Mommy & Baby Problems

S is dealing with recurrent plugged ducts. It's no fun. Especially when it tends to get bad at 4-5am. We think it's related to G sleeping longer at night (common according to the lactation consultants and other mothers). S is now taking Lecithin which is supposed to help prevent them from recurring, it's apparently an emulsifier, which means it helps keep the fat from separating from the rest of the milk. That, in addition to the heat pads, massage (not the comfortable spa kind, but the hard pressure on an already sore and tender area kind), pumping, and repositioning G's latch to the affected area. We hope it works.

We also discovered this week that G has cradle cap. Apprently this is common in babies, but from talking to friends, it is even more common in babies blessed with lots of hair. Probably because you can't see the scalp from under all of it. We're giving her more frequent shampoos and combing her scalp. This picture was taken after a major combing session, the flakes were everywhere! It seems to be going away tho, it was never really severe, so we'll see over the next few days if it clears up. And just like her Mom, G's hair gets curly when wet (and also looks better after the first day), and less curly when dry.

Mixed Blessings

So having your baby go for longer stretches between feedings is a great thing, especially when it happens at night.

Having hard breasts and plugged ducts because you baby is nursing less often is a horrible thing, especially when it happens at night.

This time around, I'm not even sure they are plugged because it doesn't have the same INTENSE PAIN that it had before, it's just lumpy. Maybe it's in the early stages? Who knows. I've put in a call to our lactation consultant as well as to the La Leche League. Hopefully someone will call back.

Speaking of calling back soon, we finally had to call the pediatrician/on-call advice nurse. I feel good that we lasted 6+ weeks without having to call. But this week has been stressful... worring first about G having a cold or fever and trying to use the nose sucker and ear thermometer (yes, I know that in infants the ear one is less accurate, but I was NOT going to put the butt one in without E around to help), then noticing yellowish gums around where her molars would be, and in the process of examining the yellow gums, finding a white bump along the front of her gums... sigh. 

For reference, it was the yellow gums that worried us enough to call the doctor.

Oh, and I did mention the longer periods between feedings, right? That's interspersed with periods where she does not sleep at all between feedings even though she's tired. How do I know she's tired? I don't have that great alert calm baby period, instead I have the yawning, almost dozing, then crying, turning to wimpering, then sleep, then waking up and crying, repeatedly until her next feeding. This occurs both when we try to put her down (we can get 20-30 minutes of peace) and when we continuously hold her, either walking around with her or just sitting with her.

We're chalking it up to her 6 week growth spurt.

6 weeks

When we scheduled my post-partum appointment for 6 weeks after G was born, it seemed so far off. But here it is. The appointment went well, I got the all clear that everything is ok (won't go into details) and most importantly, I've lost all of my pregnancy weight from G plus some. However, I always add 10 lbs to my pregnancy weight because of my first pregnancy, the 5 lbs I gained from it, and the 5 lbs from after our angel went to heaven. So all told, I still feel like I have 5 more pounds to lose. We'll see if it actually happens, since I hate dieting (I like to eat too much). If I want to get back into my wedding weight, I'll probably have to lose a bit more.

On another note, we had a parenting high last nite, where G went SEVEN hours between feedings! We were kind of shocked when we woke up at 4:30am both of us wondering if we had missed a feeding (her last one being at 9:30pm). The downside of it was that she had only nursed on one side before, so I was majorly full and G unfortunately could not completely drain that side (and I was feeling some hard spots and became deathly afraid of getting those AWEFUL plugged ducts again). So we spent the next hour and a half sterilizing all the breastpump parts E had literally just purchased before coming home that night and trying to read the online directions on how to put all the pieces together to make it work. I managed to pump out another 7 ounces total! After we finally went to bed at 6:30, I commented to E, if G had just nursed for 5 more minutes, we could have gone to bed an hour and a half earlier. It's amazing to me how even a hospital-grade pump is still nothing at all like the real thing. However, unlike a pump, you can't control when the baby wants to nurse and for how long.

G's second major accomplishment for this week is that she is getting much better at burping after her meals. For the first 5 weeks, it was as if she just refused to burp. You could pat and rub her for hours and she still wouldn't burp, though often you could easily get a spit up. The rare burp that she graced us with almost always was accompanied by the hiccups, which of course helped wake her up more and thus making it take longer to put her down to sleep. Somehow, in this past week, she has been so much better at burping. I think it's a combination of her getting older and "learning" how, and also her parents learning the tricks for how to best burp her. For G, it seems that most of the time you just have to sit her upright holding her torso straight (as opposed to hunched over because she likes to curl up in a ball lying upright against us), I usually do this with her facing me, and within a minute or so, she will give you a great burp. Sometimes accompanied with spit up, but still, a burp nonetheless, and without the patting, though usually I will pat her for a little bit before sitting her up in front of me. Very handy trick...

Delayed 1 Month Update & New Discoveries

So, I had intended to post something on G's first month, but that was last week and this is the first chance I've had to get online to post. That's what parenthood is about, everything takes WAYYYY longer. Had a family get-together for her one month "Man Yue" thing. According to my grandmother, because G was born at 11:30 at night, it counts as the next day, and in addition to the Chinese tradition of starting out life at one year old at birth, that means technically we celebrated her "thirteenth month plus one day"...

Oh, also in her first month, I got to discover the wonderful world of plugged ducts, we took G on her first trip to SF (for her friend's Red Egg party), met all her grandparents.

G also graduated to the next diaper size, maybe a week or more ago. We are using 7th Gen diapers and when E was sent on his first trip to buy diapers a few weeks ago, he called from the store wanting to buy Size 1 diapers instead of the newborn ones because you get like 12 or 16 more diapers for the same price. Uhh, she's not that big yet so stick w/ the newborn size. However, she is now on the Size 1 diapers, yay! We've got "new parents" written all over our foreheads, I took pictures of her in her Size 1 diaper... like I'm going to have time to scrapbook all of this! We'll see, I still have high hopes.

On a more recent note, today G discovered her fingers/thumb. This morning as E was changing her diaper, she was unusually quiet, and E noticed that she was sucking a finger. Of course we had to stop everything to take a picture because it was oh so cute! Then, later when she woke up from only sleeping an hour, I was doing everything I could to get her back to sleep. I put her in the sling, trying it left-handed for the first time which totally threw her off because she kept turning her head into the sling instead of outwards (way to freak out new mom smothering her baby in the sling). Anyways, we finally figured it out, and she was still crying and seemed to want to nurse, but I had started heating up some chicken & rice soup my mom had made because I was hungry so I wanted to eat first before feeding G (yeah, that didn't happen...) So, I was walking around with G in the sling, and she would quiet down and nod off in between crying and one of the times she nodded off, I noticed her thumb in her mouth, fingers up along her nose towards her eyes... so cute! Of course, tried to get a picture of it, but have you ever tried to take a picture of a baby while wearing her in a sling? Very difficult. I'll have to get E to upload the pics from my camera...