We close on our new house this Thursday! The sellers asked for rent-back for 2 days due to a delay in closing on their new house, so we get the keys on Saturday.

I’m starting to feel anxious. Closing has snuck up on me because of all of life’s distractions, and suddenly it is here. And as lovely as it has been at my in-laws’ place, being “home” for real will be even better. The excitement is almost a physical feeling.

Really rough start to the night last night. But just had a 5 hr stretch. Even if the rest of the night is a bust, I’ll be grateful for that 5 hr stretch. 🙂

Figured out why Lewis was sad all day. Tummy ache. I could tell because of all the vomit.

I’m up for the second time tonight already. But there were 4 hrs between the first time and this one. That makes a difference. I’ll take any improvement I’m given.

My mom mentioned that the sleep issues might be because he’s approaching a developmental milestone. In this case, crawling. An interesting theory, indeed. He sure is getting good at pulling himself around. Crawling does appear to be on the horizon.

Lewis appears to be sick. Eye goop, snot, crying, no sleep. We’re so tired. We work so hard to get him back to sleep, only to have him wake up 3 minutes later.

I wish I could remember what sleeping well felt like. Lewis used to be so good. Or I was on maternity leave and it didn’t matter because I could sleep whenever Lewis felt like sleeping. But now… now he has flipped on us. And we’re so tired.

Today is my brother’s birthday, so we had a family dinner out at a fancy restaurant. In addition to fun uncle snuggles, Lewis got to have his first french fry ever, duck paté, risotto, swordfish, orange carrot squash soup, and bread. He is a very fancy baby.

He was also extremely well behaved. We didn’t have to leave due to screaming, everyone got to eat their dinner, and he didn’t make a huge mess. I did, however, have to leave early because bedtime came and went and the ticking time bomb was showing signs of getting close to going off. But I was nervous beforehand, and very pleased with how it went. Such an angel!

Where did my good sleeper go? This is happening so often now that it’s more a pattern than an exception. Such a bummer.

Sometimes I feel like all I do is rock Lewis to sleep. He woke up 3 times last night, and then we had our standard 3 naps today. And I did bedtime an hour ago, and just rocked and sang him back to sleep for 2nd bedtime. So… 8 times in the last 24 hours.

I just have to keep reminding myself that I am good at other things too. That there is more to my life than sitting in a rocking chair and singing “you are my sunshine”.

Lewis recently started to babble. His favorite syllable to repeat is “ma”. I know it doesn’t mean anything yet, but it sure does melt my heart anyway when I hear “mama mama mama mama” over and over. 🙂

Lewis. He must eat every 3 hours at daycare, or else he rebels.

Lewis. He must eat ever 1.5 hours at home or else he gets mad.

Silly baby.

The daycare people figured Lewis out!!! On Wednesday afternoon, I arrived to pick Lewis up and the teachers literally ran over to greet me with huge grins on their faces.

They shoved Lewis’ daily log sheet in my face and commanded me to look at the bottle section.

He.

Drank.

All.

Of.

Them.

!!!!

Turns out they just needed to wait 3 hours instead of 2 between bottles. I had suggested that a long time ago, but in the long list of things we were trying, that seemed to have gotten lost in the shuffle or didn’t click somehow.

Anyway… doesn’t matter now. The point is that the mystery is solved and I can rest easy. It wasn’t a fluke, either. He did just as awesome on Thursday!

That eliminates a lot of stress from my life. I’m so proud of my little booger for knowing what he needs and communicating about it the best way he knew how until we figured it out. And I’m relieved he is at a daycare that doesn’t give up on “tough babies”.

Now we can go back to having a happy, porky baby. I don’t care what size he is as long as he is growing. 🙂

On a scale of 1 to “I put a dirty diaper in the laundry instead of the diaper genie and only found it after the laundry was done”, how far off my game do you think I am today?

Kyle is sick too and he fell asleep when I put Lewis to bed at 7:30.

Lewis woke back up about 20 minutes later, and even though he was screaming in the same room Kyle is asleep in (we all share at my MIL’S house), Kyle didn’t wake up.

So I had to stop cleaning up the living room and kitchen and doing laundry to come and sing “rock a bye baby” on repeat in order to put screaming baby back to sleep. And as I am rocking Lewis, I am staring at my sleeping husband feeling very jealous/angry.

