Oral Fixation

I have never seen any human being want to put things in its mouth so badly.  Desmond is constantly gnawing and gumming at his fists and the minute he grasps anything - my finger, a plastic ring, Pirate's ear - he immediately starts a long trajectory from his hand directly to his mouth. 

Desmond with his Grandma at Red Rock Brewing Company for dinner.

I used to constantly wash my hands, make sure that there was no dog hair on his binkie, wash the plastic rings, etc.  But now I find that I'm trying to motivate myself to do the aforementioned activities.  I know that Desmond's immune system is still very immature, but I figure that as long as I keep breastfeeding, there's not much more that I can do (realistically...OK, OK I'm a lazy bum and could totally rinse off hands, binkies, playthings if I put my heart in it).  Breastfeeding provides Desmond with tons of antibodies and, if I'm suffering from a sore throat with a runny nose like I am today, my mammary glands will make antibodies against the infection and Desmond will suck those suckers in.  

Des has been exposed to a constant onslaught of germs his whole life.  Since Desmond was born vaginally, his first exposure to germs were those that were in/on my vagina (charming, eh?)  This early exposure means that he's less likely to develop allergies or asthma.  These microbes, Lactobacillus bacteria, those that help to digest lactose, help to extract nutrients from the food and keep the bad germs at bay. After the results from a study showed that babies born from C-Sections were more likely to have immune system problems and have higher risk for allergies and asthma than babies born vaginally.  However, as this researcher in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Michigan is quoted as saying:

“This isn’t damning the C-section, but it may be important to make sure your child gets a mouthful of vaginal material,” says Huffnagle.

(Who says that?)  I'm not suggesting that if your dear son or daughter were born via C-Section you need to do whatever you can to expose your kid to your vaginal flora!  Kids shouldn't be kept in antiseptic bubbles; they need to be exposed to the daily germs that surround us day-to-day in order to keep robust immune systems.  (On another but related note, read THIS interesting article from Slate.com about parents who try to be too perfect in order to raise kids that are too perfect).

I tend not to use too much hand sanitizer as I'm more worried about creating superbugs than I am about possible exposure to germs.  I primarily use it when we go shopping at Smith's and I have to push the cart or when I've handled money that day.  I keep a spray in the car and on my bookshelf that's right inside of the doorway at my house.  Otherwise, I use basic Dove soap and warm water.  So now that he's putting everything in his mouth, I need something that won't leach paint or chemicals into his body and something that is fairly hygienic and could be cleaned easily. 

Desmond's mouth is still too small to accommodate a teething ring.  Besides, although he can grasp objects with his hands, he has a hard time getting them to his mouth.  Does anybody have any ideas for age-appropriate, oral-fixation oriented toys? 

Holiday do-si-do

Now that we're a mini-Thomas Family, we can't go apart and spend Christmases with our respective families: me with my family in Florida or Colombia and he with his family in SLC. Last year, we found out I was pregnant 1 or 2 days after Thanksgiving. We had spent Thanksgiving with his family here in Salt Lake and I was slated to go to Pennsylvania to spend Christmas with my mom's side of the family. However, the thought of telling all these people:

My aunt Gora, my mother, my grandmother, me, and my aunt Christine. The drink in my hand is sparkling cider, people.

all by myself made me really nervous. My family is a very traditional Hispanic family (the blonde in the picture is an aunt by marriage). They have Catholic roots and so all of their morals stem from Catholicism. I was afraid of what they were going to think and all of the talking that would occur behind closed doors. So, it goes without saying, I really wanted Billy to be there to support me when I told everyone.

It was a hard decision for Billy to make. He had never spent Christmas apart from his family and his brother was coming out from Illinois and his sister was coming out from Pennsylvania. However, he understood that I needed him there to tell my family everything. So we booked the tickets. Long story short, my family loved him:

Billy and my mother.

In exchange for him spending Christmas with my family last year, I promised him that I would spend the next Christmas with his family. So, we have decided to alternate holidays between families. Of course it's not set in stone (traveling for Thanksgiving and Christmas is awfully expensive), we are going to try to spend next year's Christmas with my family. When we're a real Thomas Family, maybe we'll be able to have people come to OUR house for the holidays.

