Hippie Mom in a Preppy World

Posts Tagged ‘work’

This post would have been published over 2 weeks ago if I hadn’t tried to be geeky while juggling a baby and accidentally killed this website’s database.  By the time I finished cleaning the damage the muse had gone on vacation and I just didn’t feel like writing.  It’s still not my best work but at least it out there now….

I have officially weaned off the pump.  Breastfeeding is still going well and there is no sign of that stopping anytime soon but I am glad that I’m no longer a slave to the pump, I was so over it.  I am tired of stressing over ounces.  I still have it for times when I’m away from Shammy all day but those will be few and far between and it will be used more for my comfort and health than to keep up with a freezer stash.

I don’t get along with the pump anymore, I can’t even stand to clean the parts, it’s such a hassle, as regardless of whether I use the dishwasher or clean by hand I don’t seem to get the nooks and crannies clean enough.  Plus the pump has been part of a recall and I have yet to receive the replacement part, I am so over it! I used to think that Medela pumps were the best but if/when #2 comes I’m definitely getting a different brand.

Update:  the universe has found a way to get a new and better pump for me as I just won a Facebook contest on the Hygeia page where I won professional grade electric pump valued at $320.  My husband asked me if I was going to cash it out on eBay but I said no way, this will come in handy in the future.

In other news, I have started training to be a Breastfeeding Peer Counselor with the Health Department and Shammy gets to come to work with me anytime that I don’t have babysitting available, they’re that cool. I like bringing him to work but it only works out if I’m working for 3 hours, longer than that feels like torture on the poor baby that gets bored and is lacking on proper stimulation.  I have what feels like a thousand hours of training to complete so it may be another month before I see a client but I am enjoying it so far.

 

I can’t believe that Shammy is already 3/4 years old (9 months old), when I dressed him up for Easter he looked like such a big boy/little man.

He is starting to refuse baby purees as he prefers self feeding so I really need to learn more about BLW so he’ll eat more.  Meanwhile spreading purees on wheat toast seems to be working well to use up the massive amounts of food that I have accumulated.

Recently we have experienced a sleep regression, call it teething, growth spurt, separation anxiety or all of the above but he was no longer sleeping through the night and would wake up at midnight exactly and would only fall asleep with my boob in his mouth.  God forbid I tried to move to get comfortable and the nipple came out of his mouth and he would wake up and scream bloody murder.

I asked the doctor if there was anything that I could do about this and he said “let him cry and cry… and cry…”  I just stared at him in disbelief that he would recommend that and then he said  ”I wouldn’t do it if I were you, I didn’t do it with mine”.  I like him again.  I much rather get some sleep in an awkward position with a happy baby than not sleep at all and suffer while he screams for hours wondering why we don’t love him anymore.  I can never see myself letting him cry it out.

 

On to the rants for this installment…

I enjoy the sitcom “Raising Hope”, it’s very funny, most times.  Recently they had an episode titled “Sleep Training” on you guessed it, crying it out.  This episode was painful to watch.  Even though they tried to get fun out of this theme I was very disturbed by it, so much so that I felt the need to write about it the next day.  I can understand that CIO is ok for some but don’t feel comfortable with a popular prime time show giving ideas to parents that don’t know better because they don’t seek the information elsewhere and take TV fiction as gospel.

My current peeve is seeing mothers that won’t hold their babies when giving a bottle.  Apparently this is a big enough epidemic that companies make money out of selling “bottle holders” that will prop the bottle so mother doesn’t even have to hold it.  If you’re not going to breastfeed, at least do the bonding by holding your baby close and looking into their eyes while feeding them.  Even on the pre-requisite training that I’m taking for the department of Health in the nutrition module it emphasizes how a person should always hold a baby when giving a bottle.  I feel bad for the baby.

 

 

 

The title may sound arrogant and if there was indeed a grading scale I would not have a perfect score (more than once I put him in PJ’s and forgot all about the bath) but at least I’m good on the important parts.

For the past month I’ve been dealing with child proofing blues.  It’s something that we should have done long ago but kept procrastinating on. I look at our house and it feels like a baby death trap, there is so much to do that I don’t know how to accomplish it all without moving half of the house into storage/ dumpster.

Now that Shammy is mobile and getting into everything, it was time to get into gear. I’m very watchful of Shammy when he’s playing but sometimes I need to not be hovering so much without interrupting his play, like when cooking dinner or doing laundry.  Plus I am trying to find a balance between keeping him safe without being too overprotective and letting the kid crawl and explore.

We had wanted to get a playard aka baby jail for a while and found a very good deal on it at a consignment sale but once put it together I felt like it was too much like jail despite being so large.  So then it was time to sit down with the husband and decide on which room of the house we were going to surrender to the baby.  The natural choice would have been the baby’s room (which is currently only used for diaper changing and baby stuff storage, lol) but I didn’t want him to be isolated when playing.

