Mastitis?

First...I'm fine.  If I did have mastitis I fixed it and I have it no longer.

But I wanted to share my little story.

Almost 14 months nursing and I've had a plugged milk duct twice...that's it...that's as far as my nursing woes go.

UNTIL...

Yesterday afternoon, roughly 3pm I notice a pain in my right boob.  Pain came out of nowhere, hurts like a bitch and there's a hard knot where the pain is.  

Oh great...a plugged duct.  No problem I think to myself, I've had these before, I'll just massage that bad boy out of there. 

Come 5pm I'm starting to feel a little...peculiar.  My stomach feels like it's in my throat, I feel sort of lightheaded and fuzzy...but I power through.

By 6pm I have to call my husband away from his work (he was working at home luckily) to come help me because I HAVE TO LIE DOWN.  I'm feeling REALLY weird.  I'm starting to get the chills and feel very achy, almost like I have the flu.

At 7pm we get the baby down and I'M DONE.  I get on the couch next to the roaring fire and curl up into a ball and I CAN'T STOP SHIVERING.

As soon as I started shivering I JUST KNEW that that damn knot in my boob was the cause of all my discomfort.  I'd been massaging away since 3pm and I'd spent the last 2 hours trying to get the baby to nurse exclusively on that right boob but all to no avail, the knot wasn't budging.

I choked down dinner, shivering so bad it was almost impossible to eat and by 8pm I drew THE HOTTEST BATH I'VE EVER HAD.

Completely random sidenote here...why is it DRAWing a bath?  Why do we say draw?

Anyway...

FINALLY I was warm.  I stayed in there for 20 minutes but as soon as that water started to cool down I was shivering again.

Somehow I made it into bed, got myself dressed with the help of my husband, and buried myself under 3 blankets.  Luckily it was also super warm up there because we'd had a fire going all day.  But I was still freezing.  77 degrees, 3 blankets, my skin feels like it's on fire and I'm absolutely freezing.

Out comes the pump, I'm going to get that knot out of there if it kills me!  So I start pumping away, trying to massage the lump while I pump.

Suddenly there's a popping noise and a splash inside the pump.  DID I JUST UNPLUG MY CLOG?  I didn't imagine it would make such an obvious noise but it very much sounded and looked like I'd just unclogged my duct.

Sure enough about half hour later I can suddenly FEEL how hot it is up in that room.  I start peeling off the layers of clothing, one piece at a time, then slowly one by one each of the blankets come off until I'm so hot that I have to open the window because it's still 77 degrees.

AND THEN about 11pm I start sweating.  The sweating was the sign for me that it was over, the clog with it's accompanying bacteria was gone.

Just like that, as quickly as it started, it was over.  I was fine.  I went to sleep and woke up with nothing more than a slightly sore boob from all the massaging.

So, was that mastitis?  Anyone else had mastitis for a whopping 8 hours?

When in Doubt Post Some Pictures of Your Kid

I'm failing miserably at this one post a week VOW I made.

Our transition from 2 naps to 1 is not going as smoothly as I was led to believe so everyday is a toss up as to whether I have free time during nap #2 because some days IT DOESN'T EXIST.

So, rather than just NOT post like I've been doing these past few months I'm just going to post some piccies!

Here's what Baby Jett's been up to lately.

CLIMBING!

...and crawling through cat doors.

No surface is safe.  And mommy is busy chasing and saving baby from imminent death all day every day.

He's also mastered the throw my body back and screech like a banshee tantrum.

Toddlerhood is awesome.

 

How Long?

So...we made it a year, or 13 months more precisely.

I'm now nursing a toddler.

Somehow this milestone has led everyone to start questioning how long I'm going to continue.  As though people fear that continuing past a year is synonymous with nursing my kid until he's 7.

BTW, what's wrong with nursing my kid until he's 7 if I really wanted to?

My goal was always at least a year, but less than 2.

