Baby's First Illness

Tiny Squee has been sick all weekend. 

It started out as a low fever. I originally thought it was from teething, since her two front teeth are trying to poke through. When I came home from work on Friday, I found Mike in the recliner underneath a cranky, pink baby. Her fever spiked up to 104 (as determined by our somewhat inaccurate ear thermometer) Friday night. We didn't sleep well. She was up every two hours at least, hot and irritable. 

Saturday morning we were supposed to drive down to Corvallis to visit Meemoo. We decided to push our travels back to Sunday due to baby illness. That turned out to be a good decision since her fever went up in the evening and ended up topping 104 again Saturday night. Another unrestful night for everyone involved.

Sunday morning her fever was lower and she seemed to feel somewhat better. She was really cranky, but not screaming in pain so it's unlikely she has an ear infection. After her bath, Mike noticed that she had a rash that had suddenly sprang up in her diaper area and spread up her chest and back. I called the advice nurse, who said that unless her behavior changed substantially, she was probably fine. I decided to hold off on making her a doctor's appointment on the grounds that I think he was going to tell us that it's viral and there's nothing he can do and that we should take her home and make sure she stays hydrated.

Sunday night was not my favorite, though. She took forever to get to sleep, then was up again from 10-11 and refused to be put down so I could get ready for bed (teeth brushing while holding a baby, anyone?). Then, she was up at 1. I gave her to Mike for a couple hours, until she woke me up at 3 screaming bloody murder. He went to bed and I nursed her quiet. We dozed in the recliner for the rest of the night. 

Today, she's very cranky and has only been willing to be put down for a few minutes at a time. Most everything sets her off and she's crying real tears and most affronts, so she's serious about it. The rash is worse and has spread up the back of her neck. It doesn't seem to bother her.

My mother suggested that she has roseola (which I had when I was a baby - apparently I spiked a high fever while my parents were camping and they ended up spending some quality time in the ER). I looked up the symptoms and they seem like a very good match (from here):

The first symptoms include:

• Eye redness
• Irritability
• Runny nose
• Sore throat
• High fever, that comes on quickly and may be as high as 105° Fahrenheit and can last 3 to 7 days

About 2 - 4 days after becoming sick, the child's fever lowers and a rash appears. This rash usually:

• Starts on the middle of the body and spreads to the arms, legs, neck, and face.
• Pink or rose-colored,
• Has small sores that are slightly raised

The rash lasts from a few hours to 2 - 3 days. It usually does not itch.

Hardcore teething

TS is in the process of growing top front teeth. Soon she will look like a beaver. Right now, she's got swollen purplish bumps with small white toothy areas that can be seen through the gums. Of course, she'll only let you look if you're holding her upside down. It's a difficult process for her. She's been very whiny and needy today according to her stay-at-home father. When I got home and took her temperature, it was running between 100 and 101. I gave her a serving of baby tylenol, which she promptly spit out. I remembered that you're supposed to syringe it into their cheek pouches, so I squirted another serving into her cheek, which she ejected even more forcefully. I tried one last time, while holding her and moving her around to distract her. She seemed to swallow most of it. Since all three of them were on the low end of the recommended dosage (about half of it), I'm pretty sure that I haven't OD'ed her on acetaminophen.

Magic Sleep Suit Retired

Sterling has outgrown her magic sleep suit. She's 9.5 months old and it's supposed to fit 6-9 months, so I'd say we're right on the money. It's probably been approaching too small for a couple of weeks now - it's been pretty tight across the top of the shoulders. I realized that she had really, truly outgrown it when she kneed out through the zipper while I was nursing her to sleep.

Was it magic? No, really not. It did restrict her movement, which helped her calm down when I was trying to get her to sleep. She did come to recognize it as a sleep signal, to the point where she'd cry when we tried to put her in it. In fact, if she didn't cry going into the suit, it was usually a signal that she wasn't tired enough to actually go to sleep. It didn't seem to particularly increase the length of her naps. We didn't keep it on her overnight because she sleeps in the bed with us and tends to overheat anyhow.

