Thalia's fertility journey: hopefully more comedy than tragedy

Pob's head

Cranial osteopathy. It's not science, it's not medicine, but it changed my cousin's son utterly. At two months he wasn't meeting his developmental milestones. He was floppy and didn't interact much with the world at all. At three months, after a few sessions of cranial ostepathy, he was a different child. Now he's 6 and is just a great, normally rambunctious, little boy. So when Pob started to scream at the breast at about 6 days old, my cousin suggested I take her to a cranial osteopath to see if it might help. Despite my scepticism, I figured, 'can't hurt, might help' and took her at 13 days old for her first appointment. She visibly relaxed and lengthened during that session but the few feeds immediately afterwards were the worst we'd had, so I didn't take her back until she was around 11 weeks old when yet another lactation consultant suggested it might be worth a try.

At that visit the osteopath apologised for not warning me that things might get worse before they got better. Again, Pob seemed to really chill out during the session and so I decided to take her back again this week. At this session, the osteopath pointed out that the right side of her head was getting a bit flatter than the left. I'd already noticed that she favours turning her head to the right, and have been trying to encourage her to turn the other way as well, but not very systematically. I've tried putting her cot book to the left, putting a mobile on that side of the crib, etc. The osteopath said that her neck is pretty stiff so he did some work on that, and suggested we keep trying to offer her toys, etc. from that side to encourage her to even things out. I'll also take her back to see him in a few weeks time.

I know many of you have had helmets for your children when a problem like this has showed up, usually when they are a bit older, though. Both the osteopath and the paediatrician who saw her when she was born told me that British children tend not to get helmets unless the imbalances are REALLY severe, as it's thought better to correct the root cause of the imbalance rather than the outcome. In Pob's case, it seems to be some neck stiffness, so we'll work on that with the osteopath and see what happens. I'm not worried, but glad to be aware that we should do some work on this. H is worried, and has immediately put Pob on left side boot camp, changing the way he gives bottles, only talking to her from that side, etc. It's quite amusing, he can't bear his perfect daughter to have anything not perfect about her. I'm happy to wait and see what effect bootcamp has before we worry any further.

Three months

On Thursday, Pob was three months old. The day didn't begin auspiciously as she was recovering from her injections the day before, so she woke at 530am and needed a feed. I ended up just putting her in bed with me and feeding while dozing for a couple of hours. It wasn't the best sleep I've had but it was warm and cozy and very sweet. She still needed a bottle at the end of it, but it felt ok that we'd had that wonderful cuddle time first. We're doing better. No breast refusal since my last post, and no formula since Tuesday night, my pumping has been doing pretty well despite the fact I stopped all supplements (thanks Meg!) on Wednesday and haven't been pumping all evening any more, either.

At three months Pob is an utter delight. She is smiley and very very alert, constantly bobbing her head as she struggles to look at everything simultaneously. She'll flick her eyes back and forth between my face, H's face, the light fittings, the bannisters, a toy, as if life is too short for her to get in all the experiences she wants. I took her to a Gymboree class yesterday, and even though it was during her naptime, there were several bits of it she loved, particularly having the multicoloured parachute waved above her head and then snatched away. She also enjoyed looking at the other babies, and spent very little time looking at me. Occasionally she'd flick her glance back to me as if to check I was still there, then she'd go back to looking over her right shoulder to see what was going on over there. After the class she fell asleep as soon as I got her in the Baby Bjorn. On the bus on the way home she lay with her head resting on her arms, it was really an adorable pose.

One of our best times together is bath time, a big change from when she used to scream the house down during this. We've now managed to get chilled out about it ourselves, and thanks to a great bath toy and some Supernanny tips on how to get her in and out of the bath without surprising her, she seems to really enjoy it. Perhaps the most enjoyable part is when we give her a massage afterwards. I've been meaning to learn how to do baby massage properly, but in the meantime I'm just following my instincts and she really chills out while I do it. We get lots of smiles and giggles, with perhaps just a little screaminess while we're drying her or geting her vest on afterwards. But in general it's a lovely process.

