Upon investigation of Kiernan's tooth, Eric discovered that not only was the left bottom tooth almost completely cut through the gum, but the right one is well on it's way to coming through too! Two teeth at once - I have to say, he's being quite the trooper considering :) I expected far worse of teething *knock on wood*
Kiernan is getting to that age where I'm starting to be a little bit more relaxed with him. I'm not entirely sure if that's going well or not ;)
The other day we had an incident where we were playing and he banged his forehead against my mouth so hard he had to red lines in the shape of my two front teeth for the rest of the day! ack! And yesterday, I let him suck on my pear. I figured, since he's allowed pear now, and he has these mesh bags where he sucks on apples, he could suck on my pear for a second. I even read this thing that said he should be ready for finger foods and I SWEAR, ripe pear is on the list. Anyhow, he sucks on the pear and he likes it. I see that he got a tiny amount of pear flesh in his mouth but think its nice and soft and small, and he can handle that no problem. Well, apparently he had a bigger hunk in the back of his mouth I didn't see, which he proceeded to try to inhale. He started to choke, and I had to go in and fish the damn piece of pear out of his throat and then felt like the worst mother ever for hours afterwards.
I'm thinking that these are the kinds of things that just happen and I need to know that. But wow - not fun!
I've been feeling a bit uninspired in my blog writing lately. I think it's partially because I've been reading a lot of other mom blogs (there are so many) and they are so well written. Someone was asking me what I get out of reading blogs about motherhood that are written by people that I don't know, and I think the answer is a) it's nice to know that there are others out there who are experiencing what I'm experiencing. As many new moms as I know right now, their experiences are so extremely varying that its nice to have an even wider net to cast for information and b) they are good writers! I enjoy their humour, wit; the way they can tell a story. Only problem is, sometimes it makes me want to be like them. I want to write these great posts, ones worthy of a following. So I try to think about what to blog about, and I get overwhelmed with the possibilities, or the lack thereof and just don't blog.
So I don't think I'm going to be the next big momma blogger - so much for that as my next career ;) And believe it or not, there are people who do mommy blog for a living.
But instead I can ramble on, and know that there are a bunch of you, people I know and who know K, that read to find out what's going on with us. And I know that this will be a great record of how things went in my first year as a mother. And I don't need to have themes for each post, and I don't have to have fancy titles. You'll still find me amusing, right? :)
Ok, enough woe is me crap :)
Well maybe not yet, but I can feel the first tooth cutting through. Eric can't feel it and thinks I'm nuts - but I definitely feel it. It's the bottom tooth, on the right. So my dad was right, the other tooth, the upper right incisor is just hanging out in the gums, visible, but won't actually be the first tooth through.
Kiernan has had a cold this week and has been snivelly, snotty, and coughy. He got out of his 6 month shots with this cold, and his mama has been especially lax with the "sleep in your own bed" rules. I know I'm probably setting myself up for issues later, but I think part of the problem is, I really like having him there with us. Oh well, we'll figure it out eventually. I'm glad we've got a reprieve from starting sleep training this weekend (which is what we had planned) because we certainly aren't starting while he has the remnants of a cold and he's teething. I am secretly (well not that secretly) pleased :)
Oh, and if anyone out there is wondering how to take off post-baby weight. Go on the no soy or milk protein diet. I've lost 6 lbs in the last two weeks!
When we saw the pediatrician last week I asked her about Kiernan's goopey-eye. Our family doctor told me to just keep massaging it and if his tear duct was still blocked when he was one, then we would take further action. Yikes! That's a really long time for my son to look like he's got permanent mascara on his right eyelashes!
So I asked the pediatrician hoping for some new idea. She said massaging was the thing to do but then explained that massaging it was a very vague way of putting it. She said "take off your glasses and I'll show you". She finds my tear duct and pushes. hard. ow!
She explains that a tear duct is either blocked, or not blocked. There's no halfway. So one day, I'll push, and I'll break the membrane blocking Kiernan's, and then his eye won't be goopey anymore. Cool!
So I do it. Once. Not that hard. He didn't even cry. And guess what?! No more goop! Holy cow!
I mean, it must have been on the verge of popping to have gone so easily, but it is nice that it's no longer one of our issues. Hopefully it won't reclog or anything.
