Knocked Up – Knocked Over

my journey through pregnancy and hyperemesis gravidarum

Category Archives: Parenthood


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Is it time to take my own advice?

Way back in November 2011, I wrote a post called In Defense of Nail Biters.  At the end of the article, I gave the following advice to parents whose kids bite their nails:

If you have a kid who bites his or her nails, please just leave them alone and let them grow out of it on their own.  The more you push, the more they’ll bite.  Please don’t feed the cycle.

I’m sorry to say that I have not been taking my own advice.  Oh sure, I leave Gabi alone about biting her nails, but there’s this other habit that she’s developed that I bug her about constantly.  Gabi has the habit of twisting and twisting her hair until it is tied in knots.  We call this “making dreadlocks , and we constantly pester her to stop.  When I brush her hair and I can tell it’s really tangled, I always ask, “Have you been making dreadlocks?”  And she always hangs her head and says yes.

Thinking about it, though, how is “making dreadlocks” fundamentally different from nail biting?

Hard truth?  It isn’t, and I’ve been shaming my kid about it, and that is not okay.

Man, that is so hard to write.  Acknowledging that I have a problem, though, is an important step in making positive changes.

I need to get honest with myself.   Why does the dreadlock making bother me so much?

  • It makes tangles that are hard to comb.  She combs her own hair for the most part, and isn’t what what conditioner and detangler is for?  It is her hair.  If she is not bothered by it, I need to not be either.
  • It breaks her hair.  I originally wrote that sentence as, “It breaks the hair.”  I had to go back and rewrite it.  It’s not the hair, it’s her hair.  Like fingernails, hair grows.  I need to let this go.
  • It leaves her hair looking perpetually messy.  She’s a little girl full of energy, bounciness, and excitement.  Her hair will never be perfectly coiffed.  Mine sure never was.  I need to let her get on with more important things like swinging on swings and following ants.

And for some reason, and I have no idea why, it’s almost like I take the dredlock making as a personal attack.  Like she’s doing it just to bug me especially.  And that is completely irrational.  There is some baggage deep inside that I can’t pinpoint that I am asking my five-year-old to carry.  And that is not fair to her.

As an adult, it is up to me to set the tone of the relationship.  I can make our relationship about pestering and nagging, or one of peace and attachment.

Right here, right now, I am choosing peace and attachment.

This is me, sitting down, taking stock of where we are in our family, and making the decision to take my own advice.  I’m not going to bother Gabi about her hair anymore.  We’ve got better things to do.


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Guest Post: This Year Pinterest Is Going to Make Me a Better Person

 P1040069_2Liz is taking a leave of absence from public education to care for her 18 month old and emotionally needy border collie. Before Liz stayed home, she taught every grade from Kindergarten to 8th, but loved middle school because that is where the real changes in life happen.  When she was working, her husband cared for their daughter and then he worked afternoons and nights. Being a mom to her daughter is the best job she has ever had.  Previously, Liz wrote the article Guest Post: Misconceptions about Motherhood.

I don’t remember how exactly I discovered Pinterest, but apparently it was at the same time that everyone else did, too. Even my own mother was telling me about things she was pinning. When I was teaching, I used it to keep track of all my summer and late night research. Then I gradually moved out of the education realm and into pinning things like recipes and garden projects. I just love the internet!

 Since I have recently (in the past two weeks) become a Stay At Home Mom, I feel it is my duty to compete with all the awesomeness out there. There’s no awards for being a Stay At Home Mom and I am intensely competitive with myself. Of course there’s no need to go crazy here. I’ll never earn the title super mom and I don’t want it.

 Figuring out this mom thing is actually kind of hard. Teaching middle school is sometimes easier believe it or not. I need some kind of structure in my day, which is why I’ve pinned all kinds of calendars and organizational ideas. There’s some great ideas on there. I’m already pinning and planning activities to do with my daughter. Her board alone has 124 pins! Where to start? A tractor made out of cardboard? Reading chairs made from inner tubes? Or a bunch of busy bags to make and toss in the diaper bag? I’ve got about 20 pins with lists of things to do with your toddler. Does that make me a good mother? Someday I’ll have time to read those.

 The downside to Pinterest is it is a time sucking, black hole. There’s so many interesting things out there. So many people to follow, so many neat ideas. I’ve got 21 boards and 986 pins and I have tried to keep it down, believe me! If I do one thing a day, it will take me about three years. Of course I keep pinning so there could be no end to this.