Desmond's Thanksgiving Day outfit. I love the whole geek chic look for boys.

Clingy baby

Isn't it funny how childless couples or parents-to-be look at other people's kids - the bad, acting out ones - smirk, and say, "OUR kids would NEVER be like that."  Shyeah right.  Let me tell you this: those books that say that at around 3 months babies go through growth spurts and eat ALL THE TIME and at 5 months they start becoming clingy and at 8 months they start recognizing the word NO and cry when you say it...they write these things because it does happen to the majority of parents out there.  If you're that person reading that book thinking that your kid is going to be all unicorns and rainbows, you're more than likely in for a huge freaking surprise. 

Billy and I used to be those people.  We'd turn our noses up at the slobbering kid, we'd shake our heads at the screaming baby at the grocery store, we'd tsk-tsk at the fussy baby at the dining table next to us.  "We'll be better parents than that...OUR babies will never be fussy."  So we skipped the fussy baby section in the baby books and went along in our twisted version of reality.

And then we had Desmond.  And then what we thought we were going to have bestowed upon us by angels:

Actually turned out to be something that looked like this (35% of the time):

This is the face Desmond has started to make when some of his relatives or strangers (to Desmond) hold him.  He starts off OK and then, the minute he realizes that the person that's holding him is not his trusted food source (me), he starts wailing.  Like the I'm-so-sorry-I'm-really-not-hurting-him type of wailing. 

We've tried to expose Desmond to lots of people and situations and he's been doing really well until a few days ago.  Maybe it's just the holidays and maybe it's because there are so many new people around and he's constantly being overstimulated.  I hope so.  I certainly don't want my kid to be a clingy baby.  I'd love to be able to hand him off to another person...anyone...who wants to hold him for a while, especially while I eat. This is a serious concern of mine because I am looking to hire a nanny to help me and Billy out with Desmond come January (more of that in another post) and I worry that he won't take to her at all and that she'll quit suddenly - stomping out of my house the second I get home in a huff - because she can't handle my "clingy" child.  

It is funny, though, that he tends to be a lot calmer when dark-haired women hold him.  I can't say that it's just a coincidence, but he does seem to be at ease when my SIL Melanie or our friend Suzi hold him .  Here's a little secret: although it sometimes embarrasses me when some well-meaning person wants to hold Desmond and he sticks out his lower lip, pouts, and then screams bloody murder right in their face, I do like the fact that as soon as I "rescue" him and press him against my body, he calms down.  It makes me feel like the only person in the class that got the A on the really difficult exam.

 Des happily hanging out with his Aunt Melanie and Cousin Nico.

Anybody have any tips on how to raise an un-clingy baby?  Is it nature or nurture?  When do kids grow out of it?

Low Milk Supply

Just when I thought I had it all figured out, my milk supply goes wonkers.  Initially, I had way too much milk: Desmond kept sputtering and choking as soon as he latched on, he would pull away before draining the breast, and his poops were green.  We tried block feeding (where I fed him just on one breast per session) and it helped.  For about 3 weeks afterward, our nursing relationship was going beautifully.  However, for the past month or so, Des has been eating every 1.5-2 hours instead of every 3-4 and my milk supply can't keep up.

This is what's been happening: I will start feeding Desmond on the left breast; when the initial let down doesn't occur, he'll pull off and start crying.  I switch him over to the right breast and the same thing would happen on that side.  I would switch him again to the left side but he wouldn't suck long enough to give me another letdown.  So, he would end up crying his guts out and I'd have to resort to feeding him some of my expressed milk that I had frozen.  Guess who started freaking out when the frozen milk ran out?  This lady.

I read online about how to increase milk supply.  There are several ways to do it.  Obviously, your breastmilk production works on the process of supply and demand: the more your baby nurses, the more milk your body produces.  However, I don't think Desmond was nursing long enough to give the signal to my breasts to make more milk.  The trick was to keep him sucking long enough to let my breasts know to make enough milk.  I was worried for Desmond, since he's a little on the skinny side, but my pediatrician said that he's OK and if he's producing 6-8 wet diapers a day, he's getting enough. 

