We had Griffin’s six month check-up yesterday with Dr. Kreckman. She’s just getting back from her maternity leave after having her son Jack in August. Yesterday was the first day she had to leave him in day care and she was obviously really stressed about it. I feel bad for her but understand that after going through medical school and her residency and just starting out in her medical practice staying home probably isn’t an option. We really love Dr. Kreckman and are glad to have her back. She’s smart and stays current with the latest research and she always explains our options to us instead of just telling us what to do.

Griffin is losing a little ground on the growth charts which Dr. Kreckman isn’t concerned about since he’s still big for his age. For the past month or so sometimes Grffin’s head will shake for 20-30 seconds when he’s nursing, we had called about this earlier but she still isn’t concerned, she thinks it’s most likely a muscle spasm like when your leg jerks when you’re falling asleep. We had a fairly long conversation about immunizations with the nurse which Julian thought was kind of annoying but I didn’t mind, she very genuinely listened to our point of view. We also talked about water and juice, every time I drink water from a glass or straw now Griffin wants a sip and I usually give him one. I couldn’t find anything about when it’s ok to start giving a baby water in my books, and I didn’t want to displace breast milk by doing this. The nurse said it’s fine to give him a few ounces of water a day or a few ounces of juice diluted with water. She said juice doesn’t have that much nutritional value but it has developmental value since it’ll teach him how to sip from a cup and it could help his digestion.

Here’s a table of how much Griffin has grown:

Since we’ve been working on the No Cry Sleep Solution we’ve been trying to introduce a schedule to our days. We’re not trying to fit Griffin to our schedule so much as we’re trying to give him some consistency so he can learn what to expect and develop some rhythms. I thought it’d be nice to write about a typical day so we can look back and remember what it was like when Griffin was six months old. They usually go something like this:

• 6:30-7:00 – Griffin wakes up for the day. At this point he’s usually co-sleeping with me in his room so he rolls towards me, kicks, smiles, and touches my face to wake me up. We do a diaper change, based on a suggestion from Scott I sing the “ABC” song while I change his diapers and for some reason Griffin thinks this is just hilarious. Then we go next door to the guest room where Julian is sleeping and all hang out together on the guest bed for a while.
• 7:30 – Julian puts Griffin on his bouncy chair in the living room and plays with him while I make breakfast. I bring breakfast to Julian and he continues to play with Griffin in the chair or in the play room while I check email, pump some milk to use for mixing with the rice cereal, and take a shower. If we’re going to introduce a new solid food we do it now so if Griffin were to have an allergic reaction it’d happen during the day while I’m watching him.
• 9:00 – First nap. I take Griffin into his room, turn on white noise and nurse him in the rocking chair. Usually he’ll be fast asleep by the end of this and I lay him down in the crib. If not I bounce him for a while on the exercise ball. If he’s really tired or overstimulated sometimes it’s harder to get him to sleep so I lay with him in the bed and side-nurse until he’s sleeping.
• 9:30 – Griffin wakes up. He has 1/2 hour sleep cycles during naps. They’re half an hour exactly like he has an internal timer. If I get there quickly I can sometimes side-nurse him back to sleep and he may sleep for another hour or more. There are no times associated with the rest of the day because it all depends on how long this nap is.
• If we’re going to go anywhere like grocery shopping or to the mother’s group we go after the first nap. Griffin is always in a really good mood after he wakes up, he’ll be looking out the car window and sort of chatting to himself on the way there. If we go somewhere he usually falls asleep in the car on the way back which can screw up the afternoon nap. If this happens sometimes I drive around in the countryside to get him a longer stretch of sleep.
• If we didn’t go anywhere we play. We sit and play with toys in the playroom, we do nursery rhymes like “Patty-cake” and “Itsy-bitsy spider”, sometimes he plays in the exersaucer or jumper. One of Griffin’s favorite things to do right now is just to hang out and look at the cats. If I really run out of ideas I’ll put him in front of a Baby Einstein video, his favorite one is “Baby Beethoven”. I don’t like doing this since despite the name the videos aren’t that educational so I try to limit us to two videos per week.
• Afternoon nap. This is pretty much a repeat of the morning nap. He usually only takes one long nap per day so depending on how the morning nap went this could be anywhere from half and hour to two hours.
• If the weather is nice enough we go for a walk. I put Griffin in the Bjorn and do the same walk every time, up the hill and to a road that was repaved this summer. When we do this walk Julian and I both sort of obsessively-compulsively touch the new pavement with our foot before turning around. Sometimes we run into neighbors on the walk and stop and chat. There’s a new house being built along our route so we stop to see how it’s coming along and sometimes talk with the builders. There’s a cat named Sweet Pea who is so friendly she knows when most people take their walks and she sits by the road to greet them, so sometimes we stop and hang out with Sweet Pea. I try to remember to talk out loud about everything we’re looking at so Griffin will start to learn the names of things. Since he’s getting kind of heavy now I’ve tried a few times to put him into our back carrier for the walk, as he gets better at sitting up this is working pretty well.
• Repeat of the playing. Sometimes I’ll carry Griffin in the pouch or Bjorn and do light housework like dishes or laundry, but generally not a lot of housework is getting done.
• If Griffin only took 1/2 hour naps before now he’ll sometimes need a late afternoon nap which is always only 1/2 an hour.
• 5:30-6:00 – feed Griffin solid food. Right now this is rice cereal and a fruit which varies since we’re introducing a new food every week or so.
• 6:00 – I make a quick dinner for me and Julian, usually with Griffin hanging out in the exersaucer in the kitchen. I can’t carry him while cooking since everything is either sharp or hot.
• 6:30 – Julian gets home. He takes Griffin and they play while I eat, then I take him so Julian can eat.
• 7:00-7:30 – We start our bedtime routine. We walk around the house turning off the lights, then we do a bath. Griffin insists that I be the one to give him his bath. We’ve tried a bunch of times to see what we might be doing differently, but we finally gave up and decided I’ll just always give him the bath. We don’t always use soap for the bath since he doesn’t get that dirty and we don’t want to dry out his skin, the bath is more just to let him know the bedtime routine is starting. He loves the shower curtain in the bathroom, while I’m running the bath he rolls towards it and pulls on it. I can’t tell if he wants to pull himself up or eat it. A lot of times Julian will hang out with us and keep me company and Griffin entertained during the bath. After the bath we do a quick baby massage with lotion and then put on his pajamas.
• 7:30-8:00 – bedtime. I adjust the space heater, white noise machine, and humidifier in Grififn’s bedroom and then turn out the light and nurse him in the rocking chair. If he’s really worn out he’ll be asleep afterwards and I’ll put him down in the crib, otherwise I bounce with him on the exercise ball. If he’s really overtired sometimes he grabs at my face and hair during the bouncing so Julian comes and takes over. Again, for some reason Julian isn’t allowed to hold him facing in during the bouncing so he holds him facing out and leaning backwards. First sleep stretch takes place in the crib these days. The night waking varies tremendously from night to night, sometimes he’s up every hour from the start and other nights he’ll sleep for much longer stretches. A typical “good” night for us goes:
• 8:30-9:00 – often a quick awakening and easy nurse back to sleep.
• 12:00 – awake, nurse in chair, back to sleep in crib by 12:30.
• 3:30 – awake, nurse, usually co-sleep after this since will now wake up every hour or so until morning.
• 6:30-7:00 – awake and grinning, whole new day.

Here are some pictures of Griffin playing in his jumper:

In other news Griffin this week:

• Has started drinking from a sippy cup
• Has sampled avocado (hates it)
• Squeals with laughter if you roll around on the floor with him
• Had fun being passed around to all the relatives at Thanksgiving
• Is enjoying having his dad home for a four day weekend

… slogan from a T-shirt spotted by Julian at Happy Bambino.

When I was pregnant I knew I would breastfeed Griffin for at least a year, no question. All the research shows that breastfeeding is better for babies in every way.

Even so, the idea of breastfeeding really weirded me out. Your internal organs are always doing things that you don’t know about, so I was ok with the idea that Griffin was in my uterus getting nutrition from me through the placenta. But the idea that my breasts, which I’ve had most of my life, would just spontaneously start producing milk seemed – I don’t know – implausible.