We have enough on our plates now because K has a cold, and he hates the gention violet we've been giving him for thrush, he's not eating as much as I want him to (probably a combo of thrush and cold causing that) and I ate cheese by accident on friday so he's having tummy issues (probably some of the new foods making that worse) and he may be teething (but I always say that) so for the last 3 nights the only way to get through the night has been to bring us in to bed with us. Great new habit to build right before starting sleep training eh? My biggest fear right now is that something else I"m eating is bothering him and I ought to be cutting that out too
For now, I am just trying to stay on the new diet and realizing I just can't eat out without a complete list of all ingredients and without being REALLY strict. No, oh I think I can get under this cheese they sprinkled all over the top and a bit into this salad. So I'm going to go on a cooking frenzy. I'm going to cook and bake and make my own food. And I'm only a bit bitter about it at the moment, but it comes and goes in waves that get much stronger at times. That or the extreme guilt that I hurt my son whenever I make a mistake. But no time for a pity party, gotta clean and cook!
Kiernan has started blah blah blahing whenever he eats. It cracks me up!
Kiernan is a Foot flicker! Can a baby have restless leg syndrome? He wakes himself up flicking his feet against each other. He stops himself from falling asleep flicking his feet against each other. He's doing so well with the weaning from the swaddle and his arms not punching himself in the head anymore, and now his feet are outta control!! He slept for 15 minutes during his nap this morning, a nap that started later than naps usually do, and I think his feet are to blame. boo!
When we bought sushi and the rat toy from IKEA my mother in law advised us not to cut off the tags. And let me tell you, the tags on IKEA toys are LONG!! And she was right, Kiernan goes for the tags on toys first. And he eats them and chews them and sucks them until they are revoltingly wet. hehe.
We had a follow up appointment with the pediatrician this week and she thinks Kiernan is doing fabulously. He now weighs 15 and a half lbs and seems to consistently be in about the 25th percentile. When I expressed concern about him not being any bigger, she commented on his bracelets (the rolls of fat that are at his wrists :) and said he's nice and healthy looking, but just a small guy. Poor Eric, he so doesn't want Kiernan to be a little guy like he was. But I'm happy. Plus, I still take to heart the fact that a lot of these percentile lists are apparently put together based on formula fed babies and formula fed babies tend to be bigger than exclusively breast fed babies, and as we all know, Kiernan is exclusively breast fed cuz the little devil won't eat the formula!! ;)
Which segs me into another issue with breastfeeding. I have thrush. Yay. :P It doesn't seem to be too bad a case but I definitely wanted to nip it in the bud so I talked to K's pediatrician and she prescribed me something. Then I went to costco to have the prescription filled, even though I had decided I didn't really like that pharmacy. It was convenient, I was going to be there anyways. ANyhow, the pharmacist got me all in an uproar about how he didn't know that it was safe to take that much of that medicine, especially when nursing and how he was going to call the drug helpline and ack! Anyhow, I double checked with my doctor and the pediatrician who assured me they knew what they were talking about, only to have the pharmacist call back and say to go ahead and take the medication since it was obviously a bad infection (it's not) and the doctor wouldn't prescribe this possibly dangerous for you and the baby drug without knowing what they were doing. My doctor's office was like "we're not even giving you a high dose!" Anyhow, very unsettling. I'm going to stick to my rule of going to the little pharmacy in my neighbourhood that make me feel confident that they know what they're doing.
Most days I'm dealing well with all the dietary restrictions I have from K's food intolerances. I have learned that rice milk and almond milk are not good substitutes in my coffee for milk and so I am learning to actually like my coffee with just sugar. It's flavoured coffee so that helps, but maybe I'll work my way up to being one of those cool people who drink their coffee black. Hm, is it odd that I think people who drink their coffee black are cool? Anyhow, the toughest part about these dietary restrictions is eating out. I have accepted that I need to cook everything from scratch at home since most prepared foods have soy or milk, but I didn't realize how hard it would be to find food I can have in a hurry. Subway's bread all has either milk or soy. A&W puts whey in their fries and burgers! McDonald's has soy or milk in their buns. Their tortillas are fine but nothing they put in a tortilla is safe. So unless I ask for a burger in a tortilla :P then that's a no go. Yesterday we went for lunch at moxie's and I asked them what I could have. I gave them two options of what I might like to have and they essentially said the only thing that was safe was a salad with grilled chicken and they'd bring me oil and vinegar to put over top. I didn't get the bread that came with the salad. I didn't get the dressing. I got the extra guacamole. Eating out loses it's appeal when you don't get to eat what you want but need to eat the one or two things on their entire menu that doesn't have soy or milk. Imagine if this was a lifelong issue for me???
