One of Amelia’s favorite gmes right now is to be pulled into a standing position and held there – frequently just with us supporting her hands! She’s starting to get a much longer gaze, so I think that’s why she enjoys standing up so much – it gives her so much more to look at! But also she really enjoys using her leg and core muscles, it’s clear.
Sorry for the turned-on-its-side video – if anyone can tell me how to rotate it, I’d be grateful!
Amelia will spend 4 hours with our nanny share nanny, Janet, today: from 8 am to noon. Both Tom and I drove in to drop her off at the nanny share house in South Austin, but we left a 7 am and hit nearly no traffic, so we got there way early. I took Amelia and drove her around the neighborhood for 30 minutes and Tom went on to work. Amelia was really good in the car – even though she woke up repeatedly from my rush hour stops and starts, she didn’t cry at all.
Janet is a nice older woman who retired from a job at an accounting firm quite a few years ago and discovered that she wanted something to do, so she decided to take care of babies. She had 5 kids of her own and has cared for Seville, the other baby in the nanny share, from when she was 3 months old until now, when she is 7 months old. Seville is a sweet girl, just getting into crawling now, and her mom is very nice as well.
It’s a lot less expensive to do a nanny share, I’ve learned, than hire a full-time nanny to come to our house, which we could never afford even if we were both working full time. And this way, Amelia gets cared for by one person reliably, and that one person only has one other child to care for. We’re only doing part-time, 8 to noon 5 days a week, with the thought that this way whoever is working from home can actually get a little work done in the morning. Of course, whoever is working from the office will be late to work (dropping off at 8 in South Austin translates into arriving at work around 8:30 or 8:45 on a GOOD day of Austin traffic).
Our current plan is that whoever’s working from the office in the morning takes Amelia into town and drops her off with Janet. Then whoever’s working from home drives into town and picks her up at noon. We can manage the cost of the nanny share if Tom can pick up another 10 hours of work a week, which should be easy enough as they’ve still got him running jobs right now and there always seems like there’s more work for him to do. Also, he always has deadlines at the end of the day (when Amelia is at her fussiest) and that just doesn’t work at all.
I’m still a little numb about it, though I do feel some sadness about leaving our daughter with a stranger, no matter how dedicated, kind and loving that stranger seems. It’s just SO difficult to be even slightly productive when you’ve got the baby with you home alone, and we’ve both been run very ragged in the last 6 weeks.
So we’re trying this out for a week to see how we all do. I hope it works and I hope it doesn’t. I’m worried that I’m giving up my principles re: “I don’t want to have a baby and give her to someone else to raise,” and that soon we’ll be leaving Amelia with Janet full time. Which we might just barely be able to afford, with one of our salaries going directly to pay for childcare, matching the prevalent paradigm of middle class parents of young children. One of us staying home full time would NOT pay the bills, unfortunately, and in this rocky economy I’m loathe for either of us to voluntarily give up a good job.
It’s just very disappointing that we couldn’t make the working-from-home/caring for baby synchronized swim work well enough. And we both worry that we’re failing our daughter. Sigh.
Janet called with an update around 10 am: Amelia had spent a very fun morning playing with Seville! She loved the buzzy chair that Seville has outgrown and hadn’t cried once all morning. She had drunk a little milk and was fast asleep in the chair when Janet called. Oddly enough, her phone call brought me to tears more than driving away from the house did this morning.
We hadn’t put Amelia on the play mat much lately, because with the acid reflux we’re supposed to keep her elevated all the time. Today, though, I rigged up a little backrest for her so she could practice her kicking.
This play mat, lent to us by Les Blases (the unfailingly kind and inspiring) is one that helps teach baby about cause and effect through a setting that only plays the music and blinks the lights if one of its dangly bits is pulled or if one of its supports is kicked.
Amelia prefers kicking at this point – she is still keeping her hands in fists just in case a bar fight suddenly breaks out – and has gotten really good at keeping the music playing with pretty regular kicking of the giraffe.
Those noises she is making, while super-cute, are actually her cues that “I’m bored of doing this now and plan to start crying in a few minutes!” It’s nice that she’ll warn us of an upcoming explosion these days… sometimes.
And now, so can you!
I love it when she nurses in her sleep – it’s my absolute favorite.
Since seeing the craniosacral therapist last Friday, we’ve had quite a few unassisted poops, some of them straining-free and some of them not. Upon following up with the pediatrician yesterday (who was running an HOUR late, no exaggeration – argh!), Amelia’s ears were pink again, at the danger-level for infection, so we did another shot of Rocephrin, much as I hated to agree to it. Another shot seemed preferable to oral antibiotics as we feel like we’re starting to get the “flow” resumed in her GI tract, and the wait-and-see approach felt like it was going to result in a visit to the weekend urgent care. Doesn’t it always? Stupid parenting and its tough calls!
We see Behice again this afternoon,and I hope it will result more progress with Amelia’s strain-free autonomous pooping, and also address her constant nasal congestion and suspected GERD. We’ve started Amelia on baby Zantac, which I am not seeing a lot of results from in the first 12 hours, but we’ll see. The thought there is that her reflux is pushing milk into her sinuses and ear canal, and causing recurring ear infections. Thus, if we control the reflux we subsequently control the nasal congestion and ear troubles. Oy.