At this point we're going to 18 months but I'd still like to wean by the time he's 2.  Mostly because I'd like to be on Baby Deux by then...not because I have a strong desire to stop nursing.

I now completely understand why people just keep going...and going.  I have no reason to wean...other than the aforementioned Baby Deux.

It's not cumbersome, tedious, time-consuming or tiring.

It's calming, soothing, relaxing and still my MAGIC WEAPON.

In short, I really love nursing.  It's been an easy enjoyable experience for us and I will be very sad when this relationship comes to an end.

It's not all cupcakes and roses though because while the nursing relationship has changed for the better since those exhausting newborn days...it has also changed for the worse in some ways.

The little bastard has started biting me.

Ok, it's not true biting but the fact that he has teeth is causing me some discomfort.

Sometimes there are teeth marks on my nipple.  As though he's holding on with his teeth.

Again...not biting per se, just holding it in his teeth.

And sometimes when he pulls off he sort of SCRAPES his teeth along my nipple.

OUCH.

He doesn't do it always, but enough.  I can see how if he did it all the time I would be like I'M DONE, NO MORE BOOB FOR YOU!

Luckily he's not doing it enough to make me want to stop...but I can see why women quit cold turkey if their kid starts biting.

Who knows, maybe one day before my aforementioned 18 months he'll bite me and I'll cut him off.

But for now we're still going strong and will continue to do so for roughly the next 6 months to a year.

So, am I in the minority continuing to nurse my toddler?

How long did you/will you go?

Back to Blogging

I've neglected this blog lately.

And I miss it.

I've begun a million different posts.

I shit you not I have 17 half finished posts in my draft folder.

I have so many things I want to discuss with you all, including:

Continuing to breastfeed past a year

What I've been feeding my baby

Baby Allergies - From Dairy to Berries

Eating dairy again

Discipline

Transitioning from 2 Naps to 1

And a guest post for another blogger friend about my road to parenthood

And the list goes on.

I can't believe it's been more than a month since I've posted, Jett is already past 13 months.

So...I'm going to start blogging again.

My goal is one post a week...let's see if I can make it happen.

In the meantime, about 2 weeks after his first birthday Jett officially became a walker instead of a crawler and walking is now his only means of transportation.

Just like that, my baby is gone and I have a toddler.

Baby Jett - 12 Months

Well...it happened.  My baby turned 1.

We're leaving our baby days behind and entering...TODDLERDOM.  More grammatically known as toddlerhood.

So crazy.

It went so fast and so slow at the same time.  I'm a little bit in awe that we made it through the first year relatively unscathed.

At ONE YEAR Baby Jett:

Weight: 19 lbs. 4 oz - Skinny little bastard - 10th percentile for weight.
Height: 31 inches - Tall little bastard - 85th percentile for height.
Head: 18.25 inches - Perfectly in the middle at 50th percentile.