My baby is the cutest baby ever :) Ok, I know I'm biased, but whatever :) I have entered him into the achannel's cutest baby contest. Maybe he will win :) And, we've had two photo sessions with him the last week (my mother thinks I'm insane) one with our friend Julie and one at the Superstore. My kid is so cute!!! I can't post the superstore photos obviously, but here are a couple from Julie. I think Kiernan wishes I wouldn't make him pose quite so much sometimes (see last photo :)
Kiernan has officially outgrown the Miracle Blanket, and since they don't make it for babies over for 4 months, we had to revert to our old swaddling techniques, which, unsurprisingly haven't been working very well since the fact that they didn't work is what brought us to the Miracle Blanket in the first places.
So, we decided to see if we could wean Kiernan from the swaddle. Skeptically we have been leaving him with one arm free this weekend, and it's being going really well! In fact, he got the other arm out and one point and he slept that way for a good hour. AND we moved him from the car seat to the crib completely unswaddled and he slept for 30 minutes!!
Our hope is that this will allow him to re-sootherize himself when he wakes up in the middle of the night and eliminate a few wake ups that are just about us giving him back his soother so he can fall back to sleep. Keep your fingers crossed that it keeps working!!
... the pull of a good toy often was stronger than the desire for rice cereal :)
... how fabulous and idea is this??!!
I SO could have used this. Geez, I think I still could use this! :)
Kiernan is changing so quickly and doing so many new things lately. Here is another list of things he's been doing:
- bearing a tiny bit of weight on his arms (much to mommy's delight)
- passing things back and forth from one hand to another
- reaching for things out of sight
- catching himself from falling a lot when sitting
- he can put his soother back in his own mouth. He generally doesn't care if he's sucking on the side or the handle instead of having it in properly, but when he does care, he can turn it around and put it in properly. It is amusing to watch him examine it to decide what he needs to do to turn it around the right way.
- He likes to lie on the floor and bang his feet into the ground. Daddy worries he will break his feet and never walk if he keeps it up.
- his new talking sounds are ever changing. I'm sure I've heard some mamama and dadada in there. :)
-he's stopped his fabulous sleeping :P
- he rarely ever rolls even though we know he can
- That teething blister is still there. Last night he started drooling like crazy and crying like nuts so we think he could be teething again, but who the heck knows.
- He's going to be six months old in 4 days!!!!!!
I thought about entitling this post "Crap ass!" but then thought perhaps that would be a bit too negative of me. ;)
I started my new dietary restrictions around Valentine's day and have seen an enormous improvement in Kiernan. By me cutting out all dairy and soy from my diet, down the ingredients of everything, we have a much happier baby, who sleeps better, and who is getting chunkier, seemingly by the minute.
Sometimes I wonder if I really need to be as careful as I'm being. Am I right to be nervous to ever eat out anywhere in case there is something in what they give me that I can't have? I went to Lone Star last week for fajitas and even called ahead to make sure there would be no soy or dairy in anything that I would be having and they assured there wouldn't be. When we got there my waitress informed me that there was in fact a milk byproduct in the tortillas. CRAPASS! (oops, couldn't help myself) So they gave me some corn tortillas instead and I had those. I was tempted to just have the regular ones anyways, what harm could it do? But instead I ate the crappy corn ones. (I did complain though, since I had called, and the fajitas were free).
Anyhow, I wondered if I was making the right call being so stringent. Then I got a cookbook I ordered in the mail called the Milk and Soy Protein Intolerance Cookbook (no bells and whistles on this book ;) and it listed everything I shouldn't eat and I found out I can't even have the non-dairy creamer I was using in my coffee. CRAPASS! So I bought vanilla rice milk and tried that. (revolting btw) Then I tried chocolate flavoured almond milk and that's ok. I have vanilla flavoured almond milk that I'm going to be trying next so hopefully that will also be ok. I'm getting used to the restrictions.