 I can do yoga with my daughter, that is assuming she stops running around in circles long enough to get downward facing dog with me. I can paint a chapter of a book on a wall, reorganize my pantry (wait, I don’t have a pantry), and make three months worth of freezer meals. I’m out of breath; the whole thing makes me a little manic.

 I’ve got to get that kitchen herb garden going and start some seeds in toilet paper roles because it’s biodegradable. So far I’ve saved 4 toilet paper rolls and they are sitting on my soon to be organized desk. Perhaps my husband won’t mind if I build some inexpensive shelves in front of the kitchen window to hold all these plants. Ooh… I can plant tulip bulbs in water and we can watch them grow every day! There’s so much to do and so little time!

Breathe. . . .

Let it go . . . .

 It’s just a bunch of pretty pictures and ideas on the internet. I’ll take it slow, one recipe and idea at a time, and if I don’t do all of it or any of it, it doesn’t make me any less of a person. One night I got extra creative and made beef and broccoli in the crockpot and Ramen, from scratch. That’s right, I even made the dough and rolled out the noodles.
Recipe thanks to Katie at the Kitchen Door: http://katieatthekitchendoor.com/2012/10/28/cookbook-review-and-giveaway-japanese-farm-food/

This year I’m going to be a better person. I’ll learn to cook, start composting, improve my garden, and find all kinds of ways to entertain and teach my toddler. Just as soon as I get organized.

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Sleep Strikes, Sisterhood, and Surrender

I’m going to do my best with this post.  It’s been a long time since I have slept so I am not sure how coherent I will be.  But I wanted to reach out to all the families out there that might be going through something similar and offer empathy, sisterhood, and the promise of better days.

We, as a culture, seem to have this Hollywood-esque notion of baby sleep. The phrase “sleeping like a baby” immediately comes to mind.  And I know I am not the only person who has been asked, “Oh, is she a good baby? Is she sleeping through the night yet?”

We seem to have lost sight of the fact that infant and toddler sleep is meant to be light.  They’re meant to wake often at night for food and reassurance.  This is what kept them alive in more primitive times.  Of course, now we don’t have to worry about being eaten by sabre tooth cats, but that doesn’t change the fact that babies are hard-wired by their very biology to need to wake at night.  Learning to sleep through the night is a developmental milestone that all babies reach at different times.  Just like walking and talking, you cannot “train” a baby to sleep through the night before he or she is developmentally ready to do so.

That doesn’t change the fact that waking with a baby through the night can be exhausting.  Believe me, I know.  We are on day 5 of the current sleep strike.  Katie is waking up every hour and staying up.  She is nurse, nurse, nursing.  Crawling around.  Exploring my face with her little fingers.  And just generally not sleeping.  Thank God we bed-share.  I can’t even imagine how hard it would be if I had to hike my butt down the hall to put her to sleep, stagger back to bed, only to have to hike down the hall again just as my eyes were closing.

She’s not waking to be mean or difficult or because she is a “bad” baby.  She is waking because she has a need, and for babies these needs are real and immediate.  Babies wake for all kinds of reasons:

  • Teething
  • Learning new skills
  • Because they miss us and love us
  • Hunger
  • Thirst
  • Growth spurts
  • Feeling sick
  • Baby is realizing that he or she is a separate person from Mama

Just to name a few.

And I’ve noticed with both girls and in talking to other parents that sleep definitely comes in cycles.  There are often ways to predict it.  There are several periods of wakefulness that we see pretty much across the board:

  • The 4 month sleep regression
  • The 6 month growth spurt
  • The 8 month sleep regression
  • The 15 month old period of nursing like a newborn

Katie is right at 13 months.  We’re a little early for the 15 month period, but she is teething, growing, and coming down with a cold.  Plus, she misses me.  She is so busy playing in the mornings and evenings that she often doesn’t want to nurse or only wants to take the time for a little snack.  Note: This isn’t self-weaning. This is also really normal baby behavior and will pass with time.

Getting up every morning for work when I haven’t slept at night is hard.  Really hard.  I feel like hell right now and the horrible cold I caught isn’t helping.  This is so hard.  But I know it will pass.  I am here, waving my white flag.  I am surrendering to her needs.  She will only be a baby for a little while longer.  Every day with her is precious, every night waking is a chance to remind her that Mama will be here for her no matter what. 