There are definitely hard parts about breastfeeding. Whenever Griffin spits up or acts fussy I become convinced that he’s sensitive to either dairy, soy, or chocolate in my diet. Since I’ve always had some combination of those three things in the last few days I’ve never been able to prove or disprove this. For the most part I avoid alcohol and caffeine even though they’re probably ok in moderate amounts. Even though I love spicy food I avoid it now because I’m pretty sure it gets into my milk and upsets Griffin’s stomach.

My breasts have gone up two cup sizes and I have no illusions about what’s going to happen to them after I stop nursing.

And another hard thing about nursing is that in the end it all boils down to the mother. You can sometimes pump and bottle feed, but in the end every hungry baby, fussy baby, night-waking nursing baby just wants his mother.

But, and I didn’t expect this, I love breastfeeding. The bond it creates is just incredible. Many of my happiest memories of his infancy will be of nursing Griffin.

Griffin has lots of different nursing “modes”. When he first started smiling at around two months he would constantly try to smile and nurse at the same time which isn’t possible but was really cute. So now he’s got a “goofy nursing mode” where he pulls off to look up at me and smile and then latches on again. There’s the “down to business mode” where he’s hungry and latches on and nurses with a single-minded focus. Sometimes he tries to “talk” while he’s nursing but he can only make sort of muffled “mmph” noises which are adorable. Sometimes he insists on being in motion so I have to walk around while nursing him which requires coordination and arm strength I didn’t know I had. Sometimes he wants to do side-lying nursing which is often a nice easy way to get him to sleep.

Since I’ve been associated with the birth center and have met so many nursing mothers I’ve become more and more comfortable nursing in public. Ironically as this has happened Griffin has become more and more interested in his surroundings so he’s become less able to nurse in public, he keeps pulling off to look at everything. I try to make sure he eats before and after every outing and if I need to feed him when we’re out I try to find a quiet place with not a lot to look at.

I’ve found that there are some inversions when it comes to nursing. I hear women complain about being “human pacifiers” during the early months when a baby wants to nurse for comfort a lot. But if you think about it pacifiers are really just “artificial mothers”. Also, nursing and especially pumping milk can make you feel like a “human cow”. Unless you think about it for a while and then it seems really, really weird that we’re adult mammals that drink milk from a whole different species.

Someone in our mother’s group recently posted looking for ways to wean their child. Someone mentioned a “weaning ceremony” where the child nurses one last time and is then offered a special cup and drinks from it along with the rest of the family. I think that’s a nice idea but there’s no way I could do it. I’m going to have to let him wean himself gradually because it makes me cry just to think there’s going to be a “last time” Griffin nurses.

Griffin is six months old today! Half a year! He’s taking it in stride, was grinning and laughing all morning just like every morning. He’s upstairs taking a nap now and later today we’ll go down to my parents’ house to see the extended family on my mom’s side.

Griffin picked his birthday well, he was five months old on his dad’s birthday, is six months old on Thanksgiving and will be seven months old on Christmas.

A lot of you know that at his two month appointment Griffin’s doctor heard a heart murmur and sent us to a cardiologist. The cardiologist did an echocardiogram and found out he had a ventricular septal defect which is a hole in the heart between the two ventricles.

This is a fairly common defect because when a fetus is developing there isn’t a wall between the ventricles, and it usually closes itself by six months. Even so, we were worried about it and it was always in the back of our minds.

There are a few things to worry about with that kind of defect, one of them is that it makes the heart less efficient so sometimes babies don’t grow well. Luckily Griffin has been growing well from the beginning. It also can strain the artery between the heart and the lungs because of the extra blood being forced back through the hole, and they did find a lot of turbulence in that artery. Finally it inflames the tissue around the hole and puts the heart at risk for infection if bacteria were to get into his blood stream.

If the hole didn’t grow shut on its own we would have had to decide based on the size of the hole and any damage it might be doing whether to operate to patch the hole.

