Whew! A Month to Remember

August is almost over. I made it through Jackson's due date anniversary with minimal crying and maximum loves and snuggles from Dash. My husband has been gone for most of the month for work so I've been experiencing my first jaunt into solo parenting.
It's not as tough as I thought!
It helped that I was incredibly busy at work. At the start of the month I had 2 new families with a combined 3 children sign contracts for care in my home. In addition, I watched another baby on a temporary basis for a week and a half.
Talk about busy! It was great though. I do much better on a busy schedule than when I have time to putz around the house. Having a full load encourages me to plan better meals and activities and we've had a blast reincorporating singing time into the routine.
All 3 of my new clients and their parents are a delight to work with and that has been really refreshing. Starting care for a new family has always been one of those things that makes me nervous, wondering whether we'll get along long-term and wanting to make sure that I take as good of care as I am capable of, to help the children thrive as they develop their fine and gross motor skills, communication, and general social interactions. Being a parent can be hard but I feel the weight of those lessons more acutely with the children I care for during the week. Those children aren't mine and I don't want to "screw them up!"
So far, so good! The new children are fitting in beautifully with my existing clients and I am really excited to get into a solid routine when school starts next week.
My middle child (I still want to call her my baby!) starts kindergarten next week.
Where has time gone?
Think about it. . . When we moved into our home, she was under a year old and not quite walking. She has been my daily companion for 5 amazing years, helping me with work things when I needed a little helper, playing with the children regardless of age, and just a general ray of sunshine with a touch of spitfire thrown in.
Or a lot of fire! That girl has personality in spades!
It's more than that though. She was only 15 months old when I suffered our 3rd loss. She was still nursing and I'll be the first to admit that I held her closer and nursed her more often for the next few months.
She nursed through the death of my mother, too. We only made it a few more weeks before I was touched out and couldn't handle breastfeeding her anymore, but she still snuggled with me each afternoon before naptime.
She watched me through losing our little girl later that year, too, and kept me smiling month after month when we couldn't seem to get pregnant again. On those days when I had all the babies sleeping and I had time to think about where I was in life, and the uncontrollable sobbing would hit, she was the one who was home to come and give me a hug and hold me tight if she was awake.
I don't think she remembers most of those grueling months where I constantly battled my grief and anger, but I will always remember the look in her eyes as she saw me crying and how much I could tell she wanted to make everything better.
She was the stitches that held my bleeding heart together until my wounds could heal.
And they have. Dash provided the remainder of the healing and I am so very grateful that I have another five years to go before I send her off to school.
I'm happy. I'm busy. I'm dedicated to the children I care for. I'm in love with my precious little girls.
I'm happy and it feels so good!
Both of my older 2 children have been assigned to the teachers we were hoping for and they each have a good friend in their class. It's going to be an amazing year.
But I just might cry when Spitfire gets on the bus next week . .
Dash is continuing to grow and I just want time to slow down a little. Please?!?!?
I know her cloth diapers add a little length to her torso and it's clear she's inherited my long body but even though she's just turned 7 months old, I can't fit her into anything unless it's 18 months. The snaps simply don't fit without an extender. She's like this chubby little ball of dimples and rolls with spastic hair and the easiest disposition of any baby I have cared for.
Her grandfather cared for her last night for a couple of hours so I could help my mother-in-law set up her classroom and he commented on how quiet and happy she was the whole time.
And she really is like that all the time. She makes a little whine/grunt noise when she's hungry or tired, but she almost never lets out a full cry as most babies tend to do.
Her excitement when she sees her food is pretty fun, too. It doesn't matter whether the food is coming from my body or her little feeder, she makes a gasping, hyperventilating, excited noise before she digs in.
In the case of nursing, she literally digs in! I've never had a pincher before but she tries to grab fistfulls of my flesh and since that doesn't really work she pinches to try and hold on while simultaneously pushing away with her arms.
It feels a little like trying to nurse an octopus. I found myself wondering aloud this morning how something with only 2 arms and 2 legs could possibly wiggle so much. 1-2-3-4. Nope, only 4 limbs, not 8.
Dash is so rolly-polly that I'm having harder time with getting her cloth diapers to fit. Some of my absolute favorites are getting too tight around her tummy.  They all claim to fit to 35 pounds and I'm thinking "How??" They seem fine when she is laying down, but since she prefers to sit they dig in and she has some serious muffin top going on! I realize she'll slim down once she's crawling and then walking, but in the meantime I am just grateful that she doesn't complain that her diaper is a little snug!
In a few short weeks the weather will cool down during the day (our nights are already cooling) and it'll be time for pants or leg warmers. I can't remember what sizes I have in storage so it will be fun looking through the older girls' clothes. Doing so always brings back a slew of memories. . .
Wait, did I just hint that I'm ready for fall?
How did that happen?? I don't like cold weather! I promise I don't!
And yet I find myself excited for sweatpants, soups, and zippered hoodies . . .
I must be getting old.