So, in desperation, I contacted my lactation consultant, Julie, who owns A Baby's Choice Lactation here in Salt Lake City.  She recommended I come see her and talk about my problems.  She rented me a hospital-grade breast pump.  Hospital-grade breast pumps are ideal for mothers who have premature babies or mothers who need to pump constantly throughout the day.  The pump is a lot stronger than other electric pumps (I think mine has a piston or something) and does double collection, which means that pumping time is cut in half and more prolactin is released.  However, the pump is about 15 lbs and it's bulky.

The behemoth breastpump.  Sits in the middle of my living room floor because I have nowhere else to put it.

Julie also recommended that I should take fenugreek.  Fenugreek is what's called a galactogogue, a substance to help milk production.  It's also used as an additive for artificial maple syrup and therefore has the (kind of unfortunate...kind of funny) side effect of making your sweat smell like maple syrup.  I haven't noticed it yet, but it's very, very cold out so I haven't been able to sweat.

Since I started the regimen of pumping more in between feedings (never instead of feedings) and taking fennugreek 1 week ago, I've noticed a change already in my milk supply.  I haven't been able to pump enough breastmilk as I would like (one pumping session lasts about 15 minutes and I produce a total of about 2-2.5 oz), but being able to keep Desmond satisfied during a nursing session is so worth it.   

Des patiently waiting for his next meal.

Hair woes

Hair is such a funny thing.  If you have straight hair, you spend all your time wishing for curly hair.  If you have curly hair, you buy countless products to fight the poofiness and frizziness of your hair.  If you have long hair, you cut your hair short for a "change."  3 days later, you lament the fact that you cut your hair and wish you had long hair again.

Views on hair and hairstyles have changed so much throughout history.  A quick hair history lesson:

The ancient Egyptians would shave their hair close to their head in order to stay cool in the scorching heat.  For fancy get-togethers, both men and women would wear long and usually braided wigs, adorned with gold or ivory ornaments.  

Ancient Greek women usually wore their hair loose or tied back into a chignon.  They would dye it red with henna and sprinkle gold powder (their version of lowlights and highlights).

In 17th century Japan, the geisha would wear elaborate hairstyles that were highly lacquered.  These women would have to sleep on special blocks in order to keep their hair styled for the next day.

The Mangbetu women grow their hair out and, using the shape of their elongated head and a cone-shaped basket frame, wrap it up and weave it into the frame and then adorn it with long bone needles.  They achieve their elongated head shape by wrapping their babies' heads with cloth.

In the 15th Century, European women would pluck their hairline to achieve a "high forehead" look.  This allowed the women to wear headpieces that they could show off.  Most European women admired the fair hair of those living in the north and would try to bleach their hair by exposing it to the sun (hello, sun-in!) and using onion skins or saffron.  

By the 18th century, the bigger the better was the mantra for hairstyles.  Women would use horsehair and starch wrapped around a wire frame to create large, creative hairpieces.  This meant that these pieces were rarely washed and therefore attracted lots of vermin.  

More history of hairstyles can be found HERE. 

When I was pregnant, I noticed that my long hair was getting thicker by the day.  During pregnancy, estrogen prevents normal hair loss; hair follicles stay or enter the "resting" phase and don't shed as often as normal.  I already had thick hair, so the extra hair thickness was bothersome to me.  However, now that I am more than 3 months postpartum, my hair is falling out by the hundreds.  Per day.  My hair is everywhere!  I spent 9 blissful months not having to deal with hair in my food, on my clothes, and on the shower curtain and now I am constantly pulling my hair off of me.  This, in turn, makes my "cool mom" haircut look particularly lackluster.  My hair isn't curling as it used to and now it lacks a certain oomph that it did the first month postpartum.

