nipples. When I thought about it at all, I assumed that nipples became sore because they were chapped and that some type of lotion would help.

My assumptions were wrong.

Yes, infants suck instinctively, but they can latch onto the nipple correctly or incorrectly. An incorrect latch hurts. It can hurt a little bit, or it can cause feet-kicking, face-scrunching pain. Have you ever sprained a joint and had to hop on the other foot or wave the other hand while saying "ow, ow, ow" (or something less polite) in a very loud voice in order to handle the pain? It's like that, eight to ten times a day.

I now understand why some animals abandon their young.

Don't worry and please don't call Child Protective Services. I'm not going to abandon Daughter 0.1. I'm not even going to stop feeding her breast milk. Unlike wild animals, I have good options for dealing with nipple pain. The most convenient one is painkillers. If one feeding goes particularly badly, I can take an ibuprofen or acetaminophen and that keeps the next feeding from hurting as much. We have a breast pump so I can pump milk out of my breasts and feed it to her in bottles. And for help finding a permanent solution, there are lactation consultants. So far I have spoken to two on the phone and had appointments with two others.

The baby prep breastfeeding class and the nurses who helped me with breastfeeding while I was still in the hospital said it was important to get a deep latch, but one of the lactation consultants I spoke to after coming home gave me an exercise that really explained why. Put your finger in your mouth so that your teeth are on the first joint and suck. The part of the tongue under your finger tip is flat and pushing up against your finger. The part of the roof of your mouth above your fingernail is flat and low. Now move your finger so that your teeth are at the second knuckle and suck. The tongue under your fingertip rounds down when you suck, and the roof of your mouth above your fingernail is round and a little higher. So a bad, shallow latch squeezes the nipple between two flat surfaces while a good, deep latch cradles the sensitive tip of the nipple between round, roomier parts of the mouth.

So breastfeeding well seems to requires more than instinct. I'm working with lactation consultants so that Daughter 0.1 and I can improve our technique and get a deep latch every time.