Five months

Dear Callum,

Today you are five months old. That is getting awfully close to half a year.


In the past month you have become very strong. You roll over when you want to, but more often during tummy time you are interested in doing push-ups. You lift your entire torso off the ground, all the way up to your diaper, using just your arms, and hold yourself like that for a long time. It looks terrifyingly close to the army-crawling position, but I think you're still a ways away from that in terms of coordination. You hold your head up independently when lying on your back, which makes it harder to convince you to go to sleep in your swing. You're learning how to sit up, and can sit unsupported for a minute or sometimes even more at a time. You're not stable enough yet that we can just sit you somewhere and walk away, but you get closer to that point every day. And when you lie down, on your back or your belly, you kick and thrash enough to rotate in circles, and sometimes you accidentally scoot forward. All of these are warning signs that we should probably start thinking about some basic baby-proofing sooner rather than later.


You are also really LOUD. You don't cry nearly as much as you used to, but you've replaced the crying with piercing shrieks, and I'm not sure if that's an upgrade or not. You chatter and babble constantly. You are still working on consonants, and we hear them occasionally, especially the B and L sounds, but for the most part you shriek strings of vowels along the lines of AWEH, over and over again. You also make a high-pitched squealing sound that sounds to me like a large, angry bird of prey. You "talk" to your Dad and me, to your toys, to your jumperoo, to your activity mat, to your mobile, and to the dog. Pretty much anything other than thin air elicits shrieks of joy or anger, depending on your mood.


This month you started laughing, and it is so incredible. You giggled before, but now you have a full-on shriek/chuckle that pretty much kills us with cuteness. And it doesn't take much to make you laugh. You laugh when we tickle you or blow on your belly. You laugh when we hand you a new toy. You laugh when we make new sounds or silly faces. And sometimes you laugh just when we walk in the room.



You started on solid foods this month, with mixed success. At first it seemed like it was going well, but then you became really fussy, and while at first I wondered if you were teething, now I'm thinking it may have been digestive discomfort. We gave you a break from solid foods for a couple weeks, and within a day or two you were back to your old, happy self. I think we'll try oatmeal again soon and see if it takes any better, but for now you are on a purely liquid diet.


Not eating solids certainly doesn't seem to be affecting your growth. I haven't weighed you in awhile, but I'm guessing that you are close to 21 pounds and 28 inches, which would put you pretty much off the charts for both weight and height. You are close to the size of a one-year-old, and already we've had to stop carrying you around in your carseat, lest we dislocate our shoulders.


You aren't sleeping quite as well as you were, but considering some of the horror stories we've heard about the four-month sleep regression, we aren't complaining. You usually wake up sometime between 5 and 6 a.m. to eat, and then go back to sleep until 8 or 8:30. This isn't quite as awesome as when you were sleeping straight through to 8:30 without that extra wakeup, but it is more than manageable. You still love putting everything in your mouth, especially your hands, and often when we come to get you in the morning we find you lying in your crib trying desperately to stuff your entire fist into your mouth.


You still absolutely love your dad. The way you look at him is just the sweetest thing I've ever seen. You stare at him with pure adoration, and he stares back at you just the same way. The beautiful relationship between the two of you is so gratifying to see, and I know that you two will only get closer as you get older.


Once we stopped feeding you solid foods, you morphed back into the happy, laid-back baby you've been all your life, and have stayed that way ever since. We've noticed, however, that it takes more to entertain you--ever since we got you your jumperoo, you like being upright, and putting you on your activity mat almost always leads to indignant shrieks within minutes. Gone are the days where you would peacefully play on that mat for 45 minutes or more--and I think we are all looking forward to when you can reliably sit up on your own, because I'm pretty sure that will be your preferred playing position.


You continue to have quite the personality. You always want to be looking around, and it's a rare moment that I can get you to cuddle with me. Sometimes when I pick you up, you will rest your head briefly against my shoulder, but within seconds you'll be up and looking around again, turning your head from side to side so as not to miss anything. You remind me of a koala when I carry you, the way you cling to me with your arms and legs, but that's pretty much as close to snuggling as you'll let me get these days. You are also very clear about your preferences. You continue to prefer to be at home, and when we take you to friends' houses or out and about you will start to express your displeasure after an hour or two. We're planning for you to be quite the well-traveled child eventually, so hopefully this preference for our house will turn out to be a short-lived phase.


The first few months of your life seemed to pass by incredibly fast, and now that we've settled into more of a routine it feels like things have slowed down a bit. It feels like ages since you turned four months and we started you on solid foods--and I can barely remember what it was like before you were here--and yet I can't believe that you're already five months old. We had planned on having a baby for years before you were born, and we always knew that having a baby, any baby, would be great, but what we didn't know was that having YOU specifically would be even greater than we possibly could have imagined.