So if you’re like me, or if you find yourself in the future in a similar situation, I’m here with you, wide awake in solidarity and sisterhood.  Dig deep and find that white flag.  Surrender to it.  Don’t get caught in the moment.  Remember that the days are fleeting right now.  It will get easier and, as my dear friend Paris says, “Just because something is hard, doesn’t mean you suck at it.”


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Being Kind to Ourselves for our Childrens’ Sakes

A few years ago, Juan and I went through a rough patch.  We saw a marriage counselor, and one of the things he told us really stuck out to me:  We are often kinder to strangers than we are to our spouses.

I hadn’t thought about that in a while, but a few months ago, a mom on a breastfeeding board posted that she wanted to lose weight saying, “I feel like such a fatty.”

At that moment, our counselor’s words popped into my head and I realized something that he hadn’t said:  Not only are we kinder to strangers than we are to our spouses, but we are kinder to strangers than we are to ourselves.

The more I thought about it, the sadder I felt.  You would never call someone at the grocery store such an ugly name, but women say things like that to themselves all the time.  Horrible names like fatty, cow, bitch, ugly, and so forth.  When women say those things to themselves over and over, they must believe it.  How horrible that society tells us it’s okay to treat ourselves that way.  And Magazines feed this by promising miracle diets, exercises to get your body “swimsuit ready,” and photoshopped pictures of models with body shapes that most people will never have, flawless skin, flowing locks of hair, and clothing that reveals nary a bulge or a wrinkle.  We’re bombarded with this all day every day.

Then, this week at work, I realized that I was just as guilty as other women.  As I walked to the lunch room at the office to heat my leftover pork chop, I realized that I had forgotten my fork back at my desk.  I thought to myself:

“I’m such a dummy.”

And then I stopped dead in my tracks.

It was one of those moments where images and moments flicker into your mind in rapid fire succession.  Images of me right before our recent vacation trying on my swimsuit and rubbing the stretch marks on my belly and frowning.  Images of me calling myself stupid for forgetting to pre-heat the oven before roasting the previous night’s asparagus.  Images of me climbing out of the shower, turning around to look at my butt and saying, “Ugh.”

And in the background of all of those images are my daughters.  Watching.  Listening.  Learning.

I am teaching my girls that it’s okay to hate themselves.  I am teaching them to be kinder to strangers than to themselves.

That is not okay.

And in that moment in the hall at my office, I made a promise to myself:  Any time I caught myself calling myself an ugly name or saying something rude about myself, something I wouldn’t tolerate from a stranger, I will stop myself and remind myself that it’s not true.  I’m not dumb.  I’m not stupid.  I’m a person who sometimes makes mistakes.  I won’t tolerate someone calling my family members names, and I’m ready to stop tolerating that behavior from myself.

Yes.  I have stretch marks and the skin on my belly is loose.  Every single mark on my belly is a reminder of the victory I won over HG.  That loose skin?  That’s skin may be loose, but it’s special.  That’s where I held my two precious daughters.  My body will never be the same as it was before I had kids, but really, is anyone’s?  I’m finding myself being more and more okay with that as time passes. 

I follow a page on Facebook called The Body Is Not An Apology, and I’m ready to stop apologizing to myself and the rest of the world for the changes my life experience has left on my body.  By the way, this group has a website  that I just now discovered, so I’m pleased to share that with you as well.

I hope this will not only bring a sense of peace and confidence to myself, but will teach my girls to love themselves and their bodies.

And yes.  I wore that purple bikini on my vacation.  Stretch marks and all.


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Motherhood and Missing Milestones

Working full time and being a mommy is so difficult.  I feel like I am constantily missing out on Gabi and Katie’s lives.  A few weeks ago, Gabi and Katie’s teacher, who is also a dear friend of mine, texted me:

K just rolled over!!!!

I knew it was on its way.  She was so close to doing it the night before.  Juan, Gabi, and I were all watching her so carefully so that none of us would miss it when she finally did roll.  But she rolled over for the first time at school.  And I missed it.

I was so sad.  I sat at my desk and cried.  I couldn’t believe I missed it.  I felt so sorry for myself.  Why?  Why do I have to work?  It’s not fair.