World Breastfeeding Week Daily Action

This week is World Breastfeeding Week and the topic for today has been breastfeeding and work.

Although the day is mostly over, I want to take a moment to talk about my experiences with breastfeeding and working. For each of my 3 living children, the experience has been different.

My first child was born a week after school got out. I was a high school math teacher at the time and chose to use summer break as my recovery period, without taking any sort of maternity leave. I didn’t have an insurance policy that would pay me for my time off, and taking 12 weeks of unpaid leave would have been seriously detrimental to our financial situation.

My baby was 52 days old when I returned to work. We had barely figured out nursing after a summer full of cracked and sometimes bleeding nipples, a case of thrush, and persistent low supply. I supplemented a few times, but seemed to manage to keep up barely. I had only enough milk to get through the next day for daycare.

My daughter slept through the night for the first time the night that I prepared to return to work. I pumped and felt immensely grateful for the extra few ounces. That middle-of-the-night pumping session was the first of a consistent pattern until I had to wean my daughter for medical reasons when she was 8 months old.

As a school teacher, leaving my class to express milk wasn’t an option and my state has no laws that protect a mother’s need to pump. I felt lucky to have a principal who was a mother who had breastfed her babies and she arranged for me to use a conference room in a building across campus that had a lock. It took a full week to find that room, and my persistent asking before a location was found. My own room wasn't an option because the department printer was there. 

A few times another teacher or aide would walk in to the conference room even though it was locked (how many keys were there?!?), but it was rare and I think it was far more embarrassing for them than it was for me.  I pumped during my planning period, which turned out to be the second block of the day or roughly 3 hours since I had nursed my baby.

Initially I pumped at the start of my planning period and again near the end of lunch, which was about 2 hours later. It wasn’t ideal, but it gave me enough milk to feed my baby and my body adapted fairly well. By the time she was about 6 months old, I would just pump once during the day but since I still had the night pumping, there was enough milk for my daycare provider to feed her.

With my second baby, I didn’t start work until a week before her first birthday. I opened my in-home daycare, a business I had been doing since my first baby was 14 months old. The daycare was on hiatus for a year while we lived with family but 48 hours after moving into our own home, I had clients in my care. Because she was a year old, I rarely nursed her during the day except to put her down for her naps. We were both too busy to sit and enjoy a leisurely session in the rocking chair.

I almost never pumped with my second unless I knew I was headed out of the house on an errand and thought she might want milk while we were gone. I wasn’t comfortable nursing out in the open unless I had a cover but even then everything felt awkward.  

Sometimes while I was trying to nurse her to sleep, a child would wake up on the main level of my home and I had to unlatch her and place her in her crib and let her put herself to sleep. That meant she cried, but I knew she was safe there while I attended to the care of another child.

I started working just 11 days after my 3^rd baby was born. We were still very much in the throws of cracked nipples and learning to latch properly. She had been born with lip and tongue ties and her suck pattern was painful. However, taking off additional time wasn’t an option so we worked our way through it.

Dash is now 6 months old. We’ve done a much better job of nursing on demand and I no longer worry about nursing in public. If my baby wants to eat while we are out, I feed her: anytime, anywhere. In my home, work actually prevents me from nursing her as often as she might like. Over a year before her birth, I moved my rocking chair to the playroom so that I could hold, rock, and soothe other babies. This has given me an easy way to nurse Dash while still keeping careful watch and interacting with the children I care for. However, I can’t jump up and catch a toddler as she loses her balance or wipe away tears (or boogers) without first putting Dash down if she is nursing.

It is a balance and one that will continue to ebb and flow as Dash grows older and the needs of the children I care for change. The safety of every child in my home matters and sometimes that means that my own child needs to wait a little longer than I’d like before she can nurse.

