This Same Day, I Heard “Hot Blooded” Playing On The Radio

Tags

babies, fever, teething

I went to pick up the Owl from daycare the other day, and instead of meeting me with a big grin and a delighted chortle, he looked at me sadly and just signed for “milk” (which also means “boob lady”).

The daycare lady said she had almost called me at work, because he had a fever. She couldn’t find her thermometer anywhere (even though she’s an RN and swears she owns three – but who CAN find their thermometer when they need it?) but she was sure he had a high fever. She had given him some tylenol and was bathing his head with a damp paper towel when I arrived.

She strongly suggested that we take him to the doctor, so we did just that.

After two hours of waiting at the walk-in clinic (I swear, the hospital would have seen a baby with a fever sooner), we were blithely told that it was “just teething”, but to give him more Tylenol because his temperature was THIRTY NINE POINT FREAKING FIVE (that’s a little over 103 F, to you Americams).

Okay.

I knew he was teething.

And it’s true that when the doctor shone a light in his mouth I could see not one but TWO molars trying to come through, in addition to the lower front tooth that is cutting through (no strawberry milk situation this time, at least!).

But that high a fever? Really?

So we carted our whiny, clingy, hot little Owl home and dosed him up good. We used his fever as an excuse to not go to work and stayed home with him, dosing him every 4 hours dutifully.

I guess it was teething, because it’s certainly gone now.

But jeez. You’d think the pain of cutting molars would be bad enough, without the universe throwing a fever like that at the poor little dude.

Ow, Ow, Fuckety Ow. TMI and I don’t care.

Tags

biting, breastfeeding, milk, nipple pain, parenting, teething

So, Babby’s teething. AGAIN. 

Sure, his top two incisors just came in, but apparently his second two sets of incisors decided that they needed to follow the others, because they are apparently lemmings.

So I had about three or four days free of biting Babby, and now he’s BITING ME AGAIN.

It is difficult to explain to others, men especially, how frigging painful this is.

Let’s just say that biting my tongue hard on the same spot again and again would be about as painful… if I had sharpened my teeth.

Let’s just say I would rather be stung by a bee.

Let’s just say that my nipples and the area below them are bright red, and covered in flaky, peeling skin, like a terrible sunburn, and feel about as bad.

Let’s just say that the underside of my nipples are covered in greenish and reddish scabs in crescent-shaped lines.

Let’s just say that all of my white bras are covered in dark red splotches, and when I try to pump, bright red drops appear in the funnel.

Let’s just say that I have given birth to an angry piranha, and the big eyes and cherubic grin is just a clever mask.

Of course, every time he bites me I cry out involuntarily and remove him from the breast unceremoniously. If I am sitting in the chair, he gets dumped on the floor with “DON’T! BITE! MOMMY!”

(What is it with creatures wanting to bite my boobas? This has been a problem since long before Babby was concieved).

If I’m trying to nurse him to sleep, he ends up wailing disconsolately on the bed while I hunch over next to him, clutching my nipple and studiously ignoring him for a short while. Then I hold him while he screams. What used to be a short interlude between nursing attempts is becoming more and more protracted, while he writhes and signs “Milk!” at me angrily.

Babby went to sleep last night with a big dose of Advil and very little chomping. When he woke up, I went to nurse him back down and he bit me so hard that I not only cried out, but I burst into tears. PH came rushing in and took the baby while I sobbed helplessly in the gliding rocker for several minutes, clutching my poor right booba and wailing.

I’ve never been good at pain tolerance. 

PH then proceeded to rock Babby to sleep without booba while Babby screamed and screamed in what felt like unending rage.

This is what we had intended to do over Easter, but PH was so stressed out by the screaming that we ended up backing out of the plan entirely. He hates listening to his baby cry, and it frustrates him so much that he can’t provide the comfort that Babby craves.

It took an hour.

…and a half.

An hour and a half of tea-kettle screams and vitriolic ah-hah-hah haaaaaaaas. It felt like a long time to me, and I’m sure it felt twice as long to poor PH.

Once he went down, he stayed asleep for about twenty minutes before he woke up and began to wail again. So I went in this time and offered him my other nipple, and he dozed off after about ten minutes of furious nursing. When I set him down, he woke right up again. I picked him up and rocked him to sleep on my shoulder, which only took about forty minutes or so before I was able to successfully put him down and collapse into bed.

All of this started at 10 pm. It was one in the morning when I went to sleep. I don’t know how long Babby slept for, but the next time he woke up I brought him in bed with me to nurse for the rest of the night, and he behaved well.

If any of you have suggestions, I’m happy to hear them, although I’ve trawled KellyMom and similar sites for help as well.