Today we had his six-month follow-up appointment and they did an echocardiogram again and the ventricular septal defect has grown shut. Woohoo! He still has a heart murmur that’s probably caused by the size and shape of his arteries and will most likely fade as he gets older. He also has another, less serious defect called a PFO. Apparently 20% of adults have that and we only need to worry about it if he ever has a stroke or does a lot of scuba diving.

The appointment was three hours long with the echocardiogram, five attempts to get his blood pressure, and an exam by a doctor, nurse practitioner, and medical student. Griffin held up like a champ, smiling at everyone and only occasionally trying to eat the stethoscopes. It’s great to have this behind us.

My friend Monika is pregnant with her second child. Monika doesn’t have easy pregnancies. She’s small to begin with and when she’s pregnant she can’t keep any food down, so she’s ended up in the ER twice this time around. She sent me this poem which made me cry, it’s great for perspective:

I can’t remember

My pregnant friend complains of a backache and tired feet.
“Was it like this for you?” she asks.
I bury my face in your newborn hair
And I answer, “I can’t remember”

I hear a new mother talking of her sleepless nights.
“Does everyone go through this” she wearily says.
I watch you tottering on your fat little feet
and think to my self, “I can’t remember”.

“When will he learn to eat on his own or tell me his needs?”
A frustrated mother laments.
I look into your three year old eyes, gleaming with independence.
When it got there? I can’t remember.

“These two year old tantrums are driving us mad!
How did you cope?” an exasperated couple inquires.
I watch as you happily skip off to school.
And I murmur, “I can’t remember.”

“My teenager rebels at everything! He won’t even keep his room clean!
What did you do with your adolescent?” a burdened parent entreats.
I look around your unused room, everything in place
And sigh, “I can’t remember.”

You hand me my newborn grandchild and with beaming face you announce,
“Oh mom, he’s so wonderful! Did you ever feel this way?”
I hold him close and with tears in my eyes
I breathe, “Oh, how I remember!”

by Barbara Nick

Griffin and I went to the supermarket today and he sat in the cart for the first time! I have a cart seat to help him keep his balance and to keep him from chewing on the cart handle which he immediately tried to do. When we got home I put him in the exersaucer and brought the groceries in. Going to the supermarket before now has always been kind of a logistical challenge so I’m very happy we’ve reached this point.

Griffin loves the supermarket, so many people and things to look at. And the supermarket loves him, all the cashiers know him and today he managed to get three of them to smile at him all at the same time. Griffin is incredibly social, he didn’t get that from me or from Julian. One time the woman behind us in the check-out line said “Wow, he’s going to be president some day”. Last week I took him to listen to our friend Ann sing at the Saint Benedict center. Griffin spent the entire concert standing on my lap so he could smile at each member of the audience in turn. Afterwards a photographer from the Milwaukee Sentinel came over and asked if he could use a photograph of Griffin he’d taken, if it gets put into the paper I’ll post a link here.

My friend Kathy had the idea of doing a “photo of the week” for Alivia, so I’m stealing it for Griffin’s blog (thanks Kathy!). Here’s Griffin this week:

In other news, Griffin this week:

• Can sit well on his own without support
• Is constantly trying to eat his feet
• Is still madly in love with our cats

I was just writing the entry about my mom and decided it would be a good segue into an entry about Griffin’s first few weeks. I’d read in various books that it’s good to spend the first week alone with just the mom, dad, and baby. That way you all get used to one another and bond as a family. Well, either the first or second night after we got home I called my mom in tears convinced we were all literally going to die. She came over and stayed with us for a week and it completely saved us.

Griffin had jaundice, which isn’t that unusual. Being posterior and having to turn during the labor gave him two really big hematomas on his head. One of them was so big it filled my palm even when his head was so tiny. It’s possible that the jaundice was caused by the blood from the hematomas being reabsorbed, or by him being somewhat premature, or maybe it was just normal newborn jaundice.

