A long time coming

It's been about a month since I last up-dated, because I was hit with a world-shaking change in late August: my Systemic Lupus, in remission for nearly three years, was out of remission.

That revelation would have been enough to shake me, but the next bit of information delivered by my rheumatologist really shattered me: "CellCept is still the best medication for Lupus. But you realize this means you'll have to wean the baby?"

My plan has been to let him self-wean, to nurse until HE decides he's done, rather than take away his source of comfort and nutrition. So the news that I was going to have to wean him left me crying on the exam table while my doctor busied herself writing notes in my medical file.



Well, it's been almost a month since I was given the news, and in that time I've done a lot of research... I've read through the Hale's guide (more appropriately known as "Medications and Mothers Milk: A Manual of Lactational Pharmacology"), and I've spoken to Dr. Jack Newman through e-mail, and have gotten feedback from Dr. Hale on his forum. Through all of this, I have come to a decision: like HELL am I going to wean my son.

I have several plans of attack at this point, ways of approaching the situation.

Plan A: The Ideal, meaning that the course of Prednisone I'm currently on works well enough to put the SLE back into remission, and I am able to continue forward medication-free, as I was before late August.

Plan B: The Back-Up, meaning I am put on a breastfeeding-safe medication, like monoclonal antibodies (rituximab, as suggest by Dr. Newman) or cyclosporine (indicated in the 2010 Hale's guide as an alternative to CellCept).

Plan C: The Last Option, meaning I am put on a low dose of CellCept and continue to breastfeed, but have the Baby Beast monitored to make sure he is not having adverse reactions to the CellCept. I will join Dr. Hale's study on breastfeeding and CellCept if this is the plan we have to go with.



As of this moment, I have stepped down from four Prednisone a day to 1/2 a tablet a day, and I am doing just fine (as far as I can tell). In my opinion, I am back to where I was pre-August... but I will see my rheumatologist in a couple of weeks and she will let me know how she feels I am doing.

But all the research I see says quite clearly that babies need to be breastfed for an extended period. Humans are not meant to be weaned before they are at least three or four years old. The composition of breastmilk changes to meet the needs of the infant/toddler/child for as long as they're nursing. And the health benefits of nursing are just too important to pass up.

So, my rheumatologist may not like it when I don't fall calmly into line the way I did when I was sixteen or seventeen years old... but I have the Baby Beast to consider now, and I won't short change him if there are any chances to avoid it.

Learning to relax

One of the most important things I've learned from being a mother is that I have to relax, I have to let go, and I have to stop being afraid of messes.

My own mother would argue that I've never been afraid of messes - I left enough lying around when I was young that I shouldn't quell at them now. But there's a difference between leaving books scattered across the couch and letting a 16-month-old pour a carton of goat's milk yoghurt on the kitchen floor. However, that's just what I did.



Being aware that both the floor and the toddler were washable, I tried to sit back and let him just enjoy himself. Every now and again, I would try to remind him to take a bite, but for the most part he was engrossed in dribbling yoghurt onto the floor and himself.



Of course, our resident clean-up crew were standing by, waiting for their chance to dive in. They ended up getting yoghurt-spattered too, but I figured that a wet washcloth would get the worst of it off of them.



I'm sure some of you are absolutely cringing at the idea of letting a toddler smear yoghurt on themselves and the floor. But I've been thinking a lot about experiences in life, and I remember very clearly being young (seven or eight years old) and thinking that there was nothing in life as much fun as creating a really good mud puddle with the hose and then stomping in it slowly and methodically for hours on end, pretending to be Atreyu dragging Artax through the Swamps of Sadness (bonus points if you can remember that film).

And, as I said above, both floor and baby were washable. So I sat back, took photos, and readied the wet towels for the end of the experiment (which, by the way, did not end until he'd smeared the dribbles of yoghurt everywhere, and finished by dumping the remaining inch of yoghurt in the carton all over his legs and diaper).

What things have you learned to be more relaxed about since having a baby?

Breastfeeding is normal; bottlefeeding is unusual

The title of today's quick up-date sums up my feelings on breastfeeding quite well: breastfeeding is normal, the natural way to feed a child, the way we have evolved through centuries of natural selection to best nourish infants and for infants to be nourished. It is bottlefeeding with a milk-substitute formula that is unusual.