A couple of friends have suggested that I should just wean him if he’s going to make me bleed all over the place and sob with pain. But I love breastfeeding. It doesn’t normally hurt  – it is actually quite satisfying and relaxing, generally speaking. Giving up breastfeeding entirely would be like giving up bubble baths forever, just because my hot water heater is on the fritz right now.

Considering that I have every intention of nursing him until he is ready to stop himself, be that two years old or beyond, and that I would really miss the closeness of nursing, not to mention the basic awesomeness of my superpower, I am not willing to give up the fight.

He isn’t biting for attention, or even out of boredom. In that brief hiatus between incisors, the biting dropped to nil.

So this must be temporary.

In the meantime, we finally have motivation to get him to sleep without booba, and I have discovered a new superpower:

I can make strawberry milk.

 

This Bites

Tags

babies, biting, breastfeeding, jobs, teething

Oh my gawd, this child is being a real pill lately.

I assume that it is because his top two teeth are coming through, but not only has his sleep been haphazard and painfully short most days and nights, but we just had an hour long wrestle-session in which he repeatedly screamed for booba, and then immediately chomped down with his little white razor teeth the second I GAVE him booba. Then I would yank the nipple out of his mouth and he would wail heartbrokenly.

Aaaaaaaaargh.

Good news – that job I applied for a ZILLION years ago? Well, I finally have an interview for it next Wednesday! Now I just need to figure out what to do with Bitey McScreamsalot while I’m off at the interview…

In Which Canada is Shocked and Dismayed, and Babby Gets Teeth

Tags

babbling, babies, bloc quebecois, Canada, Conservatives, election 2011, electoral reform, Green Party, Liberals, May 2 2011, milestones, NDP, politics, teething, voters, votes

So, remember how I said Canada was going to end up with the same government as before?

I eat my words OM NOM NOM.

Watching the election was a bizarre mix of pure elation and rich horror for people on both sides of the fence.

Now, this is Canada’s government as of 2008:

Dark Blue = Conservative, Red = Liberal, Orange = NDP, Light Blue = Bloc Quebecois, Green = obvious

This is how Canada was polling before election day in 2011:

Dark Blue = Conservative, Red = Liberal, Orange = NDP, Light Blue = Bloc Quebecois, Green = Obvious

So you can see why I didn’t think there would be any surprises. It should be noted that for the Conservatives to get a majority government, they would need 155 seats, so the projections were showing that they would be at least 10 short of their goal. The NDP were expected to make a big gain, because the leader was campaigning in Quebec and getting a lot of interest there. So the Bloc Quebecois were expected to give up some votes.

This is what happened:

For the first time in history, the Liberals placed third in the popular vote

Despite recieving 40% of the popular vote, the Conservatives win a sweeping majority (12 more than the required 155 seats) and the NDP become the Official Opposition

Not only did the Conservatives win a majority somewhat unexpectedly, but the Bloc Québécois (the Quebec separatist party, which usually holds most of the seats in Quebec) has been virtually eradicated. Even the party leader, who has been in Parliament for 20 years, didn’t get voted into his seat. Technically, the Bloc is no longer an official political party.

The Green Party leader got a seat in Parliament for the first time, which I think is largely a success that can be attributed to vote swapping.

Embarrassingly for the Liberals (who have been either the Federal Government or the Official Opposition for 150 years), not only did they get booted into a dismal third place, but their own party leader didn’t get elected into Parliament. I feel bad for Ignatieff. I always thought he was a bad choise for Liberal leader, but he didn’t deserve that.

Anyway, basically, no one is happy with this government:

The left-wing voters are horrified by the Conservative majority. Now Mr “Harper Government” has the power to make changes against the advice of the left wing Members of Parliament, despite the fact that he only has 40% of the popular vote.

The right-wing voters are horrified by the NDP opposition. You have to understand, this is totally unprecedented. The New Democratic Party puts a strong emphasis on social programs and support for the poor, the blue-collar, and the elderly. They want to put caps on trade, increase taxes on large corporations while giving cuts to small businesses, and increase the old age pension and cut taxes for the old and the poor. They aren’t total socialists or anything – on a provincial government level, as I mentioned before, they actually have a fantastic track record when it comes to handling money responsibly. But you can’t convince the right-wing folks of that, who are sure that if the NDP get into power they would just run around naked in the streets throwing hundred-dollar bills to the homeless and then shredding the rest of the national coffers for confetti.

And now they are opposing our most right-wing faction. Interesting, no?

In a way, it’s a good thing that the Conservatives have a majority. The last few years the Conservatives have blamed everything that went wrong on the fact that they were hobbled by the left-wing Members of Parliament. Now they can’t use that excuse, and we have a strong spokesman for the Everyman keeping him honest.