Love,
Mama

The end of breastfeeding

About a month ago I mentioned that Callum had more or less started refusing to nurse. I kept trying, but it never got better. He would latch on, suckle once, and immediately pull off and start screaming. My supply hadn't changed--there was as much as there ever had been, which is to say not much--so I can only assume that he got sick of working so hard for such little reward and preferred the faster, fuller gratification of the bottle.

So, I switched to exclusively pumping. And if I pumped many, many times a day, I would get MAYBE an ounce of breastmilk. Combined. All day long. As in, a few ML per pumping session. As in, basically nothing at all.

My goal had always been to make it to four months with the nursing, and so when Callum turned four months old, I was pumping less than an ounce most days, and he wasn't nursing at all, I made the executive decision to stop. It wasn't worth the time, effort, and frustration of pumping. If I'd been getting enough to make a meaningful contribution to his food intake each day? Sure, I'd have kept it up. But all that time spent harnessed to a pump and washing pump parts, only to pull a few ML? Not worth it. So the day after his four-month birthday, I stopped.

After three days my breasts started to feel slightly tender and sore. I couldn't lie on my belly without feeling pain. It was the closest I've ever come to feeling engorged. So I pumped one more time. I got 10 ML, the most I'd gotten in a single pumping session, ever. I haven't pumped since, or tried to nurse. Callum is exclusively bottle-fed. This also meant that we were able to switch to the faster-flowing, level 2 nipples, because we didn't have to worry about matching the milk flow to the nursing experience as closely as possible.

The funny thing is, it's been almost a month since the last time I pumped, and I still have milk. I even leaked a little bit just the other day. And my breasts still feel kind of sore and engorged. Not horribly, not enough for me to feel the need to pump, but enough to notice and enough to feel a little bit uncomfortable.

It's so weird. It's like, no matter what I did, I couldn't increase my supply, and now, with zero stimulation whatsoever, I don't appear to be able to decrease my supply either. I would have thought that within a week or two I wouldn't be producing any more milk--but that's not the case. Rationally, I know that at some point my supply will dry up entirely--but I feel like there's this thought at the back of my mind that my body will just go on vaguely producing a few ML of breastmilk every day for the rest of my life.

And you know what? Even though I'm pretty much over the disappointment of not being able to exclusively breastfeed, a small part of me is GLAD I'm still producing milk. I knew it was the right choice to stop pumping, but I felt really sad about it too. I felt like it was wasteful to give up what little supply I had--even though it made up maybe 3% of what Callum was eating each day--it felt like I should be taking advantage of what I had and that it was somehow shameful or wrong to let it go.

So even though I'm not doing anything with my supply, and I could really do without the vague engorged feeling and occasional leaking, there's a little part of me that's glad it's still there. Even though I KNOW it's useless, and I KNOW it's just a silly irrational part of my brain that wishes that breastfeeding had worked out better for us.

Over the last few months I've truly accepted our feeding situation. The feelings of shame and guilt that I wasn't able to produce the food needed to nourish my child are fully gone. It would have been nice if it had worked out differently, but it didn't, and that's fine. I've had my moments when I've really wished that I could have breastfed exclusively--such as when we went out to dinner and didn't realize until we got to the restaurant that we'd forgotten his bottle and had to go home to get it--and when he was nearing the upper limit of how much formula his pediatrician wanted him to eat and we had to carefully track his intake and worry about overfeeding him, and it would have been so nice to just pop him on the boob when he was hungry and not worry about it--but for the most part it doesn't cross my mind. That's not our life and I don't spend any time or energy thinking about it.

And I don't miss the bonding time--breastfeeding was always such a struggle for us, always always always, that it was never that peaceful simple moment of bonding. It was a two-handed experience, always, even once we both knew what we were doing, that involved continuously re-shaping my breast and re-latching the baby, over and over again. It's actually much simpler and more peaceful to hold Callum on my lap and feed him with a bottle. So I don't miss that part of it either.

I do still hope that if/when we have another baby someday, my body will know what to do and will get it right the second time around. I would like to exclusively breastfeed, if possible. But, at this point I've learned enough about the silver lining of bottle-feeding that if it doesn't work out, I think I'll be OK. I'll be a little more prepared, and I'll know from the beginning that formula isn't the end of the world. I'll know that there are actually some benefits to bottle-feeding, and if it turns out that we have to go that route in the future, I'll try to look straight to those. And I think I'll probably do a pretty good job at it.