Besides the fact that formula does not compare nutritionally with breastmilk and often contains ingredients and quite often bacteria that are dangerous to developing infants, a bottle cannot possibly offer an infant the comfort of a mother's breast. The Baby Beast will sometimes walk up to me when he's crying, and want to bury his face against one of my breasts. While a part of me is laughing inwardly and thinking things like, "Lookit that, he's just like his daddy," a bigger part of me is aware that a 15-month-old has no concept of sex and is using my breasts for their intended purpose: nutrition and comfort.

All of this to say that this week is the Carnival of Nursing in Public, an effort on the part of nursing mothers to normalize breastfeeding. (For more on that topic, I will pass the mic over to Code Name: Mama since she summed it up so well)

So, if you happen to see a mother nursing in public, whether she's doing it furtively, trying to keep a huge blanket over herself and he infant, or doing it boldly, refusing to be shamed into covering up when she's perfectly capable of keeping her shirt on, please give her a smile. Let her know you aren't bothered by her responding to another human being's absolute need, like so many people out there seem to be.

The American obsession with breasts as sexual objects is not healthy... not for America, not for America's babies, and not for America's mothers. So if you're a nursing mother, nurse in public this week. If you aren't a nursing mother, then smile at one while she is nursing in public this week. The health of a nation may depend on it.

Summer mornings

The Baby Beast and I have been enjoying our mornings the last month or so. Husbeast has an early morning, summer session of Chemistry this summer, so he's out of the house by 7:30am (right around when the BB and I are waking up).

The baby and I stumble to the bathroom with tousled hair and blurry eyes and use our respective toilets, then after popping a new diaper onto him, he and I head out the back door to the backyard.

I usually have some laundry project to work on, like stuffing the pockets of his diapers. That, and a cup of coffee, helps me relax slowly into the day while the baby makes the rounds of the backyard.



Some mornings, I like to let him do some water play. He loves pouring and experimenting with water, and I love to let him have the freedom to do it - when he's outside (no need to get into the stories of him 'experimenting' with the dog's water dish).



While I stuff diapers (and snap pictures), he learns about gravity and water flow and I can't imagine what else, busily moving water from one place to another, and often pouring most of it down his front.



All good things come to an end, though, and eventually he runs out of water (and patience), leaving his project behind.



And every morning, once he's wearied himself in exploring the yard and yelling at the birds and wiggling his fingers through the fence at the dogs next door, he ends up splayed across my lap, still a baby at heart despite his huge toddler size, nursing to center himself and process everything he's learned that morning.



How do your mornings start?

Raw30: Day 20

I was called into work today - suprise! - to be introduced to the students I will soon be taking over, to meet&greet both them and their dogs. I agreed readily, and then Oklahoma got a surprise 6" of snow dumped on it (on the first day of spring. it is to laugh).

So I drove the 25min drive from my home to PetSmart with white-knuckles and enough adrenaline running through my veins that I probably could have jogged there, 28-degree weather and blowing snow be damned. Especially when an idiot in a pick-up truck whipped out of his lane and into my lane just ahead of me, fishtailed, smashed out one of his rear lights, fishtailed some more, and then continued forward. Oklahoma drivers, for the most part, get their licenses out of gumball machines.

Of course, the snowstorm caused everyone to huddle in their homes and refuse to come out, so PetSmart wound up having to cancel the training classes scheduled for today. So, instead of meet&greet, I did new hire paperwork and made up a schedule for training classes for the next three months.

As for food, I started off with a smoothie, but after freezing my tuchus off in blasting wind and ice, I microwaved another vegan meal and shared it with the Baby Beast. Then we took a nap, dozing off while nursing. Aaah, bliss. Warm baby body is the best way to feel better after being cold outside.

For dinner tonight, GrandmaBeast dived in and made a salad (to go along with the short-grain brown rice, pan-seared salmon, green beans, black-eyed peas, and beets i made). It was a wonderful dinner, the Baby Beast ate a taste of everything, and the world is a good place to be. And I had double-helpings of the salad, because it was delicious.