It’s so hard being away from my girls.  In the beginning, it was intensely painful.  Walking away from Katie on that first day back was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.  It felt wrong.  I was her mother.  I was supposed to be with her all the time.  I had spent nine months holding her in my womb and then three more months holding her in my arms.  It hurt so much to give her to someone else and let the door close behind me.  It felt violent and wrong.

I grieved in those first few weeks.  Every instinct in my body was telling me to be with my baby and I couldn’t do it.  I cried so much.  I felt angry and sad and lost.  Looking back, I can see that I was going through the stages of grief.  Recognizing that made me feel even more angry.  A mother shouldn’t have to grieve.  A mother shouldn’t have to feel that sense of loss.  A mother shouldn’t have to leave her children to go to work before she’s ready.

In this country, we do not support mothers enough.  We do not provide adequate maternity leave.  Mothers suffer what I have gone through (twice!) every single day.

I have a dear friend who is working on changing that.  She’s at the front of a revolution.  Please read her blog to find out what we can all do to be a part of this revolution:  Mother Revolution.

They are also doing great things at MomsRising.org.  They do a great job of keeping an eye on upcoming legislation and providing concrete ways to get involved.

This past weekend, I was so blessed.  Little Miss Katie had a developmental explosion!  She started rolling front to back, she started babbling, she found her toes, and on the train back from San Diego she popped out a brand new tooth!  I felt so thankful that I got to share those moments with her.

But a part of me is still raging inside.  That’s not something one should have to feel grateful about.  Being with your baby for those moments should be the norm.

Please join the revolution.


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Advice for New Moms: Cultivate Gratitude

In honor of one of my friends who will be having her baby any day now, I thought it might be nice to pull together some of the thoughts I’ve been mulling over on different things that have made transitioning to motherhood easier for me.  I hope this is helpful, not only to her, but to my other mommy friends and readers.

Cultivate Gratitude. I don’t mean thanking your adult friends for helping you.  This goes without saying.  I mean cultivating gratitude toward your baby.  It can be so hard when you’ve been up all night, you’re tired, you’re hungry, and you just can’t find a spare second to yourself.  I found myself, with Gabi, focusing on what I wasn’t able to do during the day.  I wasn’t able to eat breakfast.  I didn’t have time to go to the store. I didn’t get a nap. And on and on and on.

I found myself struggling emotionally with how I could manage everything.  I felt like my ability to have a life of my own was slipping away.  I became frustrated and occaisionally resentful.  I felt overwhelmed.

But Gabi was patient with me.  That’s the thing about babies.  They are so forgiving.  They won’t stop loving you if you mess up.  They won’t say, “I told you so.”  They won’t hold your mistakes over your head.

Gabi taught me that it wasn’t so important to be perfect.  She taught me to appreciate each moment.  Her patience and joy and love helped me to grow into the mother I am today.

With Katie, I was able to find something different within myself right away.  Instead of focusing on what I didn’t get to do during the day, I found myself feeling grateful for what I was able to do.  I thanked her every day for letting me take a shower, for letting me eat breakfast, for napping while I drove, for letting me suction her nose without a fuss, for putting her legs down while I changed her diaper, and on and on and on.  It’s amazing how powerful those two words can be.

Try it.  Say those words.  Say them out loud.  Say them when you’re frustrated.  When you’re in the shower and you’ve only just soaped your hair and your baby starts to cry and you know you won’t have time to do anything else except rinse the bubbles and dry off.  Say, “Thank you baby for giving me the time to wash my hair.”  Take a deep breath and let the rest go.  It makes a huge difference.

I am finding gratitude in all parts of my life.  I’m digging deep when my bouncy four year old knocks something off the table.

Thank you Gabi.  Thank you for your joy and energy.

I’m finding it when my husband is stressed and grouchy from work.  Thank you Juan for keeping a roof over our heads.

This gratitude helps me get through my day.

So my advice to new moms is this: Don’t focus on what you didn’t accomplish.  Thank your babies for the small things.  The small moments.  The time to eat a snack or use the restroom or shave your legs.  Find joy in the little things.

And to my daughters, Katie and Gabi?  Thank you.  Thank you both.  Thank you for your patience and your unwavering love.  Thank you for teaching me to be a better person.  You are my two blessings, and I give thanks for you every day.