It's just funny--I'm so totally OK with the way things have worked out, on every rational level. I don't feel the need to justify to anyone, and when people find out that I'm not breastfeeding and try to say supportive things like how formula-fed babies are just as smart and healthy as breastfed babies, I just smile and nod, because I know that, KNOW it, have fully internalized it and don't need to hear it or get validation from any external sources--and yet, I'm still glad that my supply hasn't dried up entirely. Even though it serves no purpose whatsoever at this point.

I guess I'm just contradictory. And I guess that's OK.

Bumper sticker war

Torsten and I have been living in Colorado for about two and a half years. We love it, and we're planning on staying here for the rest of our lives. But there's no denying that we aren't Colorado natives. Callum is, though. And now that I have a kid who's considered a Colorado native, does that mean I have more of a right to live here myself?

Because the thing is, Torsten and I aren't the only people who've noticed how awesome Colorado is. According to the Census bureau, Colorado's population grew by 16.9% from 2000 to 2010 (9.7% is the national average). According to the Denver Post, the state had the fourth highest growth rate in the country in 2008, and the seventh highest growth rate in the country over the past decade. The Post estimates that more than 50% of that growth came from people moving here from other states and countries.

And really, you can hardly blame them. Colorado is awesome. The weather is fantastic (we are known for our cold winters, and while we definitely have our cold moments, what some people don't realize is that we also have lots of mild snaps in the winter, with sunny days in the 60s, which more than makes up for some sub-zero snowy days, in my opinion). There's no humidity. The mountains are absolutely gorgeous, and so great for exploring in both summer and winter. The people are nice. We have a major airport. It's very dog-friendly. Denver is a good-size city and Boulder is a lovely smaller town. We have an excellent public university system. The cost of living is reasonable. And so on and so forth. Basically, there are a ton of reasons why we decided to move here when we could have moved anywhere--and obviously we weren't the only ones to come to that conclusion.

So, there are a lot of people living in Colorado who aren't from Colorado. Which is fine! Yay for an interconnected world where we don't all just set up house on our parents' property, or marry into the family on the next farm over, right?

Except that all these Colorado natives like to complain about the transplants. They complain that they're a drag on resources, that they're leading to urban sprawl, that they don't care about Colorado's heritage or its beauty, that they place undue pressure on fragile ecosystems, that they contribute to pollution and development and destruction. Some of the more conservative people also complain that the transplants, who for the most part tend to be more politically liberal and drawn to the Denver-Boulder corridor, are making this once-conservative place into a swing state.

Personally, as you can guess, I don't agree with most of these complaints. I love Colorado in a way that I've never loved anywhere that I lived before. I care about it. I take advantage of what it has to offer. And I boost its economy by living here, spending money here, and paying taxes here. I don't mind the tourists, either (and there are lots of tourists because of Colorado's great skiing), because they are a huge part of Colorado's economy as well.

I also don't see what being born and raised here has to do with how much you appreciate this state and how well you care for it. In fact, I think the argument could be reversed to say that the transplants moved here because they wanted to be here, whereas people who were born here might take it for granted. But that wouldn't make much sense either. Really, we are all given the opportunity to be responsible stewards of our homes, whether we've lived in the same place all our lives or not, you know?

But I do think it's pretty amusing that this clash has led to what I personally consider to be snooty bumper stickers. They are a play on the Colorado license plate, which looks like this:


Except they say NATIVE, like this, as though that's something transplants should be jealous of:


And of course, now there are the counter-stickers, which say TRANSPLANT, like this:


And I recently saw one that was in the same format but simply said BITE ME. Unclear if this was a big eff you to the entire back and forth, or simply a nod to Colorado's fly fishing opportunities. Either way, it made me laugh. My Google searching for these images also led me to variations that say things like XENOPHOBE and NO VACANCY. Strong feelings on both sides, apparently, as expressed through bumper stickers.

Even the state of Colorado has jumped on the bandwagon, offering a Pioneers license plate that, until recently, was only available to people who could prove that they were the descendant of someone who lived in Colorado 100 years ago (and the only reason the state stopped requiring this and started making the design available to everyone was because they found out that asking for this information was illegal):


What about where you live? Are there lots of people moving in? Or moving out? Are there tensions between people who've lived there forever and people who have newly arrived? Do you think it matters?

Teething?

I lost my first tooth when I was four years old. I lost my last tooth only a few years later. I got my 12-year molars when I was nine. I got my wisdom teeth when I was 13 or 14.

My point is, I was ahead of schedule with my teeth. And now it appears that Callum may be following in my footsteps. I'm still not totally convinced... especially because as far as I can tell from the articles I've read on teething, pretty much every parent seems to become convinced that their child is teething the day they hit four months old... but it really does seem that way. Even though apparently teething doesn't usually start before six months.