• He's quite the dancer, he has songs he likes on commercials and when they come on he starts dancing and singing along. He also has a toy that plays a particularly catchy tune that he will dance to whenever he plays with it.
• Has a Love/Hate relationship with the vacuum.  He's absolutely fascinated with it and will point at it and touch it and open the cabinet where it lives if he comes downstairs and finds it closed, but if you turn it on, OH HELL NO, and he starts crying and screaming...even if you're holding him.
• Can suck through a straw.  It never occurred to me to try out straws but someone came over with a sippy cup with a straw and Jett figured it out almost instantly.
• Points at EVERYTHING and I mean EVERYTHING.  We try to tell him the name of everything that he points at but halfway through the day I'm exhausted and feel like I'm going to go crazy if I say "key" "remote" "book" one more time!  Which is obnoxious because...
• He does not talk!  He has ZERO words in his vocabulary so far and the pediatrician said it was fine BUT that she'd like 3 words from him by his 15 month appt.  So now we've amped up the "mama" "dada" "kitty" and I really am going to go crazy if this kid doesn't start talking soon.
• As well as not talking he also blatantly refused to use sign language of any kind.  He KNOWS what the milk sign means and will sit calmly and wait for my boob if I say milk and do the sign for him but under no circumstances will he do it back to me.  If I can ever get him to just do that one sign instead of pulling my shirt down I will teach him others, but for now I've given up on "more" and "done" and am concentrating on "milk".
• He's an eater!  I have found NOTHING that he won't eat now...except his birthday cupcake, which is awesome after his hunger strike.  He definitely prefers to be fed over feeding himself though, BOO.
• Sleeps like a champ.  Naps are still great and he sleeps 11 hours straight through the night.  Only when he's teething does he seem to have trouble.  Even our travels to Oregon have not upset the sleeping through the night.
• Speaking of teething, he's got his 4th tooth!  So we have a matching set of 2 on bottom and 2 on top and a 5th one about to make an appearance on the top.
• Has perfected the fake cry.  He now pushes that bottom lip out and squeezes out some big fat crocodile tears INSTANTLY when you tell him no or take something away from him.  He can also turn it off as soon as he's happy again.  It's impressive.
• He's a climber.  He gets into and UP everything that he possibly can.  He's climbed up the fridge, up the pantry shelves, up the drawers to reach the top of the counter, into boxes and cabinets, up the high chair.  If it can be climbed he will try to climb it.
• Likes to push anything that can be pushed around the house.  He rearranges our furniture on a daily basis.  Garbage can gets moved to the living room, chairs get moved to the hall etc etc.  Every night we have to set our house straight again...fun times.
• As of his official first birthday he was not quite walking just taking a few steps, but just 3 days later he really plunged ahead with the walking and will do about 10 steps now and is really trying to walk places instead of dropping to a crawl immediately.  I'm pretty sure in just a few days this is going to become the new normal mode of locomotion!  Watch out world, here comes Jett!

 I'm glad we're done with these!

 Cousins!  God his hair is ridiculous!  I swear he's not bald on the top there...

 He was NOT impressed with his cupcake.  He wouldn't eat it!

Family Portrait

A shoutout to Leah at Everyday Love for making Baby Jett's awesome first birthday onesie!  Check out her shop for your kiddos!

Remembering the Good

I just found this in my Draft Folder.

It was the beginning of a post in which I was outlining the positives of my hospital birth as I was trying to come to terms with it all and let go of some of the anger.

Since today is the day that I went into the hospital for my induction last year I thought it might be appropriate to share it now.

As a reminder for everyone, I was planning a homebirth right up until 38 weeks at which point a routine prenatal appointment on a Monday turned into an induction in the hospital on Wednesday for preclampsia and a baby in my arms by early Friday morning.

Not what I had planned.

I spent a lot of time being pissed.

You can read about it here and here and here if you'd like.

It took me awhile to not feel anger about the hospital birth and I still mourn the loss of the homebirth experience...hopefully with the next one we can remedy that.

But I realize I never REALLY told you all about what a great hospital I gave birth in and how they worked their asses off to give me the experience I was looking for as much as they possibly could.

Remember this?  Where I discussed why I was having a homebirth?  Well...I got to do the vast majority of the things that I outlined in this post.

So, here goes...the good of my birth at a hospital.

• I hear lots of stories about women being pressured to hurry their labor along (as though we have control over that) but no one on the hospital staff put any pressure on me to get the baby out in a timely manner.  My labor lasted 29 hours, every moment of it in the hospital and by the time we finally had the baby they were SWAMPED, so I'm SURE they needed the room, but not once did I ever feel like I was on an assembly line and that I needed to hurry up and get the baby out so the room could go to the next laboring mother.  I was the laboring mother and it was my room until the baby came.  Period.  My water had also broken early in labor but this did not bother anyone and was still no reason for them to pressure me into pitocin/epidural/C-section etc. to speed up labor.

