There are so many little things to blog about, but so little time. These days I barely respond to email. I check my email throughout the day on my phone, but it's not easy to respond to emails on the phone, and it just seems like I don't have the time or energy to flip open my laptop and write out long responses. I get tiny windows of time here and there and often that time is taken up doing household things, or trying to catch a quick nap.
M2 has been having crying fits. Screaming, unconsolable crying fits that last for hours. It is extremely frustrating and it makes me feel helpless when I cannot calm her down. It really tries my patience, something that I am already lacking. Sometimes we can figure out what the problem is - hunger, wet diaper, cold hands/feet, gas bubbles. But often these fits leave us clueless. She'll have all of the above needs met, but still cries and cries. Sometimes the cries are loud wailing screams that make it sound like she is in some sort of pain. I try to do the best I can to calm her down - my methods are to hold her against my chest, or swaddle her, and to rock her in my arms. Mr.P's method of coping with this is to sit her in her swing or put her in her crib to "cry it out." This has caused some tension between us when she is screaming and wailing and we are arguing about how to best deal with the situation.
I have suspected for weeks that she was suffering from reflux. I have seen milk come up through her nose and mouth, often an hour or more after she's eaten. She makes facial expressions when she's sleeping that indicate she has acid coming up in her throat, a feeling that I can relate to since I suffered from horrible acid reflux when I was pregnant. She gets the hiccups several times a day, and she often has a wheezy sound in her breath like there is fluid in her throat. She cries when she is laying down, and often has milk come through her nose or mouth when she is reclined. I called the pediatrician's office a couple weeks ago and talked to a nurse who assured me that reflux is a normal thing with small babies. I didn't want to come off as the overbearing paranoid new mom, but it seemed to me that her symptoms indicated her reflux was worse than average.
Yesterday I took her to see the lactation consultant for a follow up for her feeding plan we set a few weeks ago. It seems that M2's lazy suck is getting better, she was able to breastfeed a healthy amount of milk in a reasonable amount of time during our visit (they determine this by weighing her prior to BFing, and then immediately after to find out how many mL of fluid she has gained). While I was not impressed with the care I received during the labor/birth at our hospital, I have been extremely pleased with the level of help I've received from the lactation services through the hospital. The LC are so patient and kind, they have spent a lot of time on the phone with me helping me through issues and questions, and both visits with them have been very helpful.
For this week the LC loaned us a portable scale to be measuring M2's weight before and after BF at home. I find this very cool because it helps give me the peace of mind of knowing if she is getting enough in a feeding session. It's also given me more motivation to be putting M2 to the breast, rather than fall into my usual pattern of pumping and bottle feeding her. I am getting more confident about BF. With her reflux, one of the challenges with BF is that she will cry and unlatch herself if she is refluxing while I'm trying to feed her. This makes it hard because I can see she is hungry, but she is in too much pain to eat. The LC was able to observe this and after evaluating her she assessed that M2 does have a bad reflux problem. She also found that she is suffering from thrush (a yeast infection in the mouth). The thrush had spread to my nipples and breasts, which would explain why I've had a lot of pain in that area.
Today we visited the pediatrician for an emergency visit and were given prescriptions to clear up the thrush and help reduce the reflux pain. Both medications are in liquid form and I have to drop them in her mouth with a syringe. Poor M2, she did not like either medicine when I gave them to her earlier. She cried and gave me the, "You're so mean, Mom" look.
It's funny now a month in to see all the things we have found useful and not useful with M2...I'll have to save my critique of products for another blog entry, but for now I have to say that the Sleep Sheep has been a lifesaver. It is the only thing that will get M2 to fall asleep at night. I actually kind of like the sounds it makes and find it somewhat relaxing (I often put it on the "calm" setting that makes the sound of heavy rain coming down). I highly recommend the Sleep Sheep!
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