Not my favorite thing to feel. But here he is, medicated and sleeping his cold off. And here I am, unable to take any medicine of any kind, and not sleeping. Because I have to put kiddo back to sleep, finish the dishes, put away the bath stuff, finish the laundry, put away the toys, and put back together the couch that Lewis projectile vomited on earlier.

And Kyle is sleeping.

No, I don’t like to feel this way towards my husband. He doesn’t deserve it. But I do deserve a break when I’m sick too. Don’t I?

My sweet, sick boy has gotten me sick too. And in the interest of both of us getting better, he has decided to sleep for nearly 12 hours straight. I am fully rested, but my boobs are engorged and soooo painful. I don’t dare wake him up. But I wish he’d wake up on his own. This is agony! Ouch!

Sharing a room with a stuffed up baby is loud. Wish me luck getting some sleep! 🙂

We’ve got a sick, sad baby on our hands, people. Monster cold. Surely acquired at the doctors office where he was diagnosed with nothing. Arrived well, left sick. Oops.

Lewis has been having better and worse days. He is very inconsistent. His sleep has been trending towards the better side on a more consistent basis than his daycare-eating has.

Yesterday, out of desperation, I reached out on Facebook to get some suggestions for things to try that maybe I hadn’t thought of already. As always, people were very helpful. My belief in crowd-sourcing grows stronger.

The other mamas had great suggestions for ways to sneak breastmilk into solids, and other ways to get the fat/protein he needs through solid foods that he can actually eat with the few teeth he’s got.

My favorite suggestions were:

• Mix breastmilk in with his baby mush
• Quinoa
• Avocado
• Plain whole milk yogurt with pureed fruit mixed in instead of the special baby yogurt (which has added sugar, it turns out! boooooo!)

Today I sent him with his sippy cup, some breastmilk in bottles (can be transferred to sippy cup), some plain yogurt with breastmilk and pureed pineapple, and some broccoli/lentil puree with breastmilk and quinoa mixed in. So in addition to whatever milk the teachers can trick him into drinking, there are 2 extra oz of milk in his solid foods. Every little bit counts!

Next week, when my avocados are finally ripe, I’m going to make him avocado mush with quinoa, mushed black beans, and a dash of lime and cumin for fun flavor exploration.

The fat/protein problem seems to be solved with all the good suggestions I’ve collected from the awesome people in my life. Hydration is a bit tougher since he pretty much has to drink something in order to stay hydrated. But at least we’re figuring out most of the problem. Kid loves solids, so we just have to make that work.

And he still breastfeeds like a champ at home, so I’m looking forward to the next three days at home with him so I can pump him full of the good stuff!

Not an ear infection. This is a good thing, because it means Lewis hasn’t been sick this whole time without me noticing. It is a bad thing because that would have been a much easier problem to solve. Oh well.

The search for an explanation and a solution to Lewis’ eating problems continues.

I didn’t go to daycare feeling angry or upset this morning, but after clarifying the
feeding game plan, the morning shift teachers were all visibly upset again. Seeing that their reactions were much more serious than mine
made me feel like perhaps I didn’t even understand the weight of the
problem.

After that
conversation, I was very emotional and much more concerned about my baby’s
well-being. It feels like such a huge problem, and we just can’t figure
it out!

I firmly believe that you should talk about the challenges you face rather than internalize and struggle on your own, because – inevitably – someone will have something helpful to say that you hadn’t thought of yourself. Crowd-sourcing solutions is genius and works nearly every time.

Today I had two helpful conversations – One with my mother, and one with a coworker. My mother calmed me down over the phone after I left Lewis at daycare. She is just so good at saying what I need to hear and calmly brainstorming. She offered some explanations that seem very reasonable:

1. Lewis is exercising some control over one of the only things in his life that he can control in the face of his whole world being turned upside down with the move and staying at Kyle’s mom’s house. Eating is the only thing he has power over.
2. Lewis has developed preferences and a “will”, and has simply decided against bottles. My mom mentioned that my brother had done this with breastfeeding at exactly 7 months old – same age as Lewis. Maybe making choices like these is a developmental milestone.

