Author: Veronica

I started Isaac on solids today. A week ago I would have sworn black and blue he wasn’t ready. Today?  I was breaking out the rice cereal and celebrating.

Okay, maybe I wasn’t celebrating, but still.

He has been fussy for the last few days. Wanting to feed every hour, but getting bored after a few minutes and pulling at my nipple (Isaac says: ‘My Mummy is a stretchy chew toy!’). Then he’d fuss 10 minutes later because he was still hungry. Sigh. So today, I made up a tablespoon of rice cereal and gave it to him after a feed. He didn’t seem to hate it with a fiery passion (like Amy did) and after swirling it around in his mouth for a bit, swallowed it down. And again. And again. He ended up eating the entire amount.

I was almost shocked. Dude was ready for real food.

Although I think calling rice cereal real food is a bit of a stretch. More like, mushy-tastes-like-nothing-slop. Details.

However, our real food issues are coming from Amy.

She’ll have an apple in her hand and with her mouth full announce, ‘Still hungry!’

She is permanently ‘still hungry’.

It’s driving me mad. Mostly I ignore it. At least I will until the demands for food become so annoying I couldn’t ignore it from another country.

There’s only so much you can do with carrots, apples and slices of capsicum.

At dinner, she eats her meat of her own accord, then ignores her vegies. If I pick up her plate and feed her, she is more than willing to eat everything, but obviously having to feed herself is just too hard. We pick our battles and if she was starving hungry then of course she would eat everything, but she isn’t. Because she snacks all day. Constantly.

Somehow, I think she’s gotten herself confused with ‘hungry’ and ‘bored and wanting instant gratification’.

Sigh.

It’s gotten so bad with the ‘still hungry!’ that the other night? I went in before bed to make sure she was snuggled. She woke up a little, looked at me sleepily and announced ‘Mummy, Amy is still hungry.’ She wasn’t even awake properly!

It’s a phase and it will pass. The good news though? She will eat bowlfuls of porridge. She loves the stuff. (With real oats, not the instant kind)

Other Amy-isms lately:

Amy woke up at 6.30am. She’s been waking earlier and earlier lately.

‘Amy, it’s still dark. Go back to bed.’

‘But Mummy, Amy is already awake!’

Why so you are.

**

‘Amy, would you like to give Nanny a hug?’

‘No.’

Then she ran away. Obviously Nanny had had enough hugs.

**

‘Mummy!’

‘What?’

‘Isaac is scary!’

‘Isaac isn’t scary.’

‘Yes! Isaac is a scary monster. Arghhhhh! Amy hide.’

**

You might wake up with a sore breast. ‘Hmmmm, probably a blocked duct’ you’re likely to think. ‘Must express on that side today.’

You feed the baby on that side (or toddler) and carry on about your day.

A little while later (in my case it was about 60 minutes – not very long) you start to feel very tired. Your breast hurts and your back/shoulders ache a little and you’d really like a nap. Not too long after that, you find yourself curled up on the couch feeling progressively worse. Your head hurts, your skin hurts, everything is happening so fast and MAN do you feel sick.

Maybe by now your breast has been cleared of blockages and isn’t hurting so much.You still feel shocking though.

You probably have mastitis.

‘The books’ all say that mastitis is an infection in your breast (correct) and that you will generally feel a lumpy painful patch (not always correct. I had pain without the lumps) with a red area.

Just to clarify, a red area in your breast doesn’t look as if you have been slapped or spent too long with your breasts in front of the heater, which is what I was expecting the first time I got mastitis. A red area actually looks like a patch of skin where you can see that the tiny little blood vessels are more pronounced. It’s not terribly noticeable unless you’re looking for it.

My advice:

Get yourself to a Doctor, Urgent Care, the Emergency Room, whatever. Get yourself there as fast as you can. By the time you realise you have mastitis, you probably shouldn’t be driving. All you want to do is sleep and shake and probably cry. If you can, get someone else to drive you.

You need antibiotics as soon as possible.

Mastitis makes you really sick, really fast. Like, REALLY fast.

In general, I find the books telling you that it feels like ‘flu like symptoms’ to be a little misleading. Yes there are the muscle aches and the exhaustion and the temperature. But for me, all my flu’s have started with the mother of all head colds and then moved into my chest. Mastitis is like flu, but without the flu.

Today I woke up with a sore breast. I fed Isaac on it twice (crying the whole time, my infection was right behind my nipple and it was excruciating). When I started feeling too sick to sit up I thought I was just tired. Then it clicked in my head that I needed antibiotics. This is my 3rd (or 4th?) bout of mastitis ever, so I had antibiotics knocking around in the fridge ‘just in case’.

[I might be silly sometimes, but no one tell me I don’t know how to self medicate. I have EVERYTHING hanging around in the fridge, just in case.]

I took an antibiotic and 2 Panadeine and headed to the shower to express. I needed a shower anyway, seeing as how Isaac vomited on my face this morning. If you’ve got a breast pump (I don’t) a heat pack [or hot face washers] and pumping will work too. You need to keep that breast as empty as possible.

DO NOT STOP FEEDING THE BABY

Regardless of how bad it hurts, keep feeding the baby. Mastitis turns really nasty if you don’t keep the breast empty.

I am spending today curled up on the couch with a blanket. Isaac has been good and Amy is busily running in and out of the house with Nathan.

Incidentally, if you have EDS, because of poor body temperature control, a temperature will generally be seen by the doctor that is within normal range. My temperature during the last bout of mastitis was 37.3C and the doctor said ‘normal’. However, because my body temps are generally only 36.5C (ish) it was raised for me. After I had Isaac, the midwives kept checking that I was indeed, feeling okay because my blood pressure was only slightly above dead AND my temps were low. The joys, right?

So here ends