We finally decided to surrender the dining room, the table had not been used for dining in months anyway and Shammy would get to enjoy the nice view to the backyard.  And so we started the process of relocating furniture and a bird to transform part of the space into a fun haven.

 

Now that he’s becoming more independent I am actually starting to get stuff done at home besides the bare minimum.  It’s still nothing close to spring cleaning and it will take a while to recover from all of the months of spot cleaning and tidy messes.

I am very proud to have achieved the 8 month breastfeeding milestone, it was touch and go for a little bit there on the exclusive factor.  I no longer have a freezer stash and Shammy’s schedule since daylight savings time means that I never have an opportunity to pump at a time when I would get a decent output.

Shammy has never tasted formula in his life but I have reached the point where it’s not the end of the world if it comes to that, he’s older than 6 months, he’s eating other foods, it’s not the end of my philosophical world anymore.

No, I’m not done breastfeeding, not even close.  What I’m close to being done with is stressing over how many ounces are in the freezer vs how many he will need while hanging at grandma’s.  Stressing doesn’t lead to a good letdown and that leads to tiny pumped amounts, it’s a horrible cycle that I’ve been stuck in for a couple of weeks.

Nothing is official but the current tentative plan is that I will continue to breastfeed full time and pump while working but supplement to make up the difference when I’m not around.  95% or more of his milk will still be breast milk, I will still pump when away from him for more than 5 hours.  I have not made any purchases, but I already researched brands.  We’ll see…  I’ve said it before and I’ll say this again, I bow down to exclusively pumping mamas, I don’t know how they do it, here I am stressing myself dry over occasional pumping.

I’m glad to wean off the pump except for work but not yet ready to wean my son.  This week I cried along with a heartbroken mama whose toddler self weaned this week.  She had no idea that it was the last time when it happened.  Every time I nurse Shammy I try to savor it because I know that it will be over before I know it and will miss it too.

 

 

For the past few weeks we have been dealing with mild separation anxiety.  One of the things that I have found to help is laying the shirt that I wore that day in his bed, I have found that he sleeps better that way.

Now that he has learned to call me Mama I can no longer tell my husband “it’s your turn”.  He says that Shammy has quickly learned that saying that equals fast response and that is fine.  I’d rather him know that he can call me and I will come than having to resort to crying to get the attention he wants.

 

For a few weeks Shammy would eat from anyone that wasn’t me, it was challenging since I would be the only one available during the weekdays most times.  This made me consider BLW (Baby Led Weaning- where you skip the purees and let baby feed himself)  so I experimented and it was a success.  I can’t say that I’m a total convert but I will probably do it here and there.

 

 

Something interesting that I’ve learned over the past couple of weeks, the first diaper to go in the pail after I put in a load of laundry is always a poopy one!  I wash diapers every other day and this has been accurate for 3 weeks and counting, lol.  So I guess that if I want him to poop on command I just need to throw some diapers in the washer.

 

This week’s rant is a short one:

If you’re thinking of breastfeeding your baby, be warned: People will think you’re stupid. That’s right, a recently published report highlighted not one, but three studies that found people think of women who breastfeed as less competent than “otherwise identical women.”  Seriously?!

In my opinion a woman that breastfeeds is smarter than a woman that formula feeds (by choice, not circumstance) because it means that the nursing mama is well informed about the benefits of breastmilk over formula and knows that it’s way easier to lift up a shirt in the dark than hunt for a bottle you hopefully remembered to prepare at 3am.

 

 

 

 

 

We have been having some interesting weeks lately.  We recently took Shammy to his first Pagan festival, normally we would camp but we are glad we didn’t as it was too cold for comfort.  He seems to have enjoyed it overall but did seem homesick which affected his sleep.  I have never seen him so happy to be back home.   Hopefully he will sleep better at the next camping festival in April.  He also got to experience the Renaissance Faire and loved it.

He has given me several nights where he doesn’t wake up to nurse, that has signaled my body to bring about the return of Aunt Flo, boo!  It had been over a year and didn’t miss it one bit.  After that he has decided to go back to waking up once during the night to nurse, figures!

I’m now working on a semi regular basis.  I have been fortunate enough to have found a decent client, I doubt that any company could have been as flexible as I need.  I enjoy being self employed and although I don’t make much after setting aside taxes it is better than nothing.

I do have lots of flexibility and a private space to pump while at the client’s office but since pumping time is not billable time I limit it to 1 pumping session per day. The challenge with that is that I’m not pumping enough to make up for what Shammy drinks while at grandma’s house, not because I don’t produce enough but because I need to pump a second time.  This has led to a rapid reduction of the small freezer stash that I had so we may enter a breastmilk crisis soon.  I’m proud that he has never tasted formula but admit that the idea has crossed my mind if I can’t settle into a pumping schedule that will meet the demand.  I would much rather use donor milk but I always think about preemies and adopted babies and feel that they should have priority for donated milk.