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Setting the bar too high for nursing moms

With everything that Katie and I have been through so far on our nursing journey, I’ve been thinking about what all we (and by we I don’t mean me, I mean society) ask of breastfeeding moms.  This particular line of thought was sparked by a conversation with a cranial osteopath who was seeing Katie to help her with her jaw muscles.  He grilled me a bit about my diet, and I felt ashamed to tell him that I’m just so thrilled about being able to eat again that I am just eating whatever I can get my hands on.  Lots of meat, cheese, spices, Indian food, Thai food, Mexican, etc.  I was embarrassed to admit that we don’t always eat home cooked meals.  In fact, we eat out fairly frequently.

This confession of mine predictably earned me a lecture on healthy eating.  I should eat only organic food.  Whole grains.  Home cooked.  Gluten free.  And while I’m at it, I should stop eating dairy and soy because that’s probably why Katie has a stuffy nose.  What I eat goes directly to her, didn’t I know, so I must avoid foods with chemicals of any kind and by the way, I should only eat brown rice, not white rice.  Scratch that, don’t eat rice at all because of the gluten in it.

I left the appointment feeling guilty, overwhelmed, and exhausted.  The more I thought about his speech to me, though, the more irritated I got.  Aside from any rare allergy issues in kids (where there are specific clinical signs) milk is milk.  Milk is not made from stomach contents.  You don’t go to the drive through and then have cheeseburgers coming out of your nipples.  Milk is made from blood.  Unless the situation is one of extreme famine, a mother’s milk will always be rich enough, nutritious enough, and wonderful enough.

I kept turning this over and over in my head and getting madder.  If I was another woman, one who wasn’t as plugged in to breastfeeding resources, I might have walked away from that conversation believing that since I couldn’t live up to this doctor’s impossibly high standards, my child would be better off on formula.

I experienced this kind of situation again following Katie’s tongue tie clip.  First I had to get her clipped by a very specific doctor out in L.A.  Then I was supposed to see a very specific lactation consultant (also in L.A.) to retrain her to latch.  On top of that, I needed to get her in to see a cranial osteopath to get her jaw muscles working properly.  Follow that up by special exercises and speech therapy, and you’ve got one seriously overwhelmed mama.  How many specialists do I need to take my kid to?  Can’t we just nurse?

Confession: I took her to LA for the clip, but I stuck with local lactation consultants to help with the latch.  I only saw the cranial osteopath three times instead of the recommended five visits because darn it, it’s expensive and I don’t really dig it anyway.  I haven’t been doing the exercises very religiously.  We probably won’t do speech therapy at all unless we find out that she actually has a speech issue.  Her sister didn’t.  Her father and I didn’t.  If she does, we’ll deal with it, but I’m not prepared to assume that she will.

Want to know something else?  I eat fast food sometimes.  Sometimes I even feed my family fast food.  I don’t always cook.  I do my best, but some nights, it just doesn’t happen.  I take ibuprofen when I have a headache.  And I cook with butter.  So there.

There is so much pressure for breastfeeding moms to be perfect.  Setting the bar so high (organic food, expensive doctor visits, no medicines, no wine, etc.) can ultimately drive women away from breastfeeding, and it’s critical that we not do that.

So nursing moms–all moms for that matter–Be good to yourselves.  You’re not perfect and that’s okay.


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Afraid of the Dark and Making New Friends

Gabi is suddenly afraid of the dark.  Very afraid.

She has been sleeping on her own in her room for almost a year, but suddenly, when it comes time for me to kiss her goodnight, it’s meltdown city.  She also will not go into her room alone to choose her clothes.  Or to the bathroom alone.  Or anywhere alone.  She would rather stand there and pee in her pants* than click on the hall light, click on the bathroom light, and use the toilet.  At 3 in the afternoon.  (*We assume she would pee in her pants.  We’re not willing to humiliate her by putting that to the test.  She’s insistent enough that I’m certain it would end with a puddle on the floor if one of us didn’t intervene.)

Clearly this is not about the dark.

I talked to her about it last night, and, from what I gathered, she is missing some of the attention that we are having to give Katie.  She feels sad that Katie is with us all the time while she has to do things on her own more.  Poor kid.  I never lived with a sibling.  I have no idea what she must be going through.

We tried adding more night lights.  No dice.  We tried keeping her door open.  Didn’t work.

But I think we might have finally hit on a solution.

We have a very sweet boxer dog named China (pronounced “Chee-nah”.  She’s nearing old age at 8 years old, and as a working breed dog, she’s needed a job for a long time.  Well, we may have finally found one for her: watching over Gabi.