In general,I think we have pretty much the best baby in the world. She is certainly beautiful, but she's also edibly cute, I can't get enough of looking at her, kissing her and hugging her. It's a shame she doesn't yet respond to kisses, but she gets them anyway. She also (mostly) sleeps well which as given us all back some of our sanity. She smiles and plays and seems to quite like H and I. She finds the world a fascinating place, and the delight we get from watching her watch it is indescribable. Yes, we waited a long long time, but now she's here, she's perfect. It's not really possible to write how happy I am, but I am. Yes, I'd like to have lost more of this weight, yes, I'd like for feeding to not be such a palava, but if this is what life is like in order to have Pob, well, then it's worth it.

With thanks to DD whose holiday card inspired me to write about happiness for a change!

Hitting the nail on the head

A conversation with one of my oldest friends.

Thalia: General whining about breastfeeding. Missing out on bonding at the breast. Wanted to bond. Moan moan worry whine moan

Friend: T, there is more to your relationship with Pob than sticking your tit in her mouth every few hours

Thalia: Stunned silence.

She's got a point, don't you think?

Luckily I know not to quit on a bad day

On Sunday, I pumped 595ml. I've never pumped anything like that much - the previous high was 525ml and that had only happened once. I was bouncing between 420ish and 490ish a day, which was allowing me to only use formula every 3-4 days. Given where we've come from, you can imagine I was feeling a little smug about that. I'd accomplish this by pumping once in the middle of the night, since she's stopped waking between midnight and 7. That gave me around 100ml. Then I'd pump after each feed, and I've been following electriclady's advice, and just leaving the pump stuff set up and getting in a sneaky 10 minutes here and there as well, which had given me an extra 80ml or so a day. All this pumping, plus taking a bunch of supplements, plus the domperidone, and I felt like we had a routine which was manageable, and, indeed, quite rewarding after all we'd been through. She has been going on the breast at every feed, and we've been having a nice time together, and then she gets filled up with a bottle. She's gaining weight beautifully, and looks wonderful, and we were doing it almost entirely on breast milk. I could see that I didn't want to continue this forever, because it was stopping me from getting out of the house much, but I wasn't prepared to give it up just yet.

Then, over the last few days, two things happened. The first is that she started fussing at the breast, coming on and off, and, at 3 feeds over the last 2 days, screaming inconsolably until I gave up and gave her a bottle. It's the bad old days of 2-3 weeks old all over again. The second is that the pumping volume has gone way down. I still get a good pump at about 4am, and I can get a good volume in the morning by pumping after my shower - i.e., about 30 minutes after the morning feed has ended - but then that's it, the rest of the day I'm struggling to get 40mls after a feed.  know that 6 weeks ago I'd have been delighted by that, but now it feels like such a step backwards. Well, it is a step backwards!

When the post-feed volume started to decrease about a week ago, I just assumed it was because she was taking more from the boobs (I've certainly felt that she's been sucking better), and that the boobs would catch up and I'd get back to pumping more again in due course if I kept stimulating them. So I added in extra pumps between feeds to try and get more volume, and to add stimulation. To no avail, I'm just killing my nipples to get an extra 20mls or so. Sunday, it turns out, was a bit of a fluke, and anyway was accomplished by adding in two extra between-feed pumps, which is not a habit that's conducive to having a life.

The breast refusal is worse. That takes me back to my saddest, darkest moments since she was born. The thought, the feeling, that she doesn't enjoy nursing, is a horrible blow to my self-esteem and a hit to the nursing relationship I thought we'd established. What I have craved, over and above the need to nourish my baby, is the desire for a lovely bonding experience at the breast. After the initial three weeks of struggle, I thought we'd got to a good place with that, but now it seems she's got fed up with the slow flow and wants the bottle more than me. Ugh. This is compounded by my worry over the last week or so that she's not really bonded to me - she seems to be as happy with my mum, or H's mum, or H, as she is with me.

Well, this has to be the dullest post ever.

The point is, I thought we had a system which I could keep up for maybe another month, get her to 4 months, before I started to taper off so that it wasn't too much of a shock to the system when I went back to work, and so I could start to exercise a bit more and shed the awful, flabby 30 extra pounds I still have to lose. I was feeling ok about it because I had such a sense of achievement about where we've got to, and what I was managing to produce, even if it was horribly hard work. But today it doesn't feel worthwhile. Funny how hung up on the numbers I've got, my sense of self worth tied almost solely to ml pumped/ml supplemented per day.

However, as the title says, I know not to quit on a bad day. We'll see how tomorrow goes.