I think once everyone gets over being horrified, they’ll realize that this government might actually work. And if it doesn’t, maybe it will convince people to go out and effing vote.

Or at least, do some electoral reform.

Jeez.

Meanwhile, in (to me) equally important and world-shattering news, Babby has started babbling again. I haven’t been posting about this because I know I’m a nervous nelly, and I could just see you guys rolling your eyes at me if I started going “So… Babby used to babble, but he hasn’t for a couple of months, now, and now I think he may be autistic because it runs in the family y’know etc etc etc.”

I knew that babies often put one skill aside for a while when they’re working on something else, and Babby has been very focused on learning how to move. He is now capable of dragging his body in counter-clockwise spirals as well as pushing himself backwards. He doesn’t move with great purpose or speed but he moves. We went out and bought a baby gate. Baby proofing is in the offing.

So now that he has started to work that through, he has returned to other skills, to my unspoken relief. In a matter of a day or two he want from NO babbling for weeks to yayaya, wawawa, babababa, dadadada, blah, blah, blah, and so on. He also gives high fives and has discovered clapping.

All in one weekend.

Oh, and he has two teeth.

TEEF. I HAS DEM.

Five Months, Fussy and Fabulous

Tags

5 month old, babies, classical conditioning, milestones, no-cry sleep solution, schedules, sleep, sleep associations, sleep log, Sophie the Giraffe, teething

 

Babby was five months yesterday. Time flies when your baby is waking up screaming in the night multiple times every night. I took him to the doctor the other day to see if the fussiness and tendency to screech like a kettle while holding one ear was due to an ear infection. It was not. His ears are fine. Must just be teething.

Getting big!

It’s been a big month for Babby – he has perfected his ability to locate sounds, so he is very good at turning his head to catch sounds. The last couple of weeks he has been causing a fuss when we take away something he is playing with – a mile stone I really could have done without for a while longer. He can sit by himself for a little while if we sit him forward propped on his hands like a frog, but after a while he’ll start to topple sideways. Babby also achieved a long-desired goal this month: he has, on several occasions, successfully gotten his toes in his mouth, after months of trying and failing. We were very proud.

His grabbiness has increased and he likes to yank my hair and take off my glasses and turn them around so the earpieces are pointed directly at his corneas. He bites everything, including my chin and his Daddy’s nose. He has met a squeaky toy named Sophie the Giraffe, and he now plans to marry her. He spends a significant chunk of the day making out with her.

"Do you mind? We're kind of having a moment."

 

He has discovered his penis, which has added a new challenge to diaper changing. Obviously we don’t want to discourage him from exploring his own body, but diapers still have to be changed. We try to give him a bit of time with himself before prying away his hands so we can actually fasten his diaper. I live in fear of the day when he will grab his penis before I have had a chance to wipe the poo off of it. So far I have always beaten him to the punch.

We are going to start our no-cry sleep training, so I followed the author’s advice and took a log of his sleep patterns/daily routine. I’ll take another in 10-14 days and we’ll see if there has been any change.

Tsk

Tags

babies, four months old, teething

We think Babby might be teething.

It’s so hard to tell what makes a tiny baby cry. But he wakes up out of a sound sleep with a painful cry, again and again and again throughout the night. Sometimes he’s just screaming in his sleep and if I count to ten he subsides back into a worried slumber. But most of the time he just starts to wail. We’ve tried Tylenol, to little effect.

The reason we think it is teething is because

"Hmmph!"

• He chews on his hands a lot and drools.
• He keeps pursing his lips like a disapproving-librarian.
• He makes little clicking noises which make him sound like a disapproving librarian.
• There are clearly two white bumps under the skin on his upper gums, and bumps on his lower jaw on the right. They don’t seem to be coming through – they’re just visible.

He is also tugging at his ear, but I think that’s a sign of referred pain. I don’t think he has an ear infection, because the ear tugging was happening in Nova Scotia, too, before he caught Captain Trips (that’s what PH and I have been calling this cold we picked up out there, because it keeps lingering. We both still have coughs. Babby seems totally recovered). And I remember ear infection pain from my childhood and it’s awful. His painful spurts seem to be more sporadic. He’s cheerful enough most of the time, but he just can’t stay asleep because he wakes up screaming.

Not really sure what to do about it, besides tough it out and offer him teething rings. Tylenol/Advil might help a little, but not much. I wish a tooth would break through so at least we’d know that this is teething and not something else.

So I am very tired, and trying to shake the feeling that my baby is disapproving of my inability to help him…

"Tsk, Tsk Tsk..."