Raw30: Day 19

What an improved attitude I have, now that I don't feel like I have to do it one way, that I have some options. I think it was the lack of choice that chafed most, feeling that I had this very narrow window of what was and wasn't okay. For the most part, I've chosen vegan foods today... I just liked being able to say, "I think I will have some chicken on my salad" or "I am going to microwave a vegan meal" (rather than try to deal with a tired and fussy 11-month-old while chopping and mixing and flavoring). Also, a microwaved vegan meal is something I can sit down with the Baby Beast and share at his Montessori weaning table. A lot of the raw meals are either liquid... or chunky to the point where I don't feel entirely safe giving them to him.

I still ate two salads, guacamole, a smoothie, and 1/2 a pineapple today... so the majority of my intake has been raw. But I've also had a bit of chicken, some corn chips (with the guac), a few Fig Newtons, and a vegan microwave meal that, as I said, I sat down with the baby to share at his weaning table (although he mostly practiced stabbing with his fork and seeing how many times he could make rice grains fall off his fork onto the floor where the dogs were waiting.

Today's raw prep was the Kale Salad, and I really did enjoy it! It doesn't look like much, but it had avocado and salt and tomatoes... and those're things I really enjoy!



So overall, I feel pretty good about today. I'll be making another smoothie to tide me over until morning and almost certainly am going to make more Fudge Balls, but I don't feel frustrated or frantic anymore. Definitely an improvement!

A table for one (small person)

When a large box from Lord Company arrived, I got understandably excited. So did the Baby Beast, but for a totally different reason: huge box in the house? That's just cool!

I rolled it through the house, with the baby trying to manhandle (babyhandle?) it away from me so he could slap it and chew on the corners, but I finally managed to get it opened and unwrapped a pound or so of plastic wrap and an interesting cloth/paper padding and found my absolutely gorgeous wood table and infant chair.



The Baby Beast was surprisingly enthusiastic about his new table and chair once I got them set up. For one thing, they were something new in the house (which is always a reason for celebration; we get a new pot holder and he wants to manipulate it for ten minutes and check all the angles on it); but I think the main draw to him was the fact that here was furniture that was baby-sized! He could stand up next to the table and look over it, and pat it, and drool on it... without being lifted up to it! He could pull his own chair out, and push it around the room, by himself!



This goes along with the Montessori belief that children need child-sized things that they can manipulate themselves. As adults, the world is sized for us. The tables, chairs - really, all the furniture - is sized for large people. To an infant, everything is giant sized and hard to manipulate. Everything feels awkward to them, and they are left feeling somewhat out of place.

High chairs are even more awkward for them, something they have no hope of getting into or out of. Providing furniture sized for them helps them feel less out of place.



Seeing the Baby Beast's obvious enthusiasm for his new table and chair convinced me that it was a wonderful idea.



It has also made baby-led weaning so much easier. Since he's no longer sitting so high up in the air, he isn't doing the typical baby experiments of tossing food off the side of his chair to see what happens. He's been getting into eating with gusto since we've started using his table and chair.




Of course, there is one obvious drawback to him being so close to the floor... he's that much closer to the clean-up crew when he decides he's done.




And he never has any shame about it, either.

Striving toward autonomy

The Baby Beast has never been a fan of being fed... in fact, he regards spoon feeding as something to be distrusted and will glare at any spoon proffered towards him, unless he has seen me eating off of it first.

Luckily, he has managed a lot of finger dexterity. His pincer grip (grabbing between his index finger and thumb) has progressed almost to the point where he never misses (although getting the pincered food into his mouth is another story... that almost never goes quite as smoothly, and I'd say at least 45% of the things that move towards his mouth end up on his bib, his pants, or the floor). And if he can't grab it in his fingers, he'll just put his face down to the table top and eat that way.



No, we don't do a high chair. We used to do, but I found it to be an unbelievable hassle to always wrestle the thing out of the corner and over to the table, take the tray off and get the baby strapped in, put the tray on, put food on the tray... and then have to take him back down in five minutes when he grew tired of eating/playing with his food. We invested in an inflatable booster chair for regular adult chairs (straps onto the back brace and the seat) and it has been a lifesaver. He can sit at the table with us and eat, and he is able to get things himself with only a minimum of tossing on the floor (like I said, 45%. but then, we have the puppy cleaning crew around here).