The more interesting aspect of working and nursing is my parental interactions. Currently, all of my clients either were breastfed or are currently breastfeeding. It isn’t at all awkward to have a mom come in and have me walking around holding Dash as she’s latched on, but it feels quite odd to me to do that with the dads! So if a father arrives, either to drop off or pick up his child, I remain in my seat while I nurse the baby. The 24 feet between my chair and the front door seems very long when trying to talk to a dad about his child’s day, but for the last 6 months, that is how things have been done.

My working and breastfeeding experiences aren’t typical because of the kind of work I do. However, it is still a balancing act and one that every working mom has to figure out on their own.

Random Thought

All this time and I still inhale sharply when someone says, "It's a boy!"

Lyme Disease and an Unexpected Apology

For anyone who lives in our area and doesn't live under the proverbial rock, it is well known that Lyme disease is nasty business. I have 3 friends who tested positive for it this year and can add an immediate family member to the list. Although s/he hasn't been tested yet, there was a definite bull's eye rash, the tell-tale sign, last night and the doctor agreed to treat for Lyme.

For those who are less familiar, Lyme disease is usually transmitted by the bite of a tick infected with a spirochete known as Borrelia burgdorferi. This little bugger can be vicious and is known to ruin people's lives by ruining their health. You can read more here.

My daughters' pediatrician refuses to treat for Lyme without a positive test or symptoms of the disease. My own doctor indicated that anyone who doesn't treat for Lyme, particularly after multiple bites, is playing russian roulette with their health.

After gorgeous hike about 11 days ago, we removed roughly 20 ticks from our persons, some of which were already biting and a few that were still roaming.

That's a lot of ticks!

With that in mind, and knowing that borrelia burgdorferi has been found in breastmilk (segments, not the full spirochete), my doctor wanted me on a 3 week course of a breastfeeding-safe antibiotic.

I took our 9 year old to Patient First for a rash on her hands and took the time to bring up the tick-bite issue and he, too, wanted to put her on a 10 day course of antibiotics, sighting that by catching the disease early enough, a shorter course should be sufficient. I hope he's right, but I can't find any studies that indicate that one way or another.

With a full bull's eye rash on another person, 3 of the 5 of us are on antibiotics. I am trying to find a new pediatrician that will treat the remaining bitten daughter, but I'm not having much luck.

During my search, I spoke to a nurse at a local practice earlier today who insisted that it takes at least 24 hours for a tick to transmit disease and I explained that wasn't true, as bull's eye positive family member had the tick for at most 4 hours. I was frustrated but ended the call as politely as I could manage.

Imagine my surprise when I listened to a voicemail a couple hours later from the nurse, apologizing for giving me incorrect medical information. Our conversation had triggered a desire in her to reinvestigate Lyme and she discovered that my information was correct and hers was not, so she apologized. I have never had a medical professional admit a mistake and it felt really good for a couple reasons. The first is that I know how hard it is to say "I was wrong" and I admire anyone who does it. The second was that it felt good to know that my information was correct. It's not often that I can claim to know more than a medical professional, but I definitely knew more this time.

I feel mildly vindicated. These nurses keep telling me I'm nuts for wanting to treat Lyme without symptoms, but that apology (and my own doctor and the doctor at Patient First) helped me realize that it really is important to work with a medical practice that stays current on their standards of care, particularly in an area where something is as common as Lyme is here in Northern Virginia.

The hunt for a new pediatrician isn't over yet, but I feel like I'm making progress and that is all I can ask for, I guess.

Beyond the Beard

My dear Dash is continuing to hit milestones and yesterday she experienced something she found mildly tragic: her father shaved off his beard!
My husband has had a short, neat beard since December 2010, when our middle child was just 5 months old. He recently succeeded in achieving some health goals he'd set for himself and decided he wanted to know what he looked like without the beard.
So he shaved it off. I love his beard and always have, so it was a shock to see his naked face again after so many years!
Dash was not impressed. For the first few hours she refused to look him in the eye. She let him hold her, but didn't want to make eye contact at all. This morning the beard shadow is starting to show and she spent half an hour playing with him while I cooked breakfast. By the end of the half hour, she was laughing and smiling at her daddy again!
Within 48 hours, his beard will be back to it's super-short length that he sometimes goes with but we have a couple of photos of him all naked faced.
My husband comes from some seriously awesome genes and his family ages incredibly well. His parents are in their 60s but could easily pass for being a full decade younger than they are. Each of his sisters look younger than their actual ages, too. (I got get-old-early genes, so I hope our girls get their looks from their dad and not me!) With his beard, I have never thought that he looked like he was over 32, although that birthday came and went years ago. Without the beard?
Even younger.
And with his improved health, he could pull off the Mr. Clean look if he wanted, complete with fitted white shirt and a wicked wink!
I love that man of mine. Beard or no beard.
Dash? She wants the beard.
Middle child? She wants the beard.
Oldest child? She wants the shaved face.
"His beard tickles and scratches, Mom."
Why yes it does, and I love it. *grin*

