I’m not nursing anymore. In fact, I haven’t been nursing since Elizabeth was about seven weeks. I hate telling people when they ask, because more often than not I get the “aww, you poor thing, I feel so sorry for you” look as well as a giant list of troubleshooting options that I should have tried. They so desperately wanted me not to “give up”. I gently tell them that I’m not “giving up”, but rather making a decision to stop because it is in the best interest of my family. I did see a lactation consultant and we were doing everything “right”. It just wasn’t working!
It’s hard to make someone understand the difficulty of nursing Elizabeth when their own sweet child was a picture-perfect nurser, who was calmed just by lying in their mother’s arms. My little jelly bean kicked and squirmed and cried and dislatched (I know I’m making a word up here, but you get the point) about thirty times per feeding. She was not happy and I was not happy. It was so stressful trying to feed her that I would often cry when I knew it was time for her to eat. How was I supposed to bond with my sweet pea when I hated life? There of course were other factors involved in my decision, but this was the overpowering one! We switched to the bottle and she continued her fussy eating. After a visit to the pediatrician’s office, we put Elizabeth on formula that was for lactose sensitivity. It cleared the fussy mealtimes. However, she still moves her head around all over the place when she eats and the only way I know how to describe it is that she sees something moving on the ceiling at an incredibly fast pace, zig-zagging about and she is intent on following it around the room. It makes keeping the bottle in her mouth a challenge and stretches feedings out to forty-five minutes, but that is heaven compared to what I was experiencing with her in the past.
She’s getting ready to turn 12 weeks on Friday and here are some of the cool things Brent and I enjoy about her:
We can make her smile.
We can make her laugh (on occasion).
She talks back to us (I know this will mean something different when she’s 13).
She goes to bed at 7 and sleeps until Brent wakes her up at 10:30 for a final bottle, and then she sleeps until about 7. I no longer have to get up to feed her in the middle of the night! I’m not sure how long I should wait until I start backing her 10:30 feeding up to get to the 7-7 schedule. All I know is that for the past two weeks I’ve gotten 9 hours of sleep at night and I’m not ready to tamper with that just yet!
She takes three naps a day. The first is in the morning and usually stretches to three hours, at which time I wake her because it has been five hours since she ate last. I wonder how long she would sleep if I didn’t wake her. She has an hour long afternoon nap and a forty-five minute evening nap!
Elizabeth hates tummy time, and I’m lucky if I can get her to hang out on her belly for longer than a minute before she starts screaming bloody murder. My child may be late to hold her head up completely on her own and crawl!
For my own sanity, I make a meal plan each week. I always planned in my head what we would be eating for the week, but now I have each meal of the day written out so I get only what I need at the grocery store. We buy a ton of chicken from Costco and prep and freeze it so we have ready-to-make meals that just need to be thawed the night before. Some of our regular rotation: stir-fry, fajitas, homemade pot pie, BBQ chip chicken.
Since my last M4M meeting, I have been on a mission to cut out as much processed food as possible and have been on a war against high fructose corn syrup. I’ve always known it was bad for your body, but when I found out that they use mercury to extract it from the corn, I decided I was done.
I always read labels at the grocery store before, but mostly for its nutritional content. Now I read it for the ingredients. It’s hard to buy things without HFCS! We basically now eat meats, fruits and veggies, whole grain bread, pasta, and dairy. I try to get things that are as close to their natural state as possible…which means no more boxed snacks. Also, gone are the days of canned veggies. Fresh frozen is my preferred choice since it doesn’t have preservatives in them and they were “picked” at their highest nutritional peak! Of course, there’s still a load of crap we have in our pantry so we’re eating all that stuff so it doesn’t go to waste. I will never be a super health freak, and I will still order that pizza one night a week, but I am much more conscious now than I ever was. How can I expect to teach my daughter healthy eating habits if I can’t get my own under control. The problem probably stemmed from the fact that I’ve never had to watch what I eat so I’ve never felt like I had motivation to be careful. Now it’s not about the appearance on the outside, but the health on the inside! Again, I’m not a super health freak, so when you see me grab some cookies to go along with my glass of milk, don’t reprimand me!
P90X dvds are lurking on my kitchen counter staring at me every day. They are already intimidating me and I haven’t even started yet. Putting it off as long as possible is my game plan right now, because I know once I start, I have to commit, and everyone keeps telling me how much I’m going to hate life once I start.
In other random news, I’m finally watching LOST. Never was I ever interested in the show while it aired on TV. My brother and dad really got into it when it first started and I thought the whole idea sounded like it should have been made a movie instead of a television show. When they began to air the previews for the final season, I finally said to myself, this look interesting…and that’s when I began with season one. (By the way, my brother and dad quit before the first season was over because they found it too far fetched) I’m totally hooked!!! Brent and I just started season 2 and are honestly glad we’re watching it on DVD so we don’t have to wait week to week to find out what happens. I LOVE a good mystery!
The Shot Show is in Vegas this year so if I can stand to leave Elizabeth for several nights with my mom, I might be meeting Brent out there for half of his trip!
Ahhhhhhhhh…it’s that time of year. Halloween is right around the corner, followed by Thanksgiving, then Christmas. I love it!
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