The trouble is, she’s been trained for so long that she’s not supposed to hang out in Gabi’s room.  She’s unbelievably loving and patient, but you don’t leave a dog with a baby.  Period.

Last night, though, she got the surprise of her life when Gabi and I invited her into Gabi’s bed.  Poor China was confused.  It took a few tries to convince her that she was allowed to stay in the bed with Gabi.  And in the middle of the night, she did her usual pace through the house to check up on things elsewhere.  But overall, I think we’re onto something good here!

I think I will do something special for the both of them and find China a pretty new bed that we can place in Gabi’s room for her to sleep on.  She doesn’t always like to sleep with people.  She gets hot sometimes and just wants her space.

Maybe this new found friendship will be good for both of them.  Goodness knows, China’s been unemployed for far too long.

Gabi's New Roommate

 


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In Defense of Nail Biters

Gabi has started biting her nails.  She started while I was pregnant, and it’s clear that she’s not going to stop any time soon.  Juan finds this to be vexing.  He gripes.  He tells her to stop.  He takes her hand out of her mouth.  He’s even started talking about getting some of that nasty tasting nail polish.

Gabi's fingernails. The don't actually look too bad. Mine were always a little red and inflamed because of how far down I bit them.

He doesn’t understand.  He was never a nail biter.

But I was.  Oh, did I bite my nails.  I bit them right down to the quick.  I bit them until they bled.  When I ran out of fingernail, I would chew the skin around the edges of the nails.  Then I would chew up the inside of my lips.  Then I would bite my toenails.  Yeah, I know.  Gross.  Don’t pretend like you didn’t do gross stuff as a kid.  You know you did!

The nail biting was a compulsion.  I couldn’t stop.

We tried everything.  My Grandma promised me a beautiful ring when I stopped biting my nails.  Didn’t work.  Later, we tried painting my nails with bitter nail polish.  I bit them anyway.  I tried painting my nails with pretty nail polish so they’d be too pretty for me to bite.  I learned to carefully scrape off  the nail polish so I could access the nails beneath and resume biting.  Bandaids over the nails?  Peeled them off, bit, and then carefully stuck them back on again.  Every single trick that they recommend, we tried.  Many of those attempts were attempts I made myself.  It’s not like my parents were harassing me to stop biting my nails or anything.  They had given up on that years ago.

The nail biting was absolutely outside my control.  The more I tried to stop it, the more I chewed.  When I got anxious I chewed.  The attempts to quit made me anxious.  Having adults notice and point it out made me anxious.  All of that fed into the cycle.  Nail biting was just something I did and there wasn’t anything I could do about it.  Then I just… stopped.

There was nothing I did to stop.  I just woke up one morning and no longer had the need to bite.  I still felt stressed about things (who doesn’t?) but because I was developmentally ready to stop, the need to chew disappeared and it no longer served as a comfort measure to deal with anxiety.

For me the need to chew disappeared when I was 17 years old.  For some people I think it comes sooner.  For others later.  For a few people, the need never disappears.  And you know what?  Who cares?

Now that Gabi is older and biting her nails, what is the big deal?

I see parents agonizing over this on various parenting message boards, and I’d like to really examine the reasoning for wanting so badly for their kids to stop biting.  Let’s break this down:

  • It looks ugly.  So what?  They are her hands.  If someone is going to judge her based on her fingernails, they’ve got bigger issues than she needs to deal with anyway!  Chewed finger nails aren’t going to keep her from a career in a professional setting.  Unless she applied for a hand modeling gig.  In which case we would probably have a conversation about what her strengths really are.
  • It can be painful.  Oh, yeah.  Chewing down to the quick definitely hurts.  Does it ever!  Part of this is responsibility.  If she’s going to chew, she needs to be prepared for the consequences, and that means that some days her fingers might be sore.  It goes with the territory.  But is it really a huge deal?  I bit my nails until they bled, but it never kept me from enjoying activities.  I just had to take responsibility for what I had done and let them heal for a day or two.
  • What if she gets germs?  Well, she might, but so might a lot of other kids.  She will need to be able to keep her hands washed frequently to keep from spreading or catching any illnesses.
  • If she bites them too far, they could get infected.  It could happen.  Never happened to me, but sure.  It could happen.  We’ll just have to keep an eye on it and enforce the hand washing.
  • It’s a “bad” habit.  Like what?  Like smoking?  Not really.  It’s not causing long term effects.  It’s not hurting anyone.
  • It bugs me.  (This is Juan’s gripe.)  Then you really just need to use your neck and look the other way.  Sorry if I sound a little defensive on that one, but as a long-term nail biter, this particular line of reasoning really gets under my skin.