Btw, I don't want a lot of comments telling me to give up, because although I know everyone means well, it's not what I need to hear. I know it's ok to give up, I know she'll be fine on formula, but I want to breast feed her, and if that's my main job right now, I want to do it as well as I can. I'm ok, really I am, I'm just having one of those moments.

She's still wonderful, by the way.

Perfect timing

Yesterday I bought a video camera from a woman in my antenatal class. H charged it up and read the instruction manual last night. Today he put Pob down for her tummy time (he has to do it because I can't stand the screaming). He went to get the camera, walked back towards her on her mat, then accelerated saying, "Oh my goodness she's going to roll over!" I was sure he was exaggerating, she's barely been lifting her head off the mat before now. But lo and behold, there she was lifting her chest off the mat, resting on her forearms, her head upright. As he started to raise the camera to start filming, she rolled over and ended up on her back, looking a bit surprised. Then he started filming. Because I'd been distracted by watching him get the camera, I hadn't seen her do the roll, just the before and after.

I figured it was a bit of a fluke, and we proceded with the rest of the day. After her afternoon feed, H decided to put her on her tummy again. He put her down, then picked up the camera. Again I wasn't watching, and there she went, over on her back by the time I looked round, before H had the chance to start filming. We decided if we were going to capture it on film it was going to take 2 of us, so I took over baby wrangling (stopping pumping to do so), and carefully put her down while H filmed steadily. She lifted her head. She tucked her elbow in. She wriggled her head a bit. She raised one leg, and then she rolled. I flipped her back, she rolled again, and again. Finally we got it on camera, along with me laughing and crying and telling her how wonderful she is. It's also a sign of her bloody-mindedness. She hates tummy time, now she's learnt how not to do it any more! My daughter is a frigging genius, I tell you.

It's quite astonishing, how emotional I feel about her rolling over. Why is that? Because it's a sign of her growing up? Because it's so entertaining? She's sleeping now and I want to wake her and get her to do it again. It's been a good day.

In which my body proves, yet again, that it is the boss of me

My body really is perverse sometimes. For the last few weeks I've pumped after every feed, that's six times a day. I went from being able to pump around 280mls a day when I started this regime, to around 500mls or so just before I got ill 10 days ago. My supply then fell back to 400mls and didn't seem to recover even when I got better. I started to pump for longer, up to an hour at a time if I can bear it, and then a few nights ago decided to add in a pump at around 2am, now that she's reliably not waking til around 430 or 5. So I pumped at 2am and the first night I got an extra 90mls from doing that. But the next night it was 80mls, and last night it was 75. In addition, the amount of milk I get at the other pumping sessions has decreased, so that overall I'm now pumping around 450-470 rather than the 500-600 I was hoping for. (Still not as much as she's drinking, but enough to limit the formula to just under one feed per day). I'm having to pump for up to an hour just to get 80mls at the 430am feed, which is not really what I need given that I do have to sleep as well. I've tried power pumping (pump for 10 mins, pause for 10, repeat 3 times) a few times a day and that does give me more, but it takes a long time and during week days I need to be with my daughter rather than stuck to the pump!

The perversity seems to be that pumping more doesn't increase my supply. I get more the first time I do it as if I somehow catch my body by surprise, and then over a few days it adjusts back to the lower overall volume. Do you think if I sneakily changed the time I pumped every day my body would be surprised and I'd get more out? Why do I work (or not work) differently from every other woman on the planet in this area?

Book meme - UPDATED

I've just written a very ill-natured post that I've thought better about posting, at least for now, so here's something a bit less inflammatory. Here's a book meme from Ceci n'est pas un blog via Oro. And now with extra context. This meme seems to have started some time in October, and is based on the top 106 books marked as 'unread' at Library Thing. Hence the somewhat random nature of the list. I guess people don't read Jane Austen but they do read Hemingway? Here are some others who have done the meme, to give some kind of a blog trail. It's been rather like Chinese whispers, the nature of the meme, its origins gradually lost as new blogs picked it up.

Books are in bold if I've read them, in italics if I started but couldn't finish, and struck through if I couldn't stand them. Now with asterisks for those I've read more than once. One asterisk is one repeat reading, two askterisks are for multiple re-readings.