On a separate but related note, I guess the hormones during pregnancy also put my white-hair follicles into overdrive.  I spent the first few months of pregnancy plucking them, but one day, I just said, "eff it" and stopped plucking.  Yes, I embraced my grey hair at 29, 1 whole year before I made the decision to embrace them.  Unfortunately, NONE of the hair that has fallen out has been my grey hairs.  Another interesting note, it seems that these hairs tend to grow in clumps in certain areas: along my forehead and along my part.  I hope that they grow in a white streak along the front of my head, like this:

Stacy from What Not To Wear

Or this:

Rogue, from the X-Men movies.

Hard to see the grey hairs, but they run along my part and my forehead line.

Two grey hairs up close.  They have a different texture than the rest of my hair: wiry and kind of dry.

Are parents like junkies?

When I think of junkies, I think of Ewan McGregor in Trainspotting:

So, when I read the title of THIS article, I cringed.  But then it all made sense.  Of course parents are like junkies or else why in the world would they have another kid after the first?  Having a kid completely turns your life upside down.  It restricts the things you can do and, for the next 18 years, will take first place in the things-I-have-to-think-about-and-worry-about line.  So, why do humans keep having them?  Besides the fact that sex is very enjoyable and the end result of sex is, to millions of people, a pregnancy, children bring such unbelievable and indescribably joy and happiness to their lives. 

I remember taking an anthropology class in college and one of the first topics we discussed was about how human babies look a certain way (large eyes) to help the mothers and other caregivers want to take care of them.  One other method nature has of ensuring that the human race keeps going is to release oxytocin and endorphins when they're taking care of babies.  I know that I could have just a shit day but as soon as Desmond smiles at me or giggles (the other day, I was in the kitchen and Des was in the living room lying on his playmat and I looked over and said, "Hi, baby!", and he gave me the bestest, biggest smile!) I forget every single bad thing about the day and just bask in the ooey gooey feeling of having my son smile at me.  And each day is just a quest to find that same "high" and eek a smile or a laugh out of him.

So, I'm a junkie.  I admit it.  I love my drug (Desmond's laugh) and can't wait for my next fix.

From SLATE's article: Parents of Junkies.

At the end of a long day, after a rotten commute filled with road rage and little accomplished at work, with chores piled up at home and the weekend nowhere in sight, my 4-year-old daughter clambered onto the sofa next to me, cuddled into my arms, and planted a moist, unasked-for kiss on my cheek.

Poof. The exhaustion disappeared, the frustrations of the day melted away. I soaked in a bath of oxytocin. Everything was right with the world.

But wait. We're getting ahead of ourselves.

In the last few months, parents and researchers have been at war. Evidence has piled up to show that becoming a parent does not make people happier; it makes them unhappier. The data show that marriage increases happiness, but children reduce it. Marriages are vulnerable to divorce shortly after the arrival of children.

People who don't have kids think studies that prove kids are stressful are about as interesting as studies that show falling off tall buildings produces injuries. "Duh," they say. If you've been on a red-eye flight where a bawling baby kept the whole cabin awake through the night, you've seen deplaning passengers muttering about how they can't wait for the day when infanticide is legal.

Parents spend endless hours commiserating with one another about the travails of parenthood. Yet when researchers present data about children and unhappiness, parents rise up in protest. Research may depict parenthood as a bile-inducing, rage-fueling, stress-producing ordeal, but parents tell us that becoming parents is the best thing they ever did. Nonparents write off this reaction as defensiveness—if you've screwed up by having a kid and don't want to admit it, you pretend to be happy—but parents regularly choose to have more than one child. If parenthood were as subjectively awful as the objective research implies, wouldn't all parents stop at one child? It's one thing to claim that a stubbed toe doesn't hurt, and quite another to aim a second kick at the chair.

The research into happiness and parenting arrives at its results by measuring how people feel at regular intervals during the day. If you asked parents every 15 minutes how they feel, the data would read:
7:15 a.m.: Max spilled water on the breakfast table and ruined my Mac. God!
7:30 a.m.: Rachel slapped Max. Max pulled Rachel's hair. I need tranquilizers.
7:45 a.m.: On way out to drop Rachel at school bus, Max has diaper accident. Rush back to change him, miss school bus. I need liquor.
8:00 a.m.: Gas needle points to "empty," but I keep driving to get Rachel to school on time. Car stalls in major intersection. Drivers curse me. I discover I left my cell phone at home. I bang my head repeatedly on steering wheel.
And so on.