Infant biliruben levels tend to peak at around day 7. Griffin’s biliruben levels were too high at his initial check-up, so Dr. Kreckman wanted to treat the jaundice aggressively since the level would only go up from there. If the level got above 20 he would have had to go back into the hospital to be under industrial strength UV lights. UV light helps the baby’s body break down the biliruben. So, Griffin spent the first 10 days or so he was home with us on “bili” blankets which made him look like a little glow worm:

Breastfed babies lose weight at first while the mother’s milk comes in, this is normal and the goal is to have the baby back to their birth weight by day 14. Because of the jaundice we had to try to keep Griffin’s weight loss to a minimum. Jaundice can make babies too lethargic to feed well, which starts a downward cycle where they lose weight which makes them more jaundiced and lethargic. So we needed to feed him every two hours, and to supplement my milk with formula. Each two-hour cycle would start with me nursing Griffin as much as possible. Then I’d use a breast pump to try to get my milk to come in faster while either Julian or my mom would feed him the expressed breast milk from the last cycle. In the beginning when there was just a small amount of milk Julian would feed it to him with a syringe, our midwife Mary showed us how to get Griffin to suck on Julian’s finger with the syringe next to it so he’d learn to coordinate his sucking and swallowing. Then Julian or my mom would top him off with formula. Cleaning the breast pump and mixing the formula meant we were spending more than an hour of each two hour cycle on feeding Griffin. This left very little time for sleep, Julian and mom would alternate every two cycles so they could get four hour blocks of sleep.

Another aspect of the jaundice was that we had to take Griffin in to the clinic almost every day for his first few weeks to have blood drawn via a heel stick. This is worse than it sounds, I didn’t watch the first ones so I assumed it was just a pinprick. Instead they really jab the heel and then squeeze the foot while filling a small vial with blood, it takes quite a while. By the time we got to the end of the jaundice they were running out of places on his feet to jab. Julian held Griffin for every heel stick while I sat next to them and cried. One time several tests were requested and the lab technician was on the phone actually yelling at the nurse because she didn’t want to draw that much blood. Even today Griffin doesn’t like to have his feet handled, I have to skip that part in the infant massage classes. We had the same lab technician almost every time, and I liked her. If you’ve ever had to voluntarily let somebody hurt your baby you know how amazing it is that I liked her. I kept thinking I wanted to kidnap Griffin and run away with him. I actually said something to the lab technician about taking him to Mexico and she said “I bet the heel sticks are worse in Mexico”.

All of this meant the first few weeks were really, really hard. Griffin was home with us but we couldn’t hold him much because he always had to be hooked to the bili blankets. I hadn’t wanted to give him any formula, but needed to anyway. I was still recovering from the labor, and didn’t get to sleep more than an hour at a stretch. And almost every day we had to take him in to have the heel sticks done.

I spent some time in later months second-guessing whether we did the right thing by treating the jaundice so aggressively, especially when I realized how common jaundice is in infants. I finally came to terms with it, though, it would have been worse if he’d had to go back into the hospital. And it could have gotten even worse than that, our midwife Aszani’s daughter had to have a complete blood transfusion because her biliruben levels got so high.

A good thing that came of those first few weeks was that we really felt how amazingly good the health care system is in Madison. Our doctor was always completely clear with us. Somebody came to our house with the biliruben blankets and showed us how to use them. Griffin didn’t like the bottles we had at home; when we mentioned this to our doctor she called the hospital and they gave us an entire bag of the bottles he would drink from. Going in to do the heel sticks kept screwing up our two hour schedule, but the receptionist at the lab would always find us a room so I could nurse Griffin while we were waiting or before we came home.

Finally and most importantly, our midwife Mary came to our house every single day those first few weeks and she let us know she’d keep coming until we were on our feet. She worked with me on different nursing positions, she brought a scale and left it with us so we could weigh Griffin every day and make sure he was gaining weight, she brought me herbs for a sitz bath when I was in pain from the birth. When we were overwhelmed she helped give us focus, she’d say to just think about one thing a day and in the early days it was “do whatever you have to do to feed the baby”. When I was running on manic energy trying to cook and organize Mary ordered mom and Julian to make me sleep. Mary leads the mother’s group I go to on Thursdays and it’s really wonderful that I still get to see her every week.

Another good thing that came of those first few weeks was that once the jaundice had passed we thought “This is it? All we have to do is nurse him, change him, and let him sleep? That’s so easy!”.