Back on board

Quick update, more to come:

• Back from 5 days away with Omi and Opi
• Kaitereo over 1 chest infection, but might have another :(
• Mapera behaving like an angel thanks to Mummy's new techniques - thank you Diane Levy!
• Kaitereo now with 6 teeth and confirmed hands and knees forward motion!

Photos:

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.

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!

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.

Holiday fun

Well we just did our first holiday with both girls. We've been away with them before, but that was a mad fly-drive south for a funeral. This was a little road trip to Tauranga to a nice little holiday park with hot pools.
This is what we bought the big gas-guzzling van for! We strapped the babies in, loaded the back up with portacot, buggy, bed linen, suitcases of clothes and nappies, food, drink, spare clothes, raincoats, toys, more toys books and a change of undies for me and off we went.
I didn't take a lot of pictures, mainly because I was either in the water, or carrying a child in one hand and a bag of nappies in the other, but I did take a few. Find me on Facebook if you want a look.
We had a great week and I think the mineral water in the pools really helped Kaitereo's eczema as it seems to be healing up a lot. She still has the dry patches, but the red-raw rash is gone.

We spent the first 3 nights at Omokoroa Holiday park in a cute little unit with 2 bedrooms and so many beds Mapera couldn't decide where she wanted to sleep. She ended up on the bottom bunk just like at home!! She wanted to go to bed straight away and spent a happy half hour playing on each of the beds and putting her baby to bed as well.
Kaitereo really loved the hot pools, and we were in them every morning and evening. She was laughing and splashing like a loon. Mapera is getting a lot more confident in the water now, and we got her a set of water wings so she could swim without our help. When she starts lessons again next term, she'll be on her own in the pool with just the instructor! No more help from Mummy...I'm really proud but also very nervous.
I've decided to try and teach Kaitereo myself now, so she can have lessons while Mapera is having hers. I'll probably get Kaitereo into classes when she reaches the stage of needing to swim without my help.

I've wandered off the subject of our holiday, so back we go. On our last day we decided to stay another night, but the place we were in was booked, so we headed off to Rotorua to see what was there. We found another Thermal Holiday Park with a cool cabin (bunk beds in the corridor for Mapera!) and 4 hot pools. We let Mapera have loads of rubbish to eat and drink, but I think I have finally weaned her off the bottle. We forgot to take hers with us so I suggested we just give her warm milk in a cup before bed, and she loved it!
I've decided to keep it up at home, but she realised her "blue cup" (bottle) was in the cupboard when we got back, so tonight we had a minor tantrum when I told her she was having a cup.

We bathed in the pools, went to a cool animal park, ate out ALL the time and just relaxed. Mapera behaved like an angel, and so despite the mountains of luggage we seemed to need, I think we could cope with another holiday like that!
Both the girls have got straight back into normal routine, and I think it's because we pretty much kept it the same over the holiday - no TV, meal times and sleep times not too different and plenty of fresh air. Poor Kaitereo has the cough that we've all had, and I thought she had avoided. I can't give her any cough mixture as she's under 2 and she is not sleeping well, poor mite.

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Well I wrote that a few days ago and have only now got round to posting it 3 days after we got home! Kaitereo has been given a once-over by the doctor, and the cough is nothing to worry about - I was concerned that it had gone into her chest as an infection. She seems to be recovering too, sleeping better definitely.

Mapera got some new books on holiday, and we have a new favourite: The Gruffalo. I looked for it as I'd heard good things about it and I was not disappointed. I do think I have heard the basic story somewhere before though, maybe an Aesops fable or something? Can anyone out there enlighten me??

Pinetarsol bath

This is what we have to bathe our poor itchy baby in:

Eczema

I've been treating Kaitereo's rash as a nappy rash and teething rash for months, but it has been spreading in little patches onto areas where she is not under a nappy or dribbling. I took her to the doctors to rule out skin problems and maybe get some useful advice and it turns out she has eczema.
Poor little mite, she's been suffering for ages! I asked the doctor if there were any ways to treat it that didn't involve steroid cream, and he said no.
So...I got the prescription: steroid cream twice a day for 2 weeks, aqueous cream every time I change or bathe her and pinetarsol for the bath.

I REAAALLLLYY don't want to use steroid creams on her unless nothing else works, so I'm going to try cutting out wheat from her diet for 2 weeks instead, along with moisturising her skin and avoiding soaps. She's keeping the teething necklace on, as I think it is helping with her teething and it won't do any harm.

I've got the steroid cream so if it gets worse or doesn't improve I will use it. UNLESS someone out there has a tried and tested remedy they can recommend. *hopeful face*