One of my favorite psychologists, Dan Gilbert at Harvard, often quotes a study conducted by Daniel Kahneman that found that spending time with children makes mothers about as happy as vacuuming.*

And yet. Let's go back to the sofa and that cuddle and kiss. It was a fleeting moment, but it genuinely changed how I felt about the day.

It was at that moment of bliss that I realized how the objective parenting research and the subjective parenting experience could both be right. Parenting is a grind, and most parents are stressed out much more than they are happy. But when parents think about parenting, they don't remember the background stress. They remember the cuddle and the kiss. Parenting is a series of intensely high highs, followed by long periods of frustration and stress, during which you go to great lengths to find your way back to that sofa and that kiss.

We have a name for people who pursue rare moments of bliss at the expense of their wallets and their social and professional relationships: addicts.

Children regularly give parents the kind of highs that only narcotics can rival. The unpredictability of those moments of bliss is an important factor in their addictiveness. If you give animals a predictable reward—say, a shot of sugar every time they press a lever—you can get them to press that lever quite regularly. But if you want irrational and addictive behavior, you make the reward unpredictable. Pressing the lever produces sugar, but only once every 10 tries. Sometimes, the animal might have to go 20 or 30 tries without a reward. Sometimes it gets a big jolt of sugar three tries in a row. If you train an animal to work for an unexpected reward, you can get it to work harder and longer than if you train it to work for a predictable reward.

We've all seen those sad people sitting at slot machines in a casino, methodically feeding coin after coin into the slots. If you made their reward predictable—after precisely every 20 attempts, they would always get a prize—you would lower the addictive power of slots. It's the unpredictability that drives them. Or, to put it another way, it's the hope for reward, not the reward itself, that drives them.

I suspect oxytocin works the same way. The unexpected, kind, and loving things that children do produce chemical surges in their parents' brains like the rush of the pipe or the needle. Like addicts, parents will sacrifice anything for the glimpses of heaven that their offspring periodically provide.

I don't know if there is empirical evidence to back me up, but it's conceivable that the neurological mechanisms of addiction—in all their irrational and self-defeating pathologies—are based on underlying mechanisms in the hidden brain that are designed by natural selection to make us seek out—and enjoy—parenthood.
So spare a moment of compassion for the next junkie you see. And spare a smile for the next parent you run into. Junkies we are—and proud of it.
Correction, Nov. 15, 2010: This article originally said that psychologist Dan Gilbert found that spending time with children makes mothers about as happy as vacuuming. Gilbert has cited that study, but it is not his own. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

Visualizing Recipes

I'll readily admit it: I'm a food junkie.  I can spend hours on end languorously gazing at foodie blogs and websites, such as Foodgawker , The Kitchn, and Martha Stewart - Food.  After a long day of school, work, and taking care of a 4-month-old baby boy, I love sitting down in front of my computer scrolling through the gorgeous pictures of food; it relaxes and rejuvenates me. 

My love affair with food started when I got my first cookbook: The New Moosewood Cookbook.  Since then, I've branched out to the Food Network and finally into the blogosphere.  I stopped collecting cookbooks when I found more varied recipes online with nicer pictures.  The pictures are what makes me want to cook that particular meal.  That's why I love food porn sites like Foodgawker; you could just browse through thousands of beautiful food pictures and click on any you like to get the recipe. 

When I saw that there was a new cookbook being published that didn't include any written directions, I immediately went online to look it up.  This book is ideal for those of us who are visual learners.  Having pictures that are set up in a nice flow-diagram-sort-of-way is really helpful when you're low on time and hangry.

 From Katie Shelly's Picture Cook

Check out Katie Shelly's Picture Cook online on her website.  Too cute and would make a great gift for that one special foodie in your life.