Sunday, July 27, 2008

Poorly sick

My poor baby, contending with eczema and a cough and cold, not to mention new teeth steadily carving their way through her little gums, has just spent the evening vomiting for no obvious reason.
Her temperature is normal, she has no other symptoms and she seems to be fine now she has puked everything out of her little tummy.
Tareka and I were trying to think what might have caused it - guessing it was something she ate - and we remembered she had had an identical episode a few weeks ago. The only common link was pork - ham the first time, and a cheerio mini sausage this time.
I have had tummy troubles with pork myself which worsened with each pregnancy to the point where I had to avoid it completely when pregnant with Kaitereo, would it be possible that she has the same thing? We're keeping an eye on her over the next couple of days, but I think it would be safe to eliminate pork from her diet for the foreseeable future.

Other than that, both children are coming on in leaps and bounds, Mapera quite literally as she is learning to sing and dance, and enjoying our weekly music and movement group a lot more. Kaitereo is still not crawling, but she is deceptively mobile, seemingly able to shuffle around the floor either on bottom or tummy (backwards) with surprising speed!

My Dad is over visiting us for 6 weeks and Mum will be here next week, so I am looking forward to some R&R!

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In other news, I am attending a Parents Inc Parenting Toolbox course, and training to be a course facilitator. I am doing the 0-6yrs course and hope to be trained within a couple of months!
I will keep this blog posted.

Session 1:
We outlined the general types of parents we tend to see
  • the Sargent Major
  • the Jellyfish
  • the TooBusy
  • the Parent Coach
Basically, we're all more-or-less one type with elements of all the others, and we're striving (through the course) to become a Parent Coach type.
We looked at how our parents parented us, and how this might affect our own parenting style and we talked about how the course is not designed to make you feel bad, or tell you that you're doing it wrong, more to provide you with useful tools (hence Toolbox!) to deal with everyday situations that we all face and find hard.
We have homework each week, and this weeks was to "do something wacky" with your child. I got the face-paints out and Mapera, Kaitereo and I painted Monster Faces on each other and took pictures of ourselves pulling scary faces.

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Around the world

I'm joining a little online game with Fiskars, the scrapbook people. Click the link, add a comment with your name and country and tell them I sent you!

AROUND THE WORLD!

Sunday, July 6, 2008

Breastfeeding blues

Well Kaitereo has discovered how to use here nice shiny sharp teeth - ouch! She has been biting me when she is feeding, so I have been unlatching her and putting her on the ground in an effort to stop her. Unfortunately, this has become a downward spiral:

She bites - I stop feeding - my milk production decreases - Kaitereo can't get enough milk out, so she bites...and so on

I started expressing in order to keep her on breast milk, but avoid the biting, and that is when I discovered just how low my supply is, so we have bought some formula to supplement.
Now I never had any trouble feeding Mapera and she kept going til 13 months, when I weaned her straight onto cows milk. I don't have a problem with formula, it's made for babies and it serves a purpose, but I still feel like I have somehow failed my second baby.

I wanted to feed her myself until she turned 1, and I was even OK to do it via the bottle, but to have to supplement makes me feel rotten, like my body is not working properly. I've been looking up how to increase supply and I'm trying to drink more water and get more rest (both easier said than done), and I also made a batch of Tigers Milk - which was fine until the yeast woke up, and turned it into a fizzy banana milkshake - BLEUGH! I am also expressing like crazy, but it takes over 20 minutes to get 100mls.

Now I know the formula is there to help me until I can get the supply up, but it feels so wrong. I've already failed at using washable nappies 100% of the time as Kaitereo got really bad nappy rash in them overnight, so she is in disposables for night time; and Mapera is in pull-ups as I haven't found a washable equivalent that holds enough liquid yet.

*sigh*

Can anyone give me some ideas for boosting milk supply? Or just make me feel like I haven't completely failed my second child.