On a completely separate note, Dash and I have a short session with a professional photographer this evening as part of a Normalize Breastfeeding campaign. I'll put on a comfy pair of jeans and some sort of shirt and we'll head to a park we came across a week and a half ago while getting repairs done on our van. It'll be casual and quick, but a lot of fun.
I have taken countless pictures of myself breastfeeding my middle child years ago and my baby since her birth but haven't posted more than one or two online, simply because I worry some about being judged for "exposing" myself.
While my mother visited me after the birth of my second daughter, I commented once that I wished I could take pictures of my babies while they were nursing. At the time, my little nursling was just a couple weeks old and that was 5 years ago.
In response, Mom told me that she always wished she had pictures of her nursing her babies, too. It was one of the few regrets in parenting that she ever expressed to me and one that has stuck with me. I may never frame a nursing picture, but I have one small one of my oldest that she can keep when she leaves the home and a few of my middle child if I can hunt them down. Dash will have more, and she'll get to keep some of them if she wants, also.
The photographer is keeping the rights to all the photos and they may get shared publicly. This is a huge step for me and it isn't one that I just decided to do on a whim. I'm not the only one in these photos; Dash is in them, too.
This is a springboard of photos to come. Brelfies, if you want to use the new term (picture of oneself nursing a child), will be posted online more by me in the coming years.
One step at a time first  . . .

Milestones (Or Things that Happen in the Blink of an Eye)

Today is the last day of school for my 3rd grader. The year has been quite an adventure! On the first day of school, I was pregnant. For lack of a better description, that's pretty normal for me. Of the 4 "first day of school" days that my oldest has experienced, I have been pregnant for 3 of them.
This is the first time, however, that I got to take my baby with me to the bus stop on the last day of school!

One week until K turns 9 and 13 days until C turns 5.

It has been a month of milestones for our little family. My oldest informed me last month that she couldn't see the board from her desk, so a quick trip to the eye doctor and a few weeks later Viola! Glasses. Complete with BYU blue frames and a salmon colored case that she will eventually learn not to pinch her fingers with when she closes it.

Today was also the last school day where my middle daughter is not a student.  At the end of August, she'll start kindergarten. She's never attended preschool or any other formal educational program, but she is making quite a bit of progress in her reading. She can now sound out many words and is beginning to spell phonetically on her artwork.

We celebrated both of their birthdays with local family a few days ago. My middle one had her very first birthday in this home, just 11 days after we moved in.

K's 5th birthday and one week before C turned 1

Time sometimes feels like it's flying by. The same holds true with Dash. On Friday, my husband and I took a walk along the W&OD Trail near our home. It was a hot, muggy day but the morning wasn't too gross so we managed 5 miles with the double stroller, carrying both of our younger daughters while the oldest was in school.

After we finished, we left straight for Costco, forgetting that I didn't have my Ergo carrier with me or the single stroller. Either Dash was going to have to be held or we could try buckling her into the cart.

The cart won. She was such a happy camper up there, too!

The milestones didn't stop there. On Sunday she was doing her usual "wake-up the second you put me down" routine and I was trying rather unsuccessfully to let her cry. When the cry changed urgency, I went in and found her on her stomach with her face smashed against the side of the crib.

*This is why you don't use crib bumpers. My daughter could have suffocated in that position if there had been a padded bumper in her crib!*

She's 4 months old, which is right on the normal "roll-over" curve but I figured it was probably a fluke.

This morning I put her on her back in the middle of the crib as usual. When she later woke up, this is what I found: 

Her face wasn't crammed into the front of the crib, but she still did some sort of magical rolling over and scooting to get there.  She was pretty pleased with herself, too!

That's the tail end of a smile.

Now What?

You may have noticed a little thing in her crib that I've written about before.

BINKY!

