little feet, big sky

Bear in mind that I have three babywearing apparatuses: a Mamma’s Milk pouch sling, a custom Oh My Mommy Clementine mei tai and a brown Moby wrap. Spice was fine in the Moby for the first couple of weeks, but the Moby is a crazy piece of work to quickly throw on and go, since it’s so incredibly long and drags on the ground. Plus, I’m sure I could get the hang of it with time, but unless I had someone to straighten the wrap on my back so it wasn’t bunched up, it was seriously uncomfortable to wear more than an hour – a huge negative for a sling that’s so much work to get on and off.

The pouch sling is pretty good all around. Mamma’s Milk makes one of the few adjustable pouch slings, with hidden velcro so that there’s no rings, buckles, etc. Again, Spice was okay in it the first few weeks in the cradle hold, but fights it like a mad woman now. I’ve tried her in the tummy-to-tummy position, but she screams and claws at my chest and neck until I take her out. Finally, yesterday we had some degree of success with a careful facing-out position. I know you’re not supposed to have a newborn facing out, but she was half sideways, has good head control and was tucked in bum-first, with her feet lotus up. She could lean against me, and it worked well enough to get her from the breastfeeding support group to the car with one hand free. I’ll keep trying her in it, because it’s by far the fastest to grab and put on. And I’m holding out for using it for hip carries when she gets bigger.

My newest addition is a custom mei tai I bought on Etsy. A mei tai is an ABC (Asian-style Baby Carrier), generally a square/rectangle of cloth with four straps sewn on. Two straps tie around your waist and the other two go over your shoulders, cross at the back, come forward and tied around the baby’s back (newborn) or under their bum (toddler). Basically, it’s like an Ergo without all the bling. I bought the spouse the Ergo and it’s gotten virtually no use because a) he doesn’t remember/want to use it and b) it’s got too much bling. I hate things with buckles and stuff, so I wanted a mei tai. By far, BabyHawk has some of the coolest fabrics and some of the best reviews, but I wasn’t about to drop $115 on Yet Another Carrier that Spice would scream at. Thankfully, there’s Etsy, home of Lots of Cool Things made by SAHMs at Low Prices. I browsed around and settled on a cute custom mei tai with a pink/white/brown stripe pattern and black straps. After some confusion on my part in regards to how many mailboxes I have outside my house, it arrived and Spice screamed each time I put her in. Joy. Until it occurred to me to make it a little shorter by folding up the bottom and putting her in again facing out, bum in first. Success! I carried her around for about 10 minutes like that until she started to fuss. No point in pushing my luck, right?

But the swing. *sigh*

I want to carry her, my precious little bundle o’ joy, but she just won’t stand it! Bleah. And there’s only so much in-arms I can do without having at least a hand free, so.. we got a swing a couple of weeks ago. I felt super guilty about it, until I accepted the fact that this is not a battle – it’s about her being happy and comfortable. I almost always try to soothe her to sleep in my arms, but sometimes she’s just too cranky and tired and keeps fussing. I tuck her into the swing, pop it on the fastest speed and put some lullabies or white noise on, and she’s asleep faster than a drunken me passing out on the bed. She’s not going to be 10-years-old and needing to swing herself to sleep, right? And I keep trying the different slings every week since she seems to go through phases of what she likes.

But in the meantime, I still hate the swing.

Okay, breastfeeding is tough. Don’t be fooled by those idyllic pictures of bebe perfectly latched on in a cradle cuddle and peacefully nursing. Because for most women, myself included, that is so not how it starts out, at least.

Spice started out nursing from birth like a dream. Now, on days like this, it feels like our nursing future is headed for hell. She’s picked up this nasty habit in the last few days of opening her mouth and rooting back and forth frantically while the nipple is in her mouth. It takes a while for her to figure out to clamp down and start sucking and I have no idea how/why she’s doing this. Additionally, she sucks for maybe 20 seconds, then backs off and squirms, then starts over with the open-mouthed rooting over the nipple. It takes a good 5 minutes for her to figure out to stay latched on, and it’s driving me crazy!

Add to that she doesn’t burp easy and spits up almost a full feeding if she isn’t burped properly. That she has killer gas and almost every feeding results in at least an hour of the poor thing writhing in agony trying to get it out one end or the other.

From random googling, one possibility is that I have an overactive letdown, and while she starts out hungry, the milk is coming too fast for her and she backs off, then attacks again in hunger. All the advice for this mentions pulling her off for the letdown and letting it spray into a towel or burp cloth. But I tried this and I’m barely dripping during letdown. *sigh*

Failing that, I’m sometimes convinced it’s something I’m eating. We have a bad day (or night) and I swear I’m cutting out dairy and then we have a few great days and I stupidly cave in to rice pudding/yogurt/milk. This is followed by another bad day or night and I’m left kicking myself for not sticking with the no-dairy because it just makes it more confusing trying to figure out what’s causing her discomfort.

I’m going bats and on days like this, I’m left swearing to the spouse that I can’t do it, that it’s just not working, etc. I can see now why something like 40% give up breastfeeding in the first two weeks. Between the hormones, the sleep shortage, the labor recovery, sometimes it feels downright impossible to continue and that’s with having a complication-free labor and a healthy term baby!

On a slightly more humorous note, I learned the hard way just how all sorts of things end up in breastmilk. I was taking my prenatal vitamins and my previously-customary fish oil supplement and was rewarded with two days of fishy breastmilk and spit-up! Those of you that know spit-up know that rather than landing neatly in the middle of a burp cloth, it’s more likely to end up on the baby’s clothes, your clothes, bedsheets, etc. And about the same with leaking breastmilk. All we have for detergent is un-dyed, un-fragranced stuff, so it took about 3 hot water washes and indoor sunlight drying to get the smell out. Never, never again. *shudder*

OMG. I have a baby girl! Pics to come soon, but she was a healthy 7 lbs. 8 oz. at birth. The home birth went well, but she was stuck at about +3 after about 3 & 1/2 hours of pushing. (Thank god I didn’t know I’d been pushing that long!) I was super active in labor (which was good), but so exhausted by then that the decision to transfer to the hospital for a vacuum-assisted delivery was an easy one. The car ride was sheer hell, but the L&D staff at Cedars-Sinai was great. I had five minutes to try pushing, and if that didn’t work, our doctor was for a c-section, so I agreed to the epidural. It took 10 minutes to kick in, I had 5 minutes of blissful relief, and another 5 minutes of pushing with the doctor’s help and she was born.

I honestly felt I had the best of both worlds and am extremely happy with how things went. Of course, finishing off the delivery at home would have been best, but this was a close second. She got little, if any, of the effects of the epidural, and my being pain-free for the delivery and after meant I could instantly put her to the breast, as well as advocate for her best interests myself in the hours later. Totally awesome.

More to come in a bit!