Look, here’s the thing: No amount of us harping on her, offering rewards, putting tabasco sauce (thanks for that idea internet), or threatening is going to stop her from biting her nails.  She can’t control it, and if we bug her about it we will just be feeding into the anxiety cycle.  Some day, she will probably grow out of it, but in the meantime, there’s no major harm being done.

See? I stopped. They don't look too bad do they?

So please.  If you have a kid who bites his or her nails, please just leave them alone and let them grow out of it on their own.  The more you push, the more they’ll bite.  Please don’t feed the cycle.

So how about it?  Are there any other nail biters out there?   Any parents of nail biters?  I’m interested to hear your story and find out if you (or your child) eventually stopped biting and how it happened.


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Breastfeeding the Second Child Part 1: Not as Easy as I Thought

I thought it would be so easy.  I mean, it’s not like I haven’t nursed a baby before, right?  Three and a half years of nursing should make me an old pro, right?

Wrong!

This journey, while not quite as difficult as it was learning to breastfeed Gabi, has been incredibly difficult.

Katie latched on almost immediately after birth.  It was fantastic.  I thought we had it made.  But by day three, the pain was starting to get intense.  Note that I said “pain” and not discomfort.  Breastfeeding shouldn’t be painful, but this was.

She was born on Tuesday, and we took her to see her pediatrician on Friday.  He checked her for a tongue tie, but didn’t see one.  He encouraged us to meet with an IBCLC, Rhonda (not her real name).  We called her and scheduled an in-home visit.  Good thing, too, because by the afternoon I was in tears every time she latched.

She came and helped us to latch correctly.  Things got better for a few hours, but in the night it got much worse.  By morning, I was a bleeding, crying mess.

Saturday, I called her in tears because I was reaching the point where I just could hardly stand to bring her to breast anymore.  She recommended pumping and syringe feeding until my nipples healed.  I did not want to do that, so I called my midwife who came right out to the house and helped me learn a new position to nurse Katie in.

I still wasn’t healing, though, and the pain and bleeding were getting worse.

Monday, I went to a group meeting that Rhonda leads.  She helped me latch on there as well, but the meeting made me very uncomfortable.  Believe me, when you’re a deeply attached parent, hearing other parents talk about night weaning 5 month old babies through is not something you need to hear at 6 days post-partum.  Most of my tears were from the pain of nursing, but some were from grief for those poor babies who just needed their mommies at night.

Monday night, I went to a second meeting, where I met two angels: Shirley (not her real name) and Paris (this is her real name and here is her awesome blog!).  Both are IBCLCs for one of the hospitals here (NOT the hospital where they tortured me).  Paris taught me a 3rd way to nurse Katie, and it didn’t hurt!

Unfortunately, by the time I left the meeting at around 7:30 PM, I was shaking.  As I drove home, the shaking got worse and worse.  When I got home, I took my temp and it was 102 degrees.

Mastitis.

Juan ran to the pharmacy to get my antibiotics (God bless my midwives for acting fast and calling it in immediately), and I had to pump after every feeding so that the milk didn’t sit and grow bacteria.  It was a long, brutal night.

36 hours later, I was feeling much better.

It was Thursday, and we had an appointment to meet with Shirley.  She helped us again with Katie’s latch and taught me to tuck her little hips in against my body.  This is a natural way to get a baby to extend her neck a little more and to keep her from tucking her chin.  It worked!

But I had a suspicious tingle in my nipples and Katie’s mouth was coated in white.  We walked a block over to the pediatrician who took one look at her and diagnosed thrush.  I asked him to look in her mouth again for a tongue tie, but he very confidently said, “This babe is definitely not tongue tied.”

So after a week of Katie taking Nystatin and me taking Diflucan, we were ready to move forward.

But something still wasn’t right.  She was growing slowly and her lips were blanched after every feeding and full of blisters.  She also clicked and lost suction as she nursed.  Nursing wasn’t bringing me to tears anymore, but it wasn’t very much fun either.

What was going on?

Stay tuned for Breastfeeding the Second Child Part 2: Tongue Tied or Not?

 

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