That was my last ditch effort to help fix her latch. This pacifier is made by Munchkin and is called LATCH and although she only sucks on it for a few seconds at a time, she is trying to figure out how to keep it in her mouth and that effort is paying off for both of us. In order to keep it in, she has to make sure that she doesn't lose suction and she's taking that skill and applying it to nursing. My milk blister, which has been there since February, is slowly healing. More importantly to me, it is no longer painful. She's nursing quite comfortably all the time now, even when she is losing suction.

The exception is when she decides to yank on me. That doesn't feel comfortable at all!! Dash also likes to push away from me with her arm, even as she's eating ravenously. I'm not entirely sure why, so I find myself holding her hand out of the way to keep her still.

If you compare the Costco picture with the crib pictures, you might detect a bit of a difference, or maybe you won't. Dash also got quite a haircut on Sunday. Her hair is finally thinning where she's rubbing it on her sheets and as it has grown, it's lopsided. I took some time while nursing her and gave her a trim along everything, but especially the ears.

Hair on the ears drives me bonkers!

In a couple short hours, I will have a 4th grader, a kindergartener, and a semi-mobile baby. Please Time, slow down a little!

USPS Woes

At the start of the school year, the bus stop for my neighborhood was moved from the bottom of our neighborhood on an incredibly busy parkway to the top, where the street connects to another neighborhood street. A few parents grumbled because it meant a longer walk, but I was grateful for the change. Car accidents at the other location were frequent enough that they sometimes happened while students were waiting at the bus stop and it seemed like only a matter of time before children there were injured.
The only grumble I had with the location change was that it meant I knew I wouldn't be passing by my mailbox on a daily basis anymore, which would mean finding time to go get the mail; not an easy feat considering the weather and the difficulties involved in taking all my work children with me.
Nine months later I am still struggling with the "getting the mail" issue.
When our mailman can't fit any more mail into our box, he empties the whole thing and returns it to our sorting facility, about 6 miles up the road in a commercial area.
Getting to the mailbox down the street on a daily basis with multiple children? Complicated.
Going to the Post Office with multiple children? Not cool at all.
I'm a pro at taking the children shopping, to the farm, and on walks when the weather is cooperative but standing in line to talk to a USPS employee and then waiting while they retrieve my mail borders on torture.
Last week the mail got sent back for the 3rd time in 9 months. I called the USPS main line and requested that my mail be delivered to my home and was promised it would be there within 48 hours. After no mail (including in my mailbox, in spite of being told delivery would resume immediately) for another 4 days, I called again. I gave the polite and well spoken employee the case number from the previous week and she assured me my mail would be there by the end of the next day.
That was Tuesday, so my mail should have arrived by Thursday. It didn't.
The local office manager (not his title, but you get the idea) called me this morning and chastised me for not getting my mail on a regular basis but said my mailman would deliver my mail to my door this one time but that if this ever happened again, I'd have to go to the post office to retrieve all my mail.
Getting a dressing down from a boss (or a parent!) isn't fun, but from a stranger? Infuriating. I wanted to yell at him that when he's lost his son and been through an emotional pregnancy and 4 months of blistered nipples he can judge me but until then, shut up.
I didn't say that, but politely said I understood and hung up.
Reviews for this particular USPS office are pretty horrid, and unless the person doing the job has changed recently, he has been receiving very bad reviews for awhile for general job incompetence. In addition, he had told someone at 1-800-ASK-USPS (who I had called initially) that he'd called me at home.
No such call ever happened, so he also lied.
Yeah.
Friday I called the local Post Office again and the man on the line said he'd drop it off on his way home from work. I happened to have the early afternoon off, so I decided to swing by and just get it on my own. At that point, it had been 2 weeks since we'd gotten any mail.
After waiting in line, then waiting by their blue door or doom (the one with a bolted window attached that makes me feel a little like Oliver from Oliver Twist), I was informed there was no mail for me.
The driver must have already grabbed it so I went home and waited.
And Waited.
And Waited.
He'd said it would be dropped off around 6pm but 6pm came and went without any knocks on the door or the doorbell ringing.
I was pretty mad and my husband wasn't happy, either.
At 7pm, the doorbell rang.
FINALLY!!!
For two weeks of mail, the bin was not very full, which I guess was a good thing. The most important piece of mail in there was a package I'd ordered for myself as part of my belated birthday present.
It was there and I've used it and it's wonderful!!
But that's for another post. *thspsthsp*