I miss him so much while I’m working though.  Thankfully I have plenty of distractions but after a few hours I can’t stop thinking of him and have to hold back tears.  Now that he has consolidated his poops to one major one during the day I even miss wiping his poopy butt.  You read right, the woman that was terrified of changing a diaper pre-baby actually misses dealing with poop.  The day that I shared this with my husband through misty eyes Shammy took pity on me and delivered a nice load of poop for me to clean, so sweet of him!

Speaking of poop, I never imagined that my hippie son would be capable of tie dye poop but that is exactly what he delivers on days when he eats different colored foods the day before, lol.

Another interesting turn of events was the death of the washing machine interrupting our cloth diaper use.  I was able to wash the already dirty diapers at Grandma’s house and had considered doing future washes at the laundromat but it was not logistically possible and would have been very expensive.  So for the time being we used disposables and you know what?  I hate them… with a passion…  can’t stand the plastic paper feel, I hate the fact that they get thrown away and couldn’t wait for a new washer so that I can go back to my beloved cloth.

It took us to weeks to find a washer that we could barely afford and I cried out of joy when I was able to use Bumgenius once again.  This passion for cloth makes me want to participate in the Great Cloth Diaper Change, an event created to host awareness for cloth diapering while setting a Guinness World Record for the largest number of cloth diapers changed at one time.

The response to this blog has got me thinking about a related book, this idea is in its infancy and it may never grow beyond a rough draft but I’m curious if this is something that anybody would find interesting.

Some women are afraid to breastfeed in public for fear of harassment. I used to be waiting for someone to dare say something but not anymore.  Maybe they can sense the “dare to say something and you’ll regret messing with mama bear” vibe that I emanate or more likely they just don’t care.

We mostly hear about bad experiences nursing in public so I want to share a sample list of places that I have been able to breastfeed in public, without a cover and nobody bothered us:

Disney’s Magic Kingdom
Downtown Disney
Renaissance Faire (with a Broward County Sheriff on duty sitting next to me)
at the entrance to the exhibition hall at the county fair
many different restaurants  (even while the server was taking our order)
various department stores
various parts of the mall
the supermarket (various aisles)
the library
various outdoor parks
while shopping at garage sales
the circus
Turnpike Service Plaza
I-95 Rest Stop
bookstore
various parking lots and more

I wonder if it’s because I don’t use an eye catching nursing cover that screams “look at me! I’m breastfeeding!”  (nothing wrong with covers if you feel you need one).

 

Coming soon, adventures in chasing a mobile baby, but first!  I must babyproof.

 

This episode’s rants:

“The Doctors”, a TV program viewed by millions of people across the globe, has gotten out of hand, especially recently with their breach of professional conduct.  These doctors humiliate, demean, and belittle members of the public for their circumcision status.  It does not make any sense for doctors to improperly promote unnecessary surgery and the abusive treatment of minors, to satisfy their preferences.  A letter of complaint was sent to the Medical Board of California – Central Complaint Unit.

“Doctors are supposed to  treat  valid medical problems, not alter functioning healthy parts of a penis just to satisfy the customs and culture of a certain population”

I “could” get on board with justifying a Jewish doctor in a Jewish community but here we are talking about mainstream media directed to the not always very educated masses that look up to these “experts” to tell them what their opinions should be.

 

My other rant was inspired from the following read in one of the online parenting groups that I belong to:

“I’m glad that I didn’t pass my GD test because I got 8 ultraounds instead of 2 and got induced a week early so I got to pick the date and time and doctor.” ::SLAP!!!::  that is what I want to do when reading this.  Could this be any more selfish and ignorant?

Let’s ignore for a moment the inherent risks and dangers from many ultrasounds and from being induced, if you really wanted that you don’t have to have gestational diabetes to get it.  There is no shortage of OB’s that will happily give you as many ultrasounds as you like and prefer that you make an appoint me to “deliver” than risk being late for dinner.

I understand that a lot of people don’t see diabetes as a big deal, and for the most part it isn’t.  But do you really want to put yourself and baby’s health at risk for complications and other not so fun stuff just for convenience?

 

And a carryover from previous weeks is my annoyance with people’s obsessions with baby’s weight.  I’m shocked to see how many people don’t think a baby is healthy unless they’re 90+ percentile for weight.  I recently read a study that indicates that a baby in the 85 to 90 percentile is “at risk” for obesity while a baby at 95 or above is obese.  Is that the healthy start that we want to give our children?  No wonder a recent study found that 1/3 of babies are obese by 9 months.