If it's not one thing, it's another...

Wow, it has been a long time. Since I'm not pumping at 2 a.m., I don't have my guaranteed blog time any more. I haven't really been getting that much more sleep, though. She does sleep 2-3 hours at a time, but some nights she's still up every 1-2 hours. Morgan's eczema is pretty well under control and her cradle cap is all gone. She has some hair now:

Just when I think I'm getting the hang of things, I see these red spots on the inside back of Morgan's leg. After a day or so, it was looking awful, so I took her to the pediatrician to have it checked out. They told me she had a staph infection. A staph infection?? I couldn't believe it. My poor baby! She didn't seem to even know she had an infection, thankfully, but I felt so bad for her. The pediatrician gave me some antibiotic cream and said if it didn't start to heal in a couple of days, to give her an oral antibiotic. After a couple of days, it looked different, but I couldn't tell if it was healing and I didn't want to start her on the oral antibiotics unless I had to, so I took her to see her dermatologist. He said it would be better to use antibiotic ointments, rather than creams, to avoid burning/stinging her skin, so he gave me a prescription. He also gave me one for a steroid ointment to help speed healing. He then said we could give her a short round of oral antibiotics to really accelerate the healing, so I agreed. When I got that prescription, it said to give her 3 tsp. for 3 days, then 2 tsp. for 3 days and 1 tsp. for 3 days. Um, that's a total of 9 days. I didn't think that constituted a "short" round of antibiotics. I called the office and they said to give her the medicine for 9 days. I gave her the first dose and 3 tsp. is a lot for a baby. It was 6 small syringes full. Ugh! Later that evening, I was going over the medicines with my husband and I realized that it was not an oral antibiotic, but an oral corticosteroid! Yikes! How did I miss that? I thought for sure the dermatologist said antibiotic. I was all worried and feeling bad because I did NOT want to give her oral steroids - even more than I didn't want to give her antibiotics. I called the dermatologist's office in the morning and asked if I could stop giving her the corticosteroid and they said it was OK. I just continued to use the antibiotic and steroid ointments. It's slowly healing, and I have to change the dressing 3 times a day. This is now on top of the normal eczema regimen.

We went to a friend's baby shower this weekend and we stayed at my husband's parents' house. Morgan was so happy to see them. She loves her grandparents:

At the baby shower, I got to see a lot of my friends that I hadn't seen in a while and their babies. One of those poor, sweet, precious babies somehow contracted hand, foot, and mouth disease and they didn't know it until after the party. Where do our babies get these things? You'd think we all live in a third-world country or something. There's also an outbreak of swine flu in a neighboring city and the whole school district is shut down for a week. I have to keep an eye on my baby's staph infection, and keep an eye out for hand, foot, and mouth disease and swine flu! Sheesh!

Despite it all, she continues to be her happy self. Here she is working on sitting up like a big girl:

I'm so glad she's such a smiley, happy baby. All of these things would so much harder to bear if I thought she was miserable all the time. Keep on smiling, Morgan!

Could it have been my milk all along?

My original breastfeeding goal, from before I even had Morgan, was 6 months. Then, after I had her and we hit the 6-week mark, I ran into issues with oversupply and overactive letdown, so I started to pump exclusively. For anyone who doesn't know, that is a crazy amount of work. Not only are you "breastfeeding", you're bottle feeding, too. You have to pump for a total of 2 hours a day, plus milk handling time, plus feeding time and bottle/equipment cleaning time. Where does sleep time fit in there? It doesn't, really. To get a good output you have to pump once between the hours of 1 a.m. and 5 a.m., when your prolactin levels are highest. This really only applies for the first 12 weeks postpartum, but I found a high output even after 12 weeks, so I continued to pump around 2 a.m. each night. I started out pumping 8 times a day, then worked down to 7 times a day, then 6 and then 5 times. I pumped the days away, hoping that I was giving Morgan an immunological boost and I believe I did so, but in the end I had to stop breast feeding, as something in my milk was irritating her skin. We weren't sure at first, so we started giving her soy formula and I kept pumping to keep my supply up, just in case. Well, after a few days on full-time soy formula, her face magically cleared up, as did most of the patches on her body. It was an amazing transformation. Once we saw the drastic improvement, we decided we didn't want to risk adding any breast milk back to her diet, so I started the process to wean from the pump. Ouch! That was pretty painful. I pumped for like 2-3 minutes when I was very engorged - just enough to relieve the pressure. I wore cabbage leaves in my bra (yes, it works), drank sage tea, etc. I soaked through a whole bunch of bra pads, but my milk is pretty much gone after about 2 weeks. That's not bad, considering that I thought it would take 6 weeks to complete the process. I was a little aggressive in my efforts, only pumping when I absolutely had to, so that sped things up.