Here's what we're dealing with at the moment:

• Many consecutive days of exceptional amounts of fussiness. Our mellow, easygoing, laid-back baby has started shrieking unhappily for no apparent reason. He's not hungry. He's not tired. His diaper is dry. He's not sick. He's just not happy. All day long.
• Bottle refusal. Callum has always been good at self-regulating his food intake, so we've never pressed the issue if he's refused the bottle in the past. But now he gives clear hunger signs but still fusses and turns his head away from the bottle. If we try a few times, he'll usually take it eventually--and then eat a full meal. His overall daily food intake hasn't changed--it just takes a lot more work on our parts to get him to eat.
  
• Chewing. Hands, toys, our fingers, his clothing, his car seat straps, whatever. If it's near enough for him to grab, it goes straight into his mouth. This is normal four-month-old behavior, so it might or might not be an indicator of teething.
• Drooling. Same as above--this usually starts in earnest around four months anyway. It only seems to be excessive when he sleeps, during which time it collects on his shirt.
• Lip sucking. Just in the past couple days, he's started pulling his lips inward and pressing them against his gums. I can only assume that this relieves pressure? I've never seen him do that before.
• Ear-pulling. This happens only occasionally. I did some reading on whether this was a sign of an ear infection, and pretty much everything says that if they seem otherwise happy when they're doing it, and they aren't congested or feverish, it's more likely a teething sign. That description applies to him--I've only noticed him doing it when he was totally fine otherwise, and not fussy, plus he has no symptoms of sickness--so it seems like it's probably teething-related.
• Trouble sleeping. He's still sleeping fine, but not as well as he was. For awhile he was sleeping through the night until 8 a.m. or later on a consistent basis. He still does that occasionally, but more often he'll wake up sometime between 4 and 6 a.m. Luckily when he does this he pretty much just eats and goes back to sleep, so I recognize that we're still pretty well off in this department. But it definitely signals a change from his earlier sleeping habits. He also has more trouble falling asleep at night--when we put him to bed, instead of just peacefully going off to sleep on his own as he did for the first four months of his life, he fusses for awhile and sometimes needs extra soothing before he falls asleep.

So. It sounds like teething to me. Does it sound that way to you? Because the thing is that what we aren't dealing with is actual teeth. His gums look and feel totally normal to me. And I'm a little bit terrified that if this is the start of teething, it's going to be a long time before any teeth actually show up. And I would really rather not deal with this for months on end. Plus, I would really rather my baby not have to go through this for months on end. It doesn't look like much fun! I miss my non-fussy baby. And I bet he misses not having a reason to be fussy, too.

Oatmeal and bananas

Last week, on the advice of our pediatrician, we started Callum on solid foods. He won't be eating much for now--just oatmeal and one or two types of not-too-sweet produce--and only once a day until he's six months old. This is more about introducing him to food and getting him excited about it than about feeding him enough to provide real nutrients--that's what formula is for at this point.

My parents were in town to witness the first feeding, which was nice for everyone, particularly Callum since he got extra cameras flashing in his face during the big event. There are plenty of photos on Flickr, but here are a couple videos that are a pretty good overview of how it went. Please excuse my ridiculous baby voice, thank you.

First he didn't know what was going on:



Then he caught on and actually opened his mouth:



So, I'd say it went pretty well, with no issues with the tongue thrust reflex and over a tablespoon of oatmeal consumed. The next day went even better: he ate the whole bowl (not that it was full), and learned very quickly to open his mouth when the spoon came near, so that was nice.

We gave it a couple days and then introduced mashed banana, again following the suggestion of the pediatrician. And... well, he ate it. Grudgingly. A few bites. And then he started crying and turning his head away. I'd fed him oatmeal first, so I thought maybe he was just full. We tried again the next day and I did manage to feed him the whole quarter-banana that I'd mashed up for him, but not without much fussing and a distinct lack of enthusiasm.

Here he is after his first bite of banana. He does not look too impressed.

The day after that, I tried feeding him the banana before the oatmeal, when I knew he was hungry, in hopes that it had just been a coincidence. Again, he took a few bites without any apparent enthusiasm, and then kept his mouth firmly closed and turned his head away from the spoon. After that, he didn't even want his oatmeal, which on previous days he had happily devoured. He didn't spit the bananas out, so I thought that was encouraging, but maybe he just didn't know how?

Anyway. Apparently I have one of the only babies in the world who doesn't like bananas? I might try just plain oatmeal for a couple days, and then give the bananas another shot later in the week. Maybe he just needs some time to get used to them? After all, it's definitely the strongest flavor he's ever encountered.

Oatmeal is a huge hit, though. So that's good. And next we get to try one more type of produce. I'm thinking maybe sweet potatoes, but I'm not totally sure. Our only restrictions are no citrus and no berries. For those of you with kids, what have been popular food items with your babies?