• Cervical checks were few and far between.  I think over the course of the whole labor I was checked 3 times.  They were very conscious of the fact that my water had broken and they wanted to keep the possibility of an infection to a minimum.  I was checked in the very beginning to confirm I was only 1cm dilated,  checked when I started "bearing down" unwillingly so that they could confirm whether it was time to push or not and then once again after I had the pitocin, epidural and my nap because the screen was showing what looked like contractions conducive to being fully dilated.  All important checks that would have been done if I was at home...except the first one, that one was to decide how to induce me as they prefer you're 3cm dilated before they start pitocin...there would have been no reason to check me in the beginning at home.  But I'm glad this check was done and I'm glad I wasn't given pitocin right off the bat.

• Before the induction took place the anesthesiologist came in and told me about my pain management options including the epidural but then NO ONE EVER OFFERED PAIN MEDS EVER AGAIN.  If you've ever been in labor that is KEY to doing it without drugs.  Regardless of your resolve when you are not in labor if someone asks you in the middle of a contraction if you'd like drugs you're very very likely to scream YES, JUST GIVE ME THE DRUGS!  But if no one offers and you've made up your mind to do it without them it is MUCH MUCH EASIER to stay the course if the drugs are never offered.  I had to come to the conclusion by myself that I wanted the epidural so I could sleep at the very end.  It was my decision alone, there was no pressure and it wasn't even offered, I had to ask for it.

• On that same note, I remember rather distinctly at HOUR 19 when I was having some rather excruciating back labor that suddenly I WANTED THE EPIDURAL and everyone and I mean EVERYONE in the room encouraged me to keep going and not have the epidural.  When I checked into that hospital I just KNEW that nurses were going to try to get me to have that epidural and so I was SHOCKED that the nurse on duty was part of my cheering squad encouraging me to keep going without the drugs.

• There was no restrictions on what I could and could not do.  I ate, I drank, I took a shower, I took a bath.  I spent very little time in the bed, in fact ending up in the bed for a cervical check proved to be my downfall and why I asked for the epidural in the end because I was falling asleep between contractions in the bed!  

• I did not have to wear a hospital gown (I HATE hospital gowns!) and spent the whole time either in my own clothes or naked.  This might seem silly to some, but it was important for me to not be wearing a hospital gown, I hate them that much.

• They treated my midwife with the utmost respect and she was basically my spokesperson.  They did not bother me when I was in labor, they directed all comments and questions to my midwife and let her talk things over with me and then accepted her response as mine.  THIS WAS AMAZING to not be bothered with medical jargon while you're trying to get a baby out because IT'S REALLY HARD TO THINK STRAIGHT.  My midwife would lay things out for me in layman terms and offer her advice and then answered any questions I had, always pausing for a contraction, which the Dr.'s DID NOT DO, twice I remember asking a Dr. or anesthesiologist or nurse or somebody to please not talk to me while I was in the middle of a contraction...midwife always paused to help me through the contraction.  

• Once the baby was out they let us delay the cord clamping.  Which is NOT hospital policy but we had discussed it before the induction and they were on board.  They actually asked my midwife when it was ok to cut it.  That's right they asked my midwife for advice!

• They also asked me if I wanted my placenta.  I WAS going to keep my placenta and make placenta pills and placenta art.  But since my placenta was the reason I was having an induction in a hospital at 38 weeks I had no desire to keep it...it would have just been a reminder that IT was the reason for the failed homebirth.  But cool that they offered to let me keep it.

• The baby was put directly on my chest and left there.  It was HOURS later before they came back to weigh/measure and do the thorough newborn checkup.  I laid there with my boob \ out and the baby right next to it and we took a little nap.  When the baby left to go to the nursery, Dom was with him the whole time and they were back within an hour.  The ENTIRE time I was in the hospital this was the only time the baby was not with me.

• Hospitals don't run out of hot water.  I was in the shower for HOURS trying to keep the back labor at bay, had we been at home I would not have been able to do this!

All in all my hospital birth was not a bad experience and other than the fact that I did not get to go into labor on my own...it was pretty close to getting to experience all I wanted to experience.