**1984
The Aeneid
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
*American Gods
*Anansi Boys
Angela’s Ashes : A Memoir
Angels & Demons
*Anna Karenina
Atlas Shrugged
Beloved
The Blind Assassin
**Brave New World
The Brothers Karamazov
The Canterbury Tales
Catch-22
The Catcher in the Rye
A Clockwork Orange
Cloud Atlas
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
A Confederacy of Dunces
The Confusion
The Corrections
The Count of Monte Cristo
Crime and Punishment
Cryptonomicon
**The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
*David Copperfield
Don Quixote
Dracula
Dubliners
Dune
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Emma
Foucault’s Pendulum
The Fountainhead
Frankenstein
Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
The God of Small Things
The Grapes of Wrath
Gravity’s Rainbow
Great Expectations
Gulliver’s Travels
Guns, Germs and Steel: The fates of human societies
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
The Historian: A Novel
**The Hobbit
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Iliad
In Cold Blood : A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences
The Inferno
*Jane Eyre
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
The Kite Runner
Les Misérables
Life of Pi : A Novel
*Lolita
Love in the Time of Cholera
Madame Bovary
Mansfield Park
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlemarch
Middlesex
The Mists of Avalon
Moby Dick
Mrs. Dalloway
The Name of the Rose
*Neverwhere
Northanger Abbey
The Odyssey
Oliver Twist
On the Road
The Once and Future King
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Oryx and Crake : A Novel
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Persuasion
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Poisonwood Bible : A Novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Pride and Prejudice
The Prince
Quicksilver
Reading Lolita in Tehran : A Memoir in Books
The Satanic Verses
The Scarlet Letter
Sense and Sensibility
A Short History of Nearly Everything
The Silmarillion
Slaughterhouse-five
The Sound and the Fury
The Tale of Two Cities
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
The Three Musketeers
The Time Traveler’s Wife
To the Lighthouse
**Treasure Island
Ulysses
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Vanity Fair
*War and Peace
**Watership Down
White Teeth
Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
Wuthering Heights
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : An Inquiry Into Values

I wasn't surprised to find out I do fairly well on this. It's a combination of having been a shy, bookish child with a father who readily supplied books when I was much too young for them (the Tin Drum at 11, anyone?), plus having done English A-level (school leaving exam at 18 in the UK, you only study 3-4 subjects for the last 2 years so there's plenty of time for each subject), plus the book group I was part of in Philadelphia - which inflicted the AWFUL 'Confederacy of Dunces', and 'The Fountainhead', on me. 'The Fountainhead' was the only book for bookgroup I never finished, I hated it so much I subconsciously left it behind on a plane so I COULDN'T finish it, and thankfully I couldn't make the meeting where bookgroup discussed it so I didn't have to own up. HATED it.

I feel  bad at some of the classics I haven't read. Vanity Fair, Gulliver, Don Quixote among others. I don't feel bad about not reading Ulysses. I don't have the brain power to attempt any of those at the moment, and envy my friend C who just did jury duty, and used it as an opportunity to start reading Trollope, who I've never even attempted. She's a more serious reader than I am. She got me going on a bunch of less obvious classics when I was 18 and about to go to India for 6 months. She acted as a reading consultant and I went to India with around 30 books, most of which I got through and which really changed my life. 'War and Peace' was one of them but she also got me to read 'The Raj Quartet', 'A Room with a View,' and 'The Spire', among others. I think that 'The Portrait of Dorian Gray' was one of her suggestions, too. I'll have to dig up my journal from that time and remnd myself of the other books on the list. It was a transformative six months of reading for me. She also more recently gave me 'Ghostwritten' by David Mitchell, the author of 'Cloud Atlas', telling me she thought it was rather better than his more famous book, and I loved it.

I've never heard of "The Historian" or the 'History of the US' book. Why is that last one a classic? Is it a classic just if you're American or for the rest of us, too?

I remain frustrated at the non-finishing of "Les Mis". I was reading it on a bus travelling around China when I was 20, and left it behind at 4am when I had to scramble to get my stuff together when I was told by the bus driver that we'd arrived at the town I was going to. We hadn't, it was some other random town and I ended up wandering the streets for a while until I found another bus station. And then I found I hadn't got my book with me, with just 80 pages to go til the end. It wasn't possible to find another copy, in the wilds of southwest China on the backpacker trail, and by the time I was back in Europe it didn't seem right just to dive back in 7/8ths of the way through, I thought I'd need to start all over again. I've never had the heart to pick it up again.