Then at lunch today I talked with a coworker about it. As I was describing the problem to her, she said, “you know what? Lewis might have an ear infection that doesn’t have the standard symptoms. My son used to just hate lying down and have trouble sleeping and that’s how I knew he had one! No fever or any other symptoms – just bad sleep!”

Huzzah! Lewis doesn’t like to lay down (which we thought was just a weird quirk, or he wanted to play), has been having trouble sleeping, doesn’t enjoy sucking on bottles, and has been rubbing his ear (all of which seemed like they were teething related). So we’re going to the doctor this afternoon to see if this is an easy, medical fix rather than the complicated saga we’ve been pursuing so far.

Honestly, I hope he has an ear infection. Then the solution is simple.

Food stats today: 2 oz from a bottle, 2 oz from a sippy cup, cereal FOUR TIMES resulting in somewhere around 6-8 more oz of breastmilk, one jar of solids, no yogurt.

That’s way too much cereal in my mind. But hey, he got at least 10 oz of breastmilk today because of the cereal. So that’s good. And he definitely got enough calories! First time I can say that in a few weeks!

Our game plan for feeding Lewis at daycare failed miserably last Thursday. The Tylenol timing didn’t work out with his feedings, so it was as if he didn’t even take any Tylenol and he rejected all bottles.

The head teacher emailed me in the afternoon and (in kinder words) said that something needed to change and we had to find alternatives to the bottles immediately.

Commence motherly panic.

She suggested rice cereal combined with my breastmilk so he is still getting the nutritional benefits of my breastmilk even without drinking from a bottle. He loves to eat solids, so this seemed like a good suggestion, except that I am not a fan of the idea of rice cereal.

Who knows which studies you should actually listen to when there are so many conflicting conclusions out there, but I know there is some information circulating that rice cereal is pretty bad for babies. Something about it immediately converting into straight sugar when it hits their saliva.

Again, who knows who did these studies and what is right. But it is kind of like all of the pregnancy studies about alcohol: “We know a lot of alcohol is bad, but we don’t know what ‘a lot’ is, so you better just not have any”. I can get on board with that logic when it comes to my baby’s food and how what he consumes can impact his health for life.

BUT… starving for 4 days a week is also not an option. So I compromised with myself and bought him some whole grain baby cereal. It may not be the elixir of life, but combined with my breastmilk, I’ll accept it. Sustenance of any kind = a win.

Another suggestion was to just switch over to solids for the majority of his calories while he is at daycare, since he loves them. Hydration, protein and fat were all issues that popped into my brain with this idea, since baby mush is basically just straight veggies and fruit. So I talked with his doctor about adding in some yogurt to his diet, since that has lots of fat and protein, which other baby foods don’t have.

Again, there are a lot of studies out there about dairy proteins this young, but when your child is starving himself at daycare, you have to think about what is the lesser of the evils. Lewis’ doctor said there is a baby yogurt that is made from whole milk that is OK for babies as young as 6 months. The “studies” out there say that is false advertising, but protein and fat are very important for growing babies, and if he won’t take bottles… and his doctor OK’d it…. I guess we’ll go for it.

We also tested a sippy cup over the weekend. Lewis thought the sippy cup was amazing. So amazing, in fact, that he smiled the entire time he used it. Which resulted in much spillage, and very little milk consumption. But since he liked it, I sent him with a cup to daycare for them to try out. Maybe he’ll learn to swallow from the sippy cup instead of just grinning and letting it dribble out of his mouth.

So there you have it. The new plan: Sippy cup, yogurt, whole grain cereal with breastmilk, and mushy solids.

Doc confirmed that he only needs about 80-120 calories per meal with how frequently he eats during the day/night. So I think he’ll be okay with that combo. I’m eager to pick him up this afternoon and get the verdict.

Seven.

Ridiculous. Awake for a 6th time. Not hungry, no dirty diaper, not even sad. Just awake.

330 am and this is the FIFTH TIME I’ve been up with kiddo. No major screaming. Just awake every 90 minutes or less. Wow.

Sweet Boy woke up earlier than normal tonight. But he hasn’t screamed at all. He had a little snack and now he is dozing in my arms. Because he is content, it is easy to have patience while he decides whether or not to fall asleep. This is the Lewis I know. And he hasn’t even had any Tylenol!