Everyone Loves Amby
Levi loved it and now Bo does too.
Pardon me while I get a bit misty eyed and sappy on you
All my babies
have worn this outfit
Amazingly, it’s one of the precious few items that survived the great baby clothes wipe out without a spot, stain or mold spore. There were a few other things I held on to for sentimental purposes but most are covered in yellow mystery stains and speckled with mold spots. If you look in the corner of this photo, you can tell that Levi is wearing it too
For some reason, this silly little thing, makes my heart sing
I just realized that today is my due date. Now if I was this big FOUR days before I had Bo (5 weeks ago) then imagine how massive I’d be today.
Thankfully, though, instead of cutting the side of my house open and schlepping me downtown on a flat bed trailer, I have a beautiful
although colicky
5 week old baby boy
I can’t help but lean in for a whiff of the sweet smell of his lips. In a few short years I won’t be seeking the scent of breast milk contentedly bubbling on his lips, instead I’ll be patrolling for the smell of tooth paste. And then, not too many years beyond that, I’ll be sniffing him for beer breath and smoke. Time flies and it scares me.
Boden, as cute and snuggly and sniffably adorable as he is, is COLICKY~ DUN DUN DUN! Oh yes that dreaded C word. Every night from 1-4am he’s been howling and shrieking nonstop… well WAS. At my doctor’s prompting I dove onto a special diet in hopes of reducing his reflux without medication and, in turn, hopefully reduce the wailing.
I started out looking at the low acid / low gas diet (here, scroll down to #14) but that was so overwhelming - my head felt like exploding from information overload- that I turned to one of my favorite bloggers who went on a similar I will keep breastfeeding anti wailing crusade of her own. She pointed me towards this. MUCH simpler
at only range-fed turkey and lamb, baked or boiled potatoes and sweet potatoes (with salt and pepper only), rice and millet as your only grain, cooked green and yellow squash for your vegetable, and for fruit, pears and diluted pear juice. Drink a rice-based beverage drink in place of milk on cereal or in cooking. Do not yet use soy beverage. Take a calcium supplement. (Rice products, such as rice beverage, rice-based frozen dessert, rice pasta, rice flour, and millet are available in nutrition stores.)
Only I can’t even eat everything on that list. Sweet potatoes seem to cause issues; heck, veggies of any sort outside of avocado seem to be fartoriffic so the yellow and green squash are out for now too. Then there are pears, ewww pears. I am not a fan at all. I rarely will willingly consume a pear. They are MEALY and gross unless picked at the peak of pear harvest perfection and even then I loath them unless slathered with some type of caramel sauce and sunk into a torte or dumped over ice cream. I’m just NOT pear person and the thought of drinking pear juices makes me gag.
Then, where does that leave me? I’m SO glad you asked. That leaves me with oven roasted turkey on millet bread. Jasmine rice with sea salt, white pepper and avocado and on occasion a boneless skinless baked chicken breast. I also found some puffed rice cereal that’s been sweetened with the tiniest touch of honey. I could have vanilla rice milk over said cereal but I gave that a whirl the other day and nearly vomited in my bowl of $5 a box cereal. It wasn’t a problem with the rice milk, nor with the cereal but apparently when combined the two became vomitrocious.
In any event, that is it. That’s all I’m eating and while it IS helping Bo, I on the other hand have become a snarling raging beast of a woman. I’ve had a headache now for three days. I’m not a headache person, never have been, and coping with one is not my forte. “Coping” and I use the term loosely means jabbing my finger into my temple as counter pressure while I yell at people to be quiet and stop breathing so loudly. I generally do this while pacing back and forth through my galley kitchen rifling the fridge and pantry shelves for ANYTHING mild I might add to my diet. There is nothing in there to add, I know it, but I still persist, longingly staring at shelves of forbidden foods like eggs, cheese enchiladas, peppers, blueberries, beef stew, hummus, ice cream, shrimp *drooling*…. you get the picture.
My body is reacting in other ways too. On day 3 of the diet, my face massively broke out. I looked like the teenage fry cook at my local fast food joint- much worse then i ever did in my teens. Day 3 also brought about the BO plague- I smell so bad I can’t live with myself.
I have to leave the house tonight to pick up more food supplies for my self imposed torture TED diet. I’ll be easy to spot. Just look for the woman crying in front of the cheese case with a horrible case of body odor and some whopping festering facial zits and heck by then I may even have a scrumptious case of backne.
AH HA! There you are Mr Hand; so nice to see you again
Now that the idle pleasantries are out of the way, let’s get down to business
MMM! You taste delectable!
Well? What are you looking at? I don’t know about you all but I can’t stop looking at how beautiful this kid is
Oh and of course his weird toes- they fascinate me.
I wonder if he’ll end up with my funky evil pinky toe too?
Yeah, the baby is cool and all but I have to say that this:
is my new best friend- the magical baby quieting swing! I cracked from lack of sleep and dropped $50 ala Craig’s List. PRAISES JEBUS he sleeps!
The biggest problem (from what I can figure) with Bo sleeping is the fact that he’s not pooping. It’s been 2 days since he’s had anything but the occasional shart mark in his diaper (reference shart here, here and here) .
Three days ago he howled until 3am when he finally, very matter of factly, produced a noise that resembled the space shuttle breaking the sound barrier. The sheer force of creating such noise caused the diaper to flex away from his tiny wittle body as he crapped out his birth weight in waste product. Then as I removed his diaper and tried to clean him up, he decided it was a grand time to shoot the rest of his blocked up poop at me. I bent his legs up and out it fired like a poopzuka gun. Luck was on my side as the side of the pack and play changing table was just high enough to catch the carnage. Before I even had him cleaned up and rediapered, the boy was asleep, rousing only to repeat this heinous act 2 hours later.
Since then, only the very occasional shart mark I spoke of earlier has graced his diapers and as a result he’s been, um, let’s say a tad cranky so I had a talk with his doctor today about the situation.
I LOVE his doctor- LOVE HER. She’s a perfect balance of technical medical and homeopathic. She’s not freaked out that he’s passed the two week mark and not quite regained his birth weight yet (he was 7lbs 2oz on her scale today), she’s not aghast about our delayed and selective vaxing, and she is trained in cool stuff like cranial sacral therapy- which we took full advantage of today in hopes of remedying the poop problem (and thus the screaminess).
During treatment, Bo was not too keen on her releasing his neck and softly adjusting his head. Next she utilized a technique which laid him flat along her forearms and torqued his upper half one way and his lower half another way. Just as she slid him into position he dropped off to sleep mid yell- officially Bo nirvana.
I’m hopeful that he’ll crap his brains out some time today and snooze peacefully tonight. If not, we have a plan of action that includes a teaspoon of dark Karo syrup in 2 ounces of breast milk and a trip to the chiropractor for a more aggressive adjustment. I’m also heavily contemplating giving up milk and cheese again. It’s always a tough call for me- which do I love more? Dairy or sleep?
and in case this wasn’t enough poop talk for you, you can always go read this and laugh so hard you poop yourself.
Thus far we’ve all become accustom to Bo looking like this:
Quite suddenly, as he draws nearer to what would have been 37 weeks gestational age or “full term”, this is what we are seeing more of:
Oh and we are suddenly getting a lot of this too:
but we are nearly so happy as Tess seems to be about it.
I am on a quest for a babysitter- not of the human variety though. I’m trying to decide if I should get a Moby Wrap, an Ergo, a Sweetpeace or some type of swing. This kid needs motion to sooth his bubbly stomach but I’ve got three other kiddos and the occasional need to pee which go against Bo’s desire to be cuddled as much as possible.