Yay Jimmy!

My wonderful and awesome husband is now finished with his field school and headed out to the Army base for his chaplain training. But before he left he sacrificed some money and some much needed R&R to come visit me and Emery. And we love him for it even though it's only for 3 days...

Breastfeeding RIP

So breastfeeding is no more. This last weekend I went to visit my grandma. It is a 3 hour drive to visit her and so in order to make it as far as possible with a baby in the car I pumped some milk and put it in a bottle so I could feed it to her in her car seat. (Someone else was driving of course...) To my utter shock, she sucked down three ounces in about 10 minutes and went right to sleep for 3 hours. In order to understand how unusual this is I have to explain how she usually eats. 

Usually she gets hungry, I try to feed her and we spend between 5 and 20 minutes with her screaming and me trying to calm her down long enough to get latched on (and that's WITH the nipple shield too). Then she nurses for about 45 minutes... sometimes she nurses for as long as an hour and a half. She almost always stops nursing because she falls asleep. She will be hungry again in about 45-90 minutes. Then we have to start the whole routine over again. We have been doing this for almost 2 months. 

So I began to have the suspicion that she was never getting a full tummy from nursing. So I decided to do an experiment. Yesterday I pumped my milk and fed it to her in a bottle the whole day. She did the same thing that she did in the car. It only takes her about 15 minutes to down 3 1/2 ounces from a bottle. But to my surprise... she wanted to eat that much about every 2 hours and by the end of the day I was just completely and totally out of milk. I had pumped every last drop that I had and she was screaming from hunger. And I had the horrible realization that as she's gotten bigger and her appetite has increased, her (lack of) ability to suck has not improved and she's been getting hungrier and hungrier. She hasn't been starving, but she's never sated either. It's much harder to get milk out of a breast then out of a bottle. 

So last night I cried as I fed her a bottle of formula. I cried because I swore I would never give formula to my baby, and I cried because I felt so bad that she's been hungry for so long without me knowing it, but mostly I cried because as she looked up at me with her perfect round eyes I experienced a kind of intimacy with her that I have never experienced in our battle with breastfeeding. And I cried because all my preconceived ideas about how to care for her have been wrong and I knew even as I cried that this was the right thing for us. The BEST thing for me and for her. 

So on Friday I'm going to Babies R Us to buy a mechanical breast pump and I'm doing everything I know how to do to increase my milk supply so that I never again have to feed her formula. And I know this is right... but I'm still crying...

All dressed up for church...

Emery was an angel for church this week. She looked wide-eyed at all the dozens of people who held her. She slept during the service and still looked adorable. We were 45 minutes late for Sabbath School of course because she wanted to eat right when we got there... but oh well! Here's some pictures.

Nicknames

So babies tend to aquire nicknames quite quickly around my family. Emery already has quite a few. My favorite one, and the one that I feel fits her the best is "Snuffleupagus" after the sesame street character of the same name. She aquired this nickname because of the loud snuffling that she tends to do. She snuffles loudly when she's eating and she always gives some good loud snuffles when she's upset right before she lets out her first squawk. It's adorably cute and I'm ashamed to say that I have laughed at her distress more than once (as I tend to her needs of course...)

Another one she has aquired recently is "Wild Bill Hiccup" because she gets the hiccups about 4-5 times a day. This nickname is also one of my favorites just because it sounds so funny. :)

She also has this funny habit of lowering her eyelids halfway and peering at you suspiciously from the bottom half of her eyes. It looks similar to how an alligator would peer at you from it's vantage point halfway in the water. This habit has earned her the nickname "Mr. Magoo" and "Alligator." The Mr. Magoo nickname is a shout out to my dear cousin Michael who used to do the same thing as a baby. His Mr. Magoo nickname has followed him through his childhood and into his adult life. Sometimes at reunions we still hear people refer to him as Michael Magoo!
I'm sure more nicknames will come as she gets older... I'd love to hear some of your or your children's nicknames and the reasons behind them...

My mom

So my mom is awesome with babies. She has all these little tricks to calm screaming babies and she can change a diaper in about two seconds flat. She has managed to get some of the first glimmers of smiles out of my baby that I haven't even managed yet. And she knows about a million baby songs... I am in awe...

Baby worries

So I was sitting with a group of ladies in my mother's generation the other day and they were all cooing and ohhing and ahhhing about the baby. And they started to share their worries about their babies. They all had the same kind of worries about their baby's physical health. They worried about germs and diseases and physical abnormalities and brain damage. I was kind of amazed because I have almost no worries about that. I know that my baby is perfectly healthy and a few germs here and there will strengthen her immune system.
Well I was feeling pretty good about myself for being so level-headed about it when Emery started crying because she was hungry. I suddenly remembered that I didn't bring the nipple shield with me and she can't latch on without it. I tried to get her to latch on and it only made her more and more angry. So I strapped her in the car and we raced home as she screamed bloody murder in the back seat. All the while I was freaking out! What if I emotionally scar my baby by not feeding her? I want her to learn to trust me... I want her to know that she will always be cared for. My mom was telling me that it won't hurt her to cry a little but I was a total basket case. I KNOW she needs to know that the world isn't perfect and she won't always get what she wants when she wants it... but does she have to learn that lesson when she's only 3 weeks old? I don't think so. She was already unsettled from the plane ride the day before and she is already having problems breastfeeding and what if this one incident causes even more problems etc etc...
Then it suddenly hit me... my generation of mothers doesn't worry so much about their baby's physical health. We worry about our baby's emotional health... and we can be equally irrational about it. I just need to calm down, love my baby the best way I know how, and trust that her emotional health will follow.
But it's hard... I worry that I'll make some kind of fundamental mistake and my 35 year-old daughter will blame me for her disasterous life because of some huge mistake I made when she was a month old.
So, as my mother would say... "Get a grip Lindsey!"

Baby books

So I feel a little betrayed by all those baby books I read before Emery was born. The longer I'm a mom (listen to me with all my 4 weeks of experience!) the more I believe that you just have to figure it out based on the needs of yourself and your baby.
For example... all those baby books say how beautiful and natural breastfeeding is and how babies can breastfeed minutes after being born and blah blah blah... Well that may be true for some babies but the more people I ask the more amazed I am. There's apparently more women who had problems breastfeeding then women who didn't have problems. At least of the women I have talked to. Apparently breastfeeding is a learned thing for both mommy and baby. Why don't the books tell us this?
And all the baby books tell me that babies love to be held. "Hold your baby as much as possible" in fact, you really should wear your baby all the time. Babies are held all the time in the womb and they love to be held. Well they apparently never met my uber-independent daughter. She likes to be held... sometimes. She screams bloody murder if I try to sling her in any way so slinging is out of the question for now at least. And sometimes she'll cry until I set her down on the couch or the floor and then she's happy as a clam. What a weird kid...
Anyway... I don't mean to sound bitter, but I wish more books out there told us to trust our instincts and if our babies don't fit the "normal" baby mold not to sweat it. It doesn't mean there's something wrong with her.