Her bedtime routine now includes:
-a bath; we just transitioned her out of the infant tub into the "big person" tub
-two or three stories; these are board books, so they're all pretty short
-turn on her sleep music; Kenny Loggins "Return to Pooh Corner"
-nurse
I'm trying again to transition her off of nursing to sleep. It seems to be going better this time than it has in the past. I'm going to chalk it up to her being older and more developmentally mature now. We nurse until she seems to have lost interest in nursing as a food and is just nursing for comfort. I determine this by her sucking rate and strength and whether she's still swallowing. Then, I've started popping her off and laying her down on her front. I know, I know, they're supposed to sleep on their backs, but she doesn't like her back and she rolls over on her own if I put her on her back. If I pat her for a few minutes, she usually starts to breathe more slowly and easily and falls asleep. Tonight, I even got out of the bed before she was completely asleep and she fell asleep the last little bit on her own. I think we're really making progress this time.

Nursing update

9 months later, we're still at it. I feel like that's quite an accomplishment, seeing as I've never made enough milk for her. 

We've basically run out of donor milk at this point. I haven't been able to find anyone new to donate, probably because most people want to donate to younger babies. It makes sense, they need the milk more than a 9 month old who's doing well eating solids. However, she still needs to be taking in quite a bit more milk than I make. 

I'd been saying that I was going to get her on raw goat's milk after we ran out of donor breast milk, but our local farmers are in the process of drying off their herd so they can breed them for the spring. They didn't have any milk available. I did a little research and came up with this recipe for goat's milk formula made from dry goat's milk powder. I ordered a bunch of the ingredients from amazon and while I was waiting for them to show up, I put her back on powdered formula; the expensive organic Earth's Best kind. We had the same congestion issue that we had when she was just a tiny squee (the first time she was on it). I had hoped that she would have grown out of it, but apparently not. She got all snotty after a few days of formula instead of breast milk. We used the formula while we were down in California for Christmas and she did ok (not too snotty), but still more snuffly than I like my tiny squee to be.

Now that we're back home and I have all the ingredients for the goat's milk formula, we're feeding a combination of goat's milk formula and Earth's Best canned formula. I've been making up 16oz of goat's milk formula most days and then we supplement with Earth's Best when we go out (it's much easier to transport) or when we've used up all the goat's milk formula and need a bottle in a hurry (like the middle of the night). We've been doing a good portion of the feeding through the Lact-aid, although both goat's milk formula and powdered formula are a lot more irritating to use with it than breast milk was. The goat's milk formula has a bunch of added oil (coconut and olive), which solidifies when it cools down. If the Lact-aid is too cold, the oils clog the tiny sucking tube and TS can't get any liquid out. The powdered formula has a tiny little strainer that has to be used inside the funnel when the formula is poured into the bags. Otherwise, the undissolved formula gets stuck in the tiny tube as well. 

I'm still planning on changing her over to raw goat's milk once it's available. That'll probably be about the same time she turns one, which is when she's supposed to be able to start drinking plain dairy products as a beverage. Since I've got all the stuff to make the formula, I'll probably keep it up until I use some of it up, but it's nice to know that we've almost made it to the point where she can drink plain cow milk. 

My current plan is to keep nursing with the Lact-aid until she self-weans. However, I keep waffling on that decision. It's sometimes hard to rationalize all the trouble that I go through to produce a few ounces of milk. I have decided that I'm going to stop taking all the herbal supplements when she turns one, though. Then she can nurse whatever milk there is there and have a Lact-aid when she wants more (before naps and at bedtime, possibly). I keep hearing stories of babies who abruptly stop nursing and never go back to it, so maybe that'll happen to us. Or maybe she'll want to keep nursing forever (I hope not). At a minimum, I'm committed to continuing to take my supplements until her birthday, then letting her nurse through the summer. I'm torn about keeping it up through next school year - it'd be nice to not have to worry about pumping while I'm at work. That's a long time away in the life of a tiny squee, though. She'll be a totally different, much larger, person by then.

Baby Led Weaning Progress

TS has become quite the eater. She's willing to sample just about anything at this point. More and more, we just give her pieces of whatever we are eating. For example, tonight Mike brought home mexican food. TS had a few beans, a couple of pieces of chicken picked out of a burrito, a little rice, and a grape tomato (cut into quarters). She was tired or she probably would have eaten more. She also loves to drink water out of her sippy cup. Part of it is the entertainment value. She can suck up a mouthful of water and then spray it back out so that it runs down her front. Most of the time, we use bibs with little catch-pockets at the bottom. Sometimes I have to dump out several tablespoons of water out at the end of the meal, but it's worth it for the amount that she enjoys herself.