Morgan was baptised on Easter Sunday and it was nice. The poor thing had a little flare up of her eczema, though, but it wasn't too bad. I forgot to wash her baptismal gown (bad mommy!) and that might have irritated her skin. She was very well-behaved and the only time she cried was when they went to pour the water on her head. It wasn't because of the water, but because she bucked in my husband's arms and the deacon bopped her on the head with the water pitcher. Poor baby! She let out quite a cry and everyone thought it was because of the water. Other than that, she was a happy, albeit wiggly, baby. Here are a couple of pictures from the day:

The cradle cap on her head is also almost 100% healed, too. It's really amazing. I thought it would never go away. You can actually see her hair, now, not that she has much.

She's just a super happy baby in the day time. She smiles such a precious smile and I almost can't stand it. It's just in the evenings, that she gets a little fussy. I think at night, there isn't anything to distract her from what ails her and she's alone with her gas pains and itchy skin.

Her tummy is still adjusting to the switch to soy, and her stools are getting a little softer day by day. My poor baby's face turns tomato-red when she strains sometimes.

It has been about 11 days since I blogged, so I'm trying to think of what I'm forgetting. I took her to lunch where I used to work. She was all smiles.

Today she has her follow-up appointment with the dermatologist. I think he's going to be amazed at her progress. I know I am!

I think she's going through a growth spurt, even though one isn't due for another month. She has been very hungry last night and this morning. She's mastering so many of her toys and it's amazing to see all the faces she makes and she's developing her own little personality. She turned 5 months old yesterday!

Well, I better go get a few things done around the house. She's content in her jumperoo. :)

Oh, what a relief it is...

We switched Morgan over to soy formula full time the other day and then the wait began for the next poopie diaper. She was wiggling and grunting, but we didn't see anything for 3 days. Then, yesterday, after another grunting session, she finally made a poopie diaper - 3 poopie diapers! I went to change the first one and it was full of a brownish-gray paste and it smelled like doggie doo. Then, as I was changing her, she pooped in the second diaper. I thought for sure she was done, considering the volume of poo, but she somehow found some more for the third diaper I put on her. I'm just really glad she finally pooped, though. She was SO happy after that!

Here she is playing in her exersaucer, happy as can be:

Poopy, poopy, and more poopy...

It's funny how you wake up one day and realize that most of your thought processes now revolve around baby poop - it's color, consistency, smell, etc.

We started Morgan on solids last week. We started with rice cereal, but she really didn't seem very interested. We also got some carrot baby food. She really liked that and we gave her about 1/4 tub the first time. The next day, she seems really hungry and she ate the other 3/4 of the tub! Well, I think that was too much because she didn't poop until two days later. She was fussing and wriggling, but nothing would pass. I decided to put her in the jumperoo, to see if the bouncing and gravity would help things along. Oh boy, did they ever! She was happily jumping along and then she paused and was making some serious faces and grunts and then *POW*! We heard a big poopy noise and I thought I'd better get her out of there before she blew again and blew out of the diaper. When I picked her up, there was a thin line of poop seeping through above the diaper line and I knew I was too late, but it was just above the diaper, so I figured it wasn't too bad. I get her to the changing table and I open up her clothes to the sight of the hugest baby blowout. Her poopy looked just like the carrots that went in and it had blown all up her back and the diaper was so full. She only had 3/4 of a small tub, but it had multiplied and combined with her milk and cereal to make SUPER POO! Needless to say, we're going to hold off on the carrots for a while and when we start them back, she'll only get 1/4 tub at a time.

We started giving her baby oatmeal and she really likes that.

I just prepare one heaping spoonful with a lot of breastmilk to dilute it. She now opens her mouth and chomps at the spoon and eats it up like a pro. I was going to start one bottle of soy formula a day, to see how she does on it, but I waited a day after the big poopy blowout to give her a break. Yesterday, I gave her the first 2-0z. bottle of soy formula. She drank it right up, and now I'm waiting for the poop report. She has been very gassy, but I don't think that can be all the soy's fault since she had 34+ oz. of breastmilk and only 2 oz. of soy formula. Last night she didn't sleep well and was wriggling and tooting and trying to pass what I can only guess is a ginormous gas bubble. She kept rolling over on to her side, and ended up sleeping on her side a couple of times. Poor thing... She's in the bassinet beside me, at the moment, trying to work on her morning poopy. There she lies broken-hearted, wanted to poop, but only farted...