I've been doing really well and finding all kinds of recipes online and cooking a lot more since there are almost no prepared foods I can have. It gets tiring though. Fortunately a lot of web sites have listings of all their ingredients, if you're going to go to a chain. Friday night we ordered pizza pizza because their dough and sauce is fine, and so is their pepperoni and italian sausage. No steak strips though. And cheeseless pizza just isn't as good as pizza WITH cheese ;)
Anyhow, the other day I was going to make this recipe for pork tenderloin where you put a can of cranberries and a packet of onion soup mix into the crockpot with the tenderloin and cook on low for 8 hours. Easy peasy. Then I read the onion soup mix - soy protein. boo. So then we looked online and figured out that I could use beef bouillon and onion and onion powder instead. So I did that yesterday morning. About 4 hours into cooking I realized that I had never checked the ingredients on the beef bouillon. Vegetable protein, including soy, was listed way down the list. GRRRR! As if!! It never occurred to me to check it!! BOOO!
I decided to eat it anyways. A bit of soy in the beef bouillon in this recipe couldn't be that big a deal - I was eating TONS of that stuff before and that tiny amount couldn't hurt once in awhile. Wrong! Although the pork was delish (and hopefully I can find a substitute so I can make it again) Kiernan woke up this morning at 5 farting and screaming and cranky like we haven't seen him in... well since Valentine's day.
So ya, I have proof that what I'm doing it worthwhile at least. And I'll get used to it. Oh, one last crapass.... we bought an electric breast pump yesterday. It works well. I pumped last night after dinner... guess where that milk has to go now? :P
I guess I should have just called this post crapass after all :)
Step One:
Lay the blanket on a flat surface with the foot pouch at the bottom and lay baby between armflaps with tops of shoulders slightly above top of blanket.
Step Two:
Fold the armflaps over the outside of your baby's arms and tuck them snuggly under her back on each side. IMPORTANT: You should lift the baby's bottom to be sure the armflaps are flat and snug under baby's back.
Step Three:
Pull the footpocket up over the feet. NOTE: Some babys' feet may not reach the foot pocket yet. This is okay: It will be there for them as they grow.
Step Four:
Fold the right side of the blanket over your baby's belly and tuck it under the left arm pit (her right). This flap should wrap all the way under the baby's back.
Step Five:
Wrap the left side of the blanket over the top of her belly and all the way around her until you run out of blanket. This is where it is important to pull the blanket snug. THE BLANKET MUST BE PULLED SNUG.
Now just in case the Miracle Blanket people find this and get all up in arms, we think its funny that they show this happily swaddled baby in their instructions and that K is so obviously displeased by the results of this process every night. And yet, without it, we would never get even a semi-decent night's sleep so we highly recommend it for anyone with a highly flaily baby who wakes him/herself up whenever his/her hands are free to roam around and whack him/herself in the face ;)
I was thinking the other day that I don't record any of Kiernan's firsts, or any of the things that he does anywhere but in this blog. Is that going to cause problems one day? Is this blog really going to ALWAYS exist? I wonder if there are services that will print and bind old blog postings for you. I plan to investigate.
So here is a quick list of things Kiernan has been doing that we don't want to forget happened around this time:
- last night he slept for just over 6 hours straight! AND! They were hours I was asleep! AND! They were hours one would usually be asleep at. He woke up to eat at 11 (back down around 11:30 or so I think) and woke up just before 6 this morning. Eric and I both looked at each other unsure as to whether we believed that had actually happened? Had I woken up and fed him and forgotten? Did we ignore his cries? How could it be? But really, I think he just slept that long. SCORE!
- He's really rolling now! I know I announced he was rolling eons ago, but he seems to be doing it now without any coaxing from me. It's still a crapshoot, you never know when he's actually going to do it, but he does it! And both ways - back to front and front to back. I still don't think he really does it on purpose though, so that'll be the next step.
- He's talking more and making new sounds. wawawawa is the most common, but he also looks at me really thoughtfully and seems to try to make thhh sounds a lot. He also now smacks his lips now.
- He's turned serious. The boy who would smile at any lady in sight is stingy with the smiles lately. He looks at everyone with a strong "I'm not sure about you" look.
- Foot flicking boy. He rubs his feet together like a grasshopper all the time. This distracts him from falling asleep and he also manages to kick his robeez off all the time (much to his grandmother's amazement!)
- We tried some sweet potato this morning. I guess the cereal is bland enough that he accepts it without being shocked about it, other than that it isn't applesauce. He clamped his mouth shut after a few bites of sweet potato. We'll give him a few days to warm up to the new taste sensation though :)
- He cuddles! And sits quietly with us. It's amazing. I think in combination with his tummy not holder, he's older and calmer and is happy just to hang out sometimes. It's really nice.