I can't believe that was a whole year ago and that Baby Jett is about to turn ONE...do I have to quit calling him Baby Jett now and start calling him Toddler Jett???

Baby Jett - 11 Months

Oh Baby Jett, how are you almost 1 already? I still like you more the older you get but I'm not sure I'm ready to say I have a one year old!

At 11 months Baby Jett:

Is not quite 20 lbs yet, if I had to guess I'd say he's about 19.5?  We don't have our official ped appt until the end of the month, so that will have to suffice.

Is over 30 inches.  Again, haven't officially been measured but we measured him and he's at least 30 inches now.

Still has ridiculous hair.  In the sunlight it looks uber blonde, in dark light it looks almost brown and when photographed the top of his head still appears bald because the hair is so blonde there...I'm still holding out hope that one day it will all even out and be the same color!

Still has blue eyes.

Talks and talks and talks, I can't get this kid to shut up....but he doesn't say any words really, lots of gah gah gahs and da da das and bah bah bahs and ma ma mas and every once in awhile someone will say something like 'wow' or 'hi' and it sounds like he parrots it back to you...but it's rare and it doesn't feel like he's REALLY doing it on purpose.

But he understands basic commands.  Like 'lift up your hands', 'come to mama', that sort of thing.

He can freestand for long stretches of time and can get from the floor to standing without support and can bend down and pick things up and set them back down all without any support...but he won't take steps without at least holding onto a FINGER.  He's barely using the fingers at this point but he refuses to take a step until he has a finger in his hand. I think he's building up the confidence to just plunge ahead with walking.  It feels like instead of taking one or two steps he's just going to one day start full on walking, just like he did with the crawling.

Has discovered the joy of opening and shutting doors.  He can be amused for hours with just a door.  Shut the door, open the door, laugh maniacally.  Shut the door, open the door, laugh maniacally.  Good times.

Easily gets off the bed, couch, steps, etc.  When I open the back door to the yard he now freely goes in and out as he chooses. Sometimes he just sits on the step and goes down the step, outside.  Up the step, inside.  And over and over and over again.

He's started playing with toys instead of just sucking on them.  Rolls balls and pushes toy cars, you get the idea.

LOVES stacking objects and putting things inside other things.  His favorite toys now are little stacking cubes that go one inside the other or pile on top of each other to make a tower.

He can take his shirt off.  Once the arms are out he pulls the rest of it over his head.

Makes the money sign by rubbing his thumbs against his other fingers when you say daddy or he sees daddy.  Fucking hilarious.  I think he's just doing a mini wave?  But it looks like he's rubbing his fingers together, like GIVE ME MONEY!  And he only does it with daddy!

Started throwing tantrums.  It begins already.  If he doesn't get what he wants he makes sure to let us know!

Points to let us know what he wants.  Although sometimes he seems to just want to point at everything and no matter what you hand him he continues to point at everything else.

Finally understands the concept of the sippy cup, ie. you must lift it up to get the liquid out!

Had his first real beach trip and DID NOT eat sand!

Got a 3rd tooth!  Top right tooth came through, that sucker is huge!

 Can you see the giant tooth?

Back to loving the bath.  Thank god!  That crying for baths thing was ridiculous!

Back to eating!  After what felt like forever he is FINALLY eating real food again and he'll basically eat anything.  Through the hunger strike we discovered that he likes to be fed, so we half feed him and he half feeds himself...it's a compromise depending on how tired/distracted he is at any given meal.

Is still a breastfeeding fool.  There's no possible way breastfeeding is ending at one year =)

Sleeping well!  Two 1-1.5 long naps every day and sleeping through the night for the most part.  Generally there's one feed either at 10-11ish at which point he then sleeps through until 6-7am or he starts off the night by sleeping through until about 4-5am then has a feed and sleeps for another 2 hours or so.  I'm pretty sure he's in the midst of a growth spurt as these feeds are true feeds where he hardly opens his eyes just eats and eats and eats and then is easy to put back down when he's done.

 

Why do I even still try to do these?  He won't sit still.