Since the Baby Beast is so intent on autonomy, I'm planning to invest in a Montessori weaning table in the next couple of weeks. Weaning tables are just what they sound like: tables sized to your infant/toddler meant to make the process of weaning from breast/bottle to solid food as easy as possible.

No, I am not planning on stopping our breastfeeding relationship. The WHO and AAP both recommend breastfeeding a minimum of two years, and as long past that as mother and child are comfortable. And while Maria Montessori believed children should no longer breastfeed past nine months, she and I will just have to agree to disagree on that point.

Here is a photographic example of a weaning table and chair. Once the Baby Beast's arrive, I will certainly include photos.

Why make it so low to the ground? The idea is that your infant/toddler can get into and out of the chair with a minimum of help. Traditional high chairs make the baby completely dependent on an adult to help get them in and out, but the weaning table/chair can be climbed into/out of without and adult lifting the baby.

I operate on the belief that I'm not raising my baby; I'm teaching a person. Thinking in those terms quite often stops me from impinging my own desires on the Baby Beast (i.e. interrupting his play time to cuddle or kiss on him; he approaches me quite often for cuddles, and i am VERY willing to love on him when he asks for it. there's no need to stop him in the middle of his play to kiss him).

It amazes me every day how fast he's growing. It's hard for me to believe he'll be 10 months old in a couple of days. Time isn't marching on - it's flying by.

Let's eat!

I've mentioned before that we're doing child-led weaning... one thing that goes hand-in-hand with that is allowing an infant to start solids when they're ready and not when a label on a jar of pureed vegetables tells you they're ready.

Child- or baby-led weaning is actually the most natural way to start solids with a baby. Very few things adults eat resemble a puree in texture (with the exception of apple sauce, puddings, and custards [and probably others but i'm not going to do an exhaustive list because, well, i don't wanna!]) and when we eat, we eat not only for flavor but for texture. Have you ever eaten stale popcorn, the type that kind of squeaks when you bite it? It tastes the same as fresh, but there's something about the texture that just throws you off.

Presenting babies with a lot of pureed goop isn't a good way to introduce them to the wide and varied world of foods. But it's not just that. Babies aren't just babies: they're people. They have the very natural desire to be the masters of their own destinies, even if that only extends to choosing what to put in their mouths and in what quantity to put it in. Baby-led weaning gives them the opportunity to make their own decisions on how much food to eat and how often to take bites.

Moreover, by not shoving spoons full of goop into their mouths, parents can actually prevent a lot of the 'normal' gagging babies do when switched from smooth to chunky purees. They gag because spooned puree tends to be sucked into the back of the mouth. Allowing them access to whole foods, they can get used to moving bites around in the front of their mouth (basically, learning to chew) before eventually learning to swallow. With purees, they learn to swallow before learning to chew.

I could go on and on, but there are books and plenty of Web sites and forums to cover the topics in detail.

We started the BabyBeast off with a very simple and traditional first food: banana. The difference was, I just handed him half a banana when he was six months old and let him take it from there. He managed just fine, although there was less 'eating' and more 'tasting' and 'smearing' and 'squishing.'



Baby-led weaning is, once again, the most natural approach to parenting. Very few cavemommas had blenders available to puree foods for their infants. When the baby was able to grasp and bite and swallow, that was probably when the baby started eating instead of nursing for all of its nutrition.

Even today, with babies who are extremely prone to allergies (for instance, with a family history of food allergies), pediatricians will recommend not feeding anything but breastmilk or formula for the first 12 months. By their first birthday, most babies have at least their upper and lower incisors, to facilitate biting things (if not chewing things).



The BabyBeast, as I expected, has teeth top and bottom now so he is able to take bites of things even if they end up drooling out of his mouth. He still nurses for 99.999% of his nutrition, and I'm fine with that. We've had a few bites, but he's learning that bites lead to the end of that particular nursing session and is being more careful not to clamp down.

I'm in no rush to get him eating whole meals. He'll reach that milestone whenever he's developmentally ready and not when I think he 'should' reach it. Taking it easy just comes, well, naturally.