That being said, she’s feeling a little better in recent days – those smiles are fuel that Tom and I gobble up so that we can withstand the crying jags. Everyone assures us that we’ll get past this rough patch and soon have a giggly, snuggly baby who we can watch learn and grow… we can’t wait! Bring it!
On the work front, I am feeling a little more like I have a better handle on this work-from-home thing on this, my third week. Tom’s work is still making it difficult for him, though. Baby steps – not just for babies anymore!
Yesterday I asked our midwife if she knew of any alternate treatments that might be kinder than the buttstick, and while she had no magic bullet, she did recommend that we see some one for a Tui Na treatment – which is a kind of acupressure. So I high-tailed it to AOMA Professional Clinic and saw Dr. Jamie Wu, who specializes in pediatric Tui Na. He gave me some acupressure routines to perform on Amelia that should help her congestion and her digestion issues. Dr. Wu and GB have both seen some really miraculous results from this treatment, so cross your fingers for us.
Then today we went to the pediatrician for a follow-up visit and discovered that on top of everything, Amelia has an ear infection. We think some of the reflux, possibly from when she strains to poop, aspirated up into her ears and mucked up the works. We had an antibiotic shot at the doctor’s office (which coincidentally is also the treatment for salmonella, if that test comes back positive), and will need to keep a close eye on her over the next couple of days.
Upon talking with Dr Parr, it seems like the buttstick is something that we really have to do, but she did suggest we get a smaller one from the surgeon for now, as this one is so painful for her. Tom volunteered to do the buttstick insertion (as I’m so completely loathe to do it), saying that he’d rather have her hate him than hate me. Funny how parenthood re-phrases declarations of true love, isn’t it?
Oh, and also my cell phone died this morning. Not the battery – the PHONE.
Dad, Adrienne & Amelia
Deep thought
Becky & Amelia
Tom's magic football hold
Angry Shaolin monk baby
Peaceful Shaolin monk baby
Isn’t she getting big? Look at those rolls of fat!!! She’s out of Newborn clothes and now wearing 0-3 month! Also, we’ve gone from newborn-sized cloth diapers to infant-sized ones. My daughter is an infant now!
Happy post-Xmas everybody! I apologize for the long delay between posts, but I simultaneously got cable and started having family in town visiting, along with being accosted by the holiday, and also getting active on Facebook again (wow, what a time sink!).
My sister Adrienne came in for 5 days, with her visit overlapping my father’s 6 day visit. We stared at the baby a LOT, and bought & decorated a tree. Also enjoyed were cooking, watching the new 42″ flat screen that my dad bought us, and general lazing about.
Then Amelia had to put up with just Mom and Dad for a while, until my sister April and her husband Jason arrived on Xmas Eve. We had a lovely day yesterday: menu included prime rib, yorkshire pudding (my 1st time!), twice-baked spuds and English trifle, the latter of which I made myself. Everything was scrumptious, and everyone’s were fabulous.
The other reason that my voice has been off the interwebs of late is that the kid’s sleep patterns have been ALL OVER THE PLACE, and thus my sleep has been intermittent at best. We think she might have a bad reaction to my eating either dairy or citrus/tomatoes or both, so I’m eschewing much of the delicious leftovers from yesterday and going dairy and acidic food-free for a coupel of days to see if Amelia lets go of the fussing for a while. Also, her poop is very green, not the best of signs in Exclusively Breastfed Babies (whose poop, for the uninitiated, should be mustardy-yellow.)
It’s hard to come up with tasty things to eat that have neither dairy nor tomatoes nor citrus, at least for me, but I came up with a few menu items this morning and Tom ran to the grocery store WITH Amelia, which allowed me to go back to bed and get 90 minutes uninterrupted sleep. Yay!!! It helped my menu planning that I got two HUGE cookbooks for Xmas – The America’s Test Kitchen Cookbook, and Mark Bittman’s Best Recipes in the World. I am now equipped, cookbook-wise, to cook EVERYTHING. Which I love about me.
Seriously, though, the fussiness associated with my daughter’s digestion is really getting impressive. I won’t say colic, because it’s not like she’s crying for hours at a time (knock wood), but it’s quite disturbing when your breastfed baby pushes the nipple out of her mouth to scream. The nipple! This has been the automatic Crying Off Switch for 6 whole weeks! It can’t fail us now! Hence our taking the drastic measure of separating me from cheese, milk, butter, tangerines and ‘maters.
I must say that it’s been SO wonderful to have family here and see the love they have for my daughter; I don’t know why it is so moving – it’s not like I was expecting them not to like her or anything – but I just melt when I see my loved ones staring at Amelia with the same besotted look that I must have on my face most of the time. (Sorry – 2 AM Screaming Amelia is loved just as much as 2 PM Cooing Amelia, but the former doesn’t get all the adoring looks that the latter soaks up.) Maybe my mild level of surprise come from the assumption that no one could love Amelia as much as Tom and I do, and it’s really touching to see how wrong that notion is, and watch Amelia being embraced into our family by so many adoring pairs of arms. Everybody loves everybody – hurray!
More pics and things soon, pinkie-swear.
It is a special infant-flavored style of perversity that every time my daughter has an OH-MY-GOD-I’M-STARVING-TO-DEATH-RIGHT-NOW screaming meltdown in the car seat, I am driving the last 10 miles to the house and stuck behind someone going 10 miles under the speed limit.
Every. Damn. Time.