I'm not sure what multi-colored food she's eating here, but it looks like she's enjoyed it with her entire face.

She and Mike like to eat dinner together.

We usually share a bowl of oatmeal in the morning. This is at my grandmother's house.

I love the devilish look she has while trying to bite into this pear. She wasn't successful, but we did share it later.

Here, she's having a quartered grape tomato.

Her eating isn't very consistent. Yesterday, she ate a TON of food. Today, she didn't want much breakfast, had some strawberries and pancake at lunch (we were out), and then had a bit of mexican food for dinner. Nothing like the quantity of food she consumed yesterday, though. Maybe she was still full. A surprise from yesterday's meal was orange. We were at a restaurant and had ordered her one scrambled egg, hashbrowns and fruit off the kids menu. The fruit was a sliced orange. I didn't think she'd go for it, but she ate it all (half an orange) including gnawing on the peel. Who knew that oranges would be such a hit?

Other current favorites include: avocado (a perennial favorite), apple, pear, all fruits really, bread, chicken, oatmeal, and banana.

Handprint ornaments

I really dropped the ball on Christmas this year. Normally, I'm ahead of the curve and have all my shopping done several weeks before. This year, I had hardly even thought about what I was going to do before the term of teaching ended. Based on some helpful posts in facebook groups I belong to, I came up with the ideas to make salt dough handprint ornaments. I looked at several different websites to find a recipe and inspiration.

This is the recipe I used for the first batch. I can't find the original website I used, but it said that the ornaments could be microwaved to harden them. I tried that (because I was short on time at that point) and discovered that microwaving them did indeed cook them and cause them to harden, but that they bubble a ton even if you poke lots of holes in them with a fork. The next day, I tried again. I ran out of regular salt, so I used Kosher salt. It works, but the dough is grainier than would be ideal. One blog I looked at recommended a 150 degree oven for an hour. 6 hours later, they still weren't dry. I turned the oven up to 200, then to 250. They did eventually dry out and they weren't discolored and didn't bubble, but it was a little inconvenient cooking them for the entire day. Next time, I think I'll cook them at 250 for a couple of hours, then turn them up to 350 to finish.

I painted the first set (the bubbly, microwaved ones). It emphasized the handprint that way, which was good because it was sort of hard to see on some of them because of the way it had bubbled. The second set were better, but I didn't have time to paint and shellac them before Christmas.

They were well received by the grandparents (and great grandparents). I think I'm going to make handprint ornaments a holiday tradition.

Christmas with a tiny squee

We all flew to my grandmother's for Christmas. It was a lot of people (me, Mike, Sterling, my mom, my brother, his wife, their 2 year old all stayed there and my aunt and uncle came for Christmas day). There were a few stressful moments. But overall, it was good to be there with everyone and to celebrate Christmas with family.

Sterling was an excellent flyer. She was a little rambunctious on the way down, but slept the entire flight back, which was awesome. She enjoyed looking out the windows of the plane. Unfortunately it was cloudy the whole way, so she couldn't see anything really cool.

My grandmother loved seeing her. Granny's house is not what one would term baby-proofed, so we had to watch our TS closely, but she was able to rampage about in the living room without too much damage. Granny had a lot of good toys: a few old watches, some necklaces, tupperwares, and all sorts of stuffed bears and dolls. TS enjoyed determining the merits of each of these. Her favorites were the watches and a large silver necklace. She also liked the TV remote controls.

Mike and I had headed down several days before Christmas so that we could go into San Francisco and wander about for a bit. We took BART in and TS fell asleep partway there. Here she is sleeping in the sourdough bakery that we ate lunch at (very tasty). Then we checked out the Cartoon Art Museum, which was "tiny, but interesting" (according to the review). After that, we headed to the Children's Creativity Museum, but got sidetracked at another museum where someone we knew was having an exhibit. By the time we made it to the Creativity Museum, it was closing. Oh well, next time.

 My brother and his family showed up a couple days after us. Their daughter is just over 2. She and Sterling had a good time together. Their Christmas present to everyone was to cook Christmas dinner. My brother had told Granny to buy a 7 pound roast (for 9 of us, including the two babies). She got an 18 pound roast. She wanted leftovers. Despite the excess roast, they pulled dinner off astonishingly well. Everything was very tasty.

My aunt makes cookies every Christmas. I look forward to them all year.


My mother flew in last. I wish she had been there a little earlier. It's always easier when she's around.