The Tuesday Redirect

So my maternity leave officially ends this week, all around. Just in time for all our family to depart and for me to suddenly be thrust into solo double-hammer-time parenting for the very first time. Not really sure which rocket scientist worked THAT schedule out. Oh, wait, it was me. Right. Okay.

*wanders off stage right, audience hears muffled cries of "STUPID, STUPID" and some head-slapping sound effects*

Ahem. Anyway! I'm back at the Advice Smackdown (thanks to Sarah of Whoorl and Kelly of Mocha Momma for filling in the last couple guest-author spots), although I admit I'll be cheating a bit longer by only answering easy questions. So those of you who have submitted questions that require actual brain power and thinking, well...you just hold onto your horses there, missy. I'd say it'll be at least mid-December before my mind catches up to my typing fingers. In the meantime, mush and nonsense, ahoy!

Baby sucking on Daddy's pinkie finger = mush.

Baby wearing floppy-eared puppy booties = nonsense

And on that note, this week's Time & Money-Saving Tip is up at the Luvs MomSpeak site. It's about pee-pee. Yes, it is. I'm certainly not expecting another 136 comments on a post about pee-pee, but you have to admit that would be pretty awesome. (NOTE: If the sight of the word "pee-pee" triggers your gag reflex, the post also includes a photo of my cleavage. See? Something for everyone!)

For those of you interested in neither babies nor cleavage = hamsterdog

And Everything Else

My dad is back in the hospital. On Monday night he had a coughing fit while taking his medication (nothing super out of the ordinary -- he chokes very easily since losing his larynx to cancer) and aspirated a pill into his lung. He's now being treated for aspiration pneumonia. The good news is that he appears to be responding very well to the treatment and we're hoping he'll come home today. My parents got to "see" the baby via webcam a few hours before the accident, and I spoke with him on the phone yesterday and as always, he sounds great.

***
We're all sick too, although in a much less dramatic pneumonia-ish way. Noah came down with a bad, baaaaad cold last week -- he woke up wheezing on Thursday, and because Daddy was home scored himself a trip to the DOCTOR, where Daddy was told that it was indeed just a bad, baaaaaad cold. As we all know, Mama would never have taken him to the doctor, but would have instead smeared some Vaseline on his chest and called it a day.

***
I did take Ezra to the doctor yesterday, obviously because he's new and shiny and like soooo the favorite, and his weight is officially back up to 7 pounds, 8.5 ounces. I returned the hospital-grade rental pump and plunked down money for my very own Pump In Style, like a real breastfeeding mother with real boobs that work and sustain her child and stuff.

***
I feel the need to clarify my somewhat slapdashy post from Monday, the point of which was unintentionally hijacked by the idea that I actually sterlize my breastpump parts after every feeding. Which I promise you I do not. Not at all. Once a day, tops, and only because I HAD THRUSH ONCE, and once you have thrush you cannot ever forget having thrush, and I guess one of the lifelong side effects of thrush is a compulsion to sterlize pump parts in the microwave every morning. But that's it! The only time! Usually I just run everything under hot water for a bit and pile them up glamorously on a handtowel in our master bathroom. Anything to keep the romance alive, folks.

***

Don't even get me started on this one. Photos like this are the only thing keeping me from selling Noah to the gypsies. He's been challenging. Very, very challenging.

SYNONYMS: SEE ALSO: WILLFUL, TANTRUMMY, DEFIANT, BRATTASTIC.

But that's a topic for another day. Another day when I have two hands free to type and more than two hours of sleep to ruminate on my own failings as his mother and finite amount of patience and when I can actually bear to think about Monday, when I spilled an entire cup of soda on the legs of two well-dressed business people at the mall food court because I was trying to balance a tray in one hand and pull Noah up off the floor where he had melted into a puddle of NOOOOO I WANNA SIT OH DER with the other and everybody was staring at me, ME, the terrible mother who couldn't control her terrible kid and I apologized over and over to the man and woman who I'd splashed with soda but they just glared at me and I could tell she was mentally reminding herself to re-up her birth control prescription, and finally I hauled Noah off by the hood of his jacket and prayed that the ground would just swallow me up whole.

Towards the baby, he is nothing but loving and gentle and proud as can be. His teacher hasn't noticed any change in his behavior at school, and says that he loves talking about Baby Brother and has been more social than ever with his classmates. But towards US, he is downright awful. He yells, he tantrums, he laughs at our panicked faces when he slips away from us in a parking lot.

This isn't how Noah behaves, except that now it totally is, and I'm ashamed to admit that I am not coping with it very well.

The other night, after many time-outs and tantrums, Jason ordered Noah to an early bedtime and was trying to get him into pajamas while desperately clinging to his last bit of patience. I didn't hear the conversation, but apparently Noah started signing that he was scared, and said that he was scared of Daddy, because Daddy was always so mad.

The sound of Jason's heart breaking? Yeah, that I heard.

But...yeah. Let's save that topic for later. Let's all just look at this photo for awhile instead.

***

Thank you to Heather B, Nicole and Jessica for filling in for me this week over at the Advice Smackdown.

Click

I first noticed Ezra's tongue-tie the morning after he was born. Something increasingly felt "off" in his otherwise picture-perfect, open-wide baby-bird-mouth latch,  I'd yet to see his tongue protrude past his lower lip, and when it did, it looked exactly like the top of a heart. I immediately started looking for someone capable-looking to snip that sucker back, but after a few dozen more increasingly painful latches I was ready to hand my baby off to anybody with a pair of scissors. You there! Orderly! Wanna make a few bucks? Go sterilize your car keys.

So by yesterday afternoon, when I FINALLY had an appointment with a pediatric surgeon, I had no patience for the millionth assurance that a frenectomy was no big deal, that it was better to get this taken care of now rather than later, that it would only hurt him for a split second or two. I briefly wondered if I came across as heartless, and if the proper response to being officially told that yes, Ezra most definitely needed his frenulum separated was possibly not what I said, which was: GIDDY UP.

The surgeon asked me to leave the room during the procedure and go next door to a small private room with couches where I could nurse Ezra afterwards, and again I wondered if I was supposed to be deeply emotionally affected by the pain I was about to put my precious newborn through -- like mothers who stay during the procedure are prone to hysterics and fainting spells. But frankly, after seven full days of sticking my boobs into his pencil sharpener of a maw, I was running a tad low on pity.

In the time it took me to walk eight feet or so to the next room and plop myself down on a couch, the snippage was over and done and my furious baby (who looks EXACTLY like his Grandpa, by the way, when he gets good and righteously pissed-off. Grandpa with a shade of Alien.) was back in my arms and looking for boob. There was not a single drop of blood to be seen, and after a good nursing session he sighed contentedly, let loose a tremendous poop, and all was forgotten.

***
FILE UNDER THINGS I NEVER THOUGHT I'D SAY: Damn, I need more breastmilk storage containers.

***
During the five months that I nursed Noah, I can probably count the number of times I could have described it as "blissful" or "wonderful" or even "pleasant." It was...mildly tolerable, most of the time. The early days were so fraught with anxiety and fear and rejection -- he was simply TOO BIG and TOO HUNGRY and I was doomed to become his second choice of a food supply from the moment that first (completely necessary) bottle of formula touched his lips. He was so prone to nursing strikes that I never even tried to nurse in public lest he refuse to latch and draw attention to how awkwardly bad I was at the whole thing. We occasionally had those moments when everything worked fine and our eyes would meet over the small curve of my never-very-full breast and...sigh. This is nice. But we had plenty of those moments when he sucked down a bottle, as well. 

When my milk dried up, it was mostly a relief to stop, although I always felt sad that I'd never really achieved the successful nursing relationship I wanted, the kind other women must have, otherwise why in the world do people get so worked up and preachy about it? Breastfeeding sucked, and I was a little glad to be done with it. I will never, ever judge anyone for quitting. Sometimes it just doesn't work, no matter what the high-and-mighty tongue-cluckers say.

This time has been completely different. Unbelievably different. When the nurse first plopped Ezra rather unceremoniously across my chest in the recovery room post-surgery, leaving me to struggle with positioning him while mostly numb and immobile (because I'd breastfed before, and therefore didn't need any help or even a little refresher course don't get me started on my hospital's breastfeeding support for second-time mothers oh my God GAH), I was able to get him on and nursing vigorously almost immediately -- you'd never know that his birth had been such a rude surprise for him, and so heavily medicated. He was awesome. I'm using words like awesome and wonderful and blissful a lot these days. We're good at this. It works. It insert-Keanu-Reeves-style-WHOA works.

I did things differently this time too, though. I packed Mother's Milk tea and fenugreek capsules in my hospital bag to boost my supply, and probiotic supplements to fight off another thrush infection from the post-c-section antibiotics. I also packed (and unabashedly used) a pacifier to save my breasts from the ravages of non-stop comfort sucking. And I had sterilized bottles and formula at home. I promised myself that I'd give it my best shot, and nothing more.

Ezra did get a couple ounces of formula those first nights at home -- he cluster feeds (we call it clusterfuckfeeding, because OF COURSE WE DO) at night for hours and hours until I'm raw and bone-dry, and since his weight was questionable and his pooping not satisfactory, we topped him off with a bottle and a preemie-flow nipple. And then my milk came in three full days before it did with Noah, and now a couple quick five- or 10-minute pumping sessions post-feeding in the morning gives us all the breastmilk we need for his evening topping off.

He'll take the bottle grudgingly, suck it all down, and then demand one more go at the breast to fall asleep. Because he loves to nurse. And, amazingly, so do I.

***

I had one recurring dream during pregnancy: I gave birth to a baby boy, and I breastfed him. And everything was fine, and then I woke up. So while I will resist the urge to end this post with a trite and corny saying about dreams coming true, you should know that I'm totally thinking it.

The Mighty Ez, Boob Man.

nOT yET Mastering teh 0ne-handed Typing Thing

Baby may be cross between vampire and those newly hatched velociraptors from Jurassic Park, what with the FEEDING and FEEDING and rarrrry little squawks and howls. I sometimes stick my face in front of his during the frantic rooting, because it amuses me when he attempts to latch on to my nose.

***

Yeah. So I typed those two sentences awhile ago. Three days, two days, something like that. It's time to admit that entries involving "words" may still be beyond me at this point. You guys like pictures, right?

(Photos ahoy after the jump, so you won't want to kill me over the slow load times.)

Preparation Stages

Stage One: The Welcome-to-the-Suck Practicalist

Stage Two: The Low-Supply Dreamer

Stage Three: The I-Can-Accessorize-ANYTHING Conspicuous Consumer

Stage Four: The Ain't-No-Fool Realist

My Boobs. Did You Miss Them?

So I'm dreaming about the baby pretty regularly now -- shockingly nice, normal dreams where he (he is always a boy, apologies to the hair-bow hopefuls) is indeed of the human variety, although I did have one dream where he was born with a full set of teeth -- and weirdly, every dream eventually includes breastfeeding. I say weirdly, because breastfeeding always seems to be really easy in these dreams.

DING DING DING! BIZARRO WORLD!

(I know the loyal, long-time readers hate it when I spend half an entry recapping three-year-old plot points, but I cannot help it! It's something of a compulsion with this pregnancy, to neatly file everything into Then and Now columns, and I'm entirely too lazy to dig through the archives for links.)

(Plus every time I go into the archives I get delete-happy because can you honestly BELIEVE what a fucking longwinded know-it-all neurotic twit I was back then? God.)

(BACK THEN! HAR HAR HAR HAAAAAAAR COUGH.)

Anyway, the Cliff's Notes version of Mah Boobs:

I have fibrocystic breast disease. It's been relatively quiet lately, but during my early 20s it was a constant source of annoyance and cancer scares. The cysts would occasionally fill up with blood, meaning they very closely resembled malignant lumps during exams and ultrasounds. And even though we sort of KNEW it was really a benign cyst, it's not exactly the sort of thing you fuck around with, so off to the aspiration races I went.

I once went to a doctor who...I don't even know what his problem was. He spent the entire procedure trying to talk sports with Jason while impatiently jabbing at my right boob with a needle, and then proceeded to randomly aspirate cyst after cyst without removing and reinserting the needle, meaning he was, essentially, tearing through my breast tissue while hunting for cysts. (Hi! Were you eating? Nom nom, suckas.)

After it was over, I sat in the car and sobbed and sobbed because it hurt SO MUCH, and then reached up to examine my boob and HOLY LIVING FUCK, he'd left the very lump I'd gone to see him about in the first place.

I called my OB/GYN from the parking lot and started shrieking at the receptionist because HOLY LIVING FUCK, after all of that, he'd aspirated the WRONG CYST.

We drove to the office for a quick ultrasound to confirm, and yes, I was right. He'd roughly aspirated a slew of clear, obviously harmless cysts and left the solid-looking suspicious one completely alone.

I was referred to an actual breast center that specialized this sort of thing and that doctor actually got the right fucking cyst and was extremely gentle during the whole procedure. The cyst was -- surprise! -- benign and I've never had anything else aspirated since.

But the damage was done. My right boob is a mass of lumpy scar tissue from the botched aspiration, and while I should have known that there would likely to be milk duct damage as well, it wasn't really something I thought much about at the time.

So. Flash-forward to Noah's birth and our subsequent attempts to breastfeed. My milk took a really, really long time to come in, and my supply was nowhere near adequate for the 10-pound chunker I birthed. He was born with the appetite of a six-week-old, I swear to God, and I imagine I would have struggled to ramp up a decent supply even WITHOUT the gimpy right boob.

But no matter what I did -- and believe me, I tried everything increase my supply -- I was, at best, working with a boob and a half. The more fenugreek I consumed and the more I pumped, the more painfully engorged my left boob would become -- it was even showing signs of OVERSUPPLY, projectile milk and everything -- but the right side could eke out an ounce or two every few hours, and Noah had absolutely no patience for that nonsense.

I felt like a big. Fat. Stupid. Failure. I remember paying my co-pay at the pediatrician's office the day after we brought Noah home and just. Bawling. Right there in the waiting room. Our dog had a broken leg and our baby had just been slapped with a FAILURE TO THRIVE diagnosis and we had to get his weight back up or he'd go back to the hospital and it was all my fault. All of it. My fault.

We didn't have any formula at home and I had some bottles I planned to use once I went back to work but I couldn't remember where I'd hidden them and Noah's first week of life is kind of blur, but I remember the crying. There was so much crying. Mostly from me.

Looking back, it all seems so head-slappy obvious that nursing exclusively was just not in the cards for us.  I was damaged goods! Hello! Domperidome ain't gonna squeeze milk out of non-existent ducts, babycakes. So nurse on the good side and follow up with a formula chaser, GOD.

And that's what we did for awhile, although it was always treated as our temporary stop-gap solution. The lactation consultants continued to give me advice that would lead to the end of the bottle, because THAT was the goal. Not like, feeding the damn baby or coming to terms with the obvious problem. "We'll get him off that formula junk yet!" one of them told me, six weeks in, just when I'd finally managed to get Noah to stop rejecting my boobs altogether. They openly admitted that the surgery I described would "likely impact my supply" but kept telling me it was something I could overcome if I just tried hard enough.

(You know, as this is all coming back to me today, I am sort of filled with this overwhelming desire to drive by their office and pelt the windows with rancid Similac.)

Then I went back to work. The gimp boob dried up almost immediately (and OH, what an attractive rack I had there for awhile!), and the other one wasn't doing so hot either. I'd assumed that because Noah's daycare was close to work and I had an office with a door that I wouldn't have any problems nursing him during the day or pumping regularly at work.

(Head! Slap! Obvious!) Even though I had a completely enviable set-up at work, I still needed to do...like, WORK. Huh! I'd get called into a meeting right when I planned to pump. I'd get stuck behind a deadline and would get to daycare late for a feeding, meaning my baby was screaming and the caretakers were frustrated. Noah wanted eight ounces at a time -- I'm guessing I could give him four. Then maybe two. Finally, when he was about five months old, he pulled away one morning in a pissed-off fury and would never latch again. There was nothing left.

We were done. I still felt like I hadn't done enough. If I'd just pumped more or held on just ANOTHER COUPLE MONTHS until the freelance work came through I could have kept going. I still got comments and emails from people telling me I should have tried X, Y and Z and that there's no way my milk dried up and I was using that as an excuse and spreading terrible misinformation across the Internet because milk only dries up if you stop putting the baby to the breast, don't you know that?

A recent post that dared to even MENTION bottles got one of those "you should just breastfeed" drive-bys. Ay yi yi, and so it begins.

I wish I could tell you that it doesn't still sting a little bit. That I don't still feel a little bit defensive about it, but OBVIOUSLY  this entry tells you otherwise. The "just breastfeed" business makes me especially stabby, because there is no "just" from my bust, okay, sweetcheeks?

The closest thing I can compare it to is the time I had to put my cat to sleep. In my head, I knew I'd done everything I possibly could have done for her. I knew it was time and the right thing to do. But I was still haunted by feelings that I let her down and could have done more; that in the end I just plain gave up on her.

And then I went and got another cat, knowing full well that it might end the exact same way. Why? Because it's worth it, duh.

These dreams, though. Almost every night. Cute baby boy, nursing like a champ, while I ask Jason what my big fucking damage was last time. (I dream in 80s movie lingo a lot too, yes.) This is easy!   

I've done research this time about damaged ducts and breast tissue, and even found some breast-surgery sites that suggest your ducts will sometimes heal themselves and regenerate with each subsequent pregnancy and lactation. That's a really nice thought. And it would really great if that happened, but I'm not counting on it. I can still feel the hard mass of scar tissue under the surface, and there's almost a full cup size difference between right and left. Just like last time.

I do plan to breastfeed again. I also plan to supplement again, to make up for ol' gimpy here. I hope, since I'll be staying home for awhile longer, that I'll also be able to nurse for longer. Or not! These babies do come with that pesky will of their own, after all. I mostly I plan to cut myself some goddamn slack. It's on my iCal and everything! October 2008 Through Sometime In 2009:  GIVE SELF A BREAK FROM SELF; REMEMBER TO NOT LEAVE NEWBORN AT TARGET. It appears my subconscious likes this plan.

It might end the exact same way, sure. But even that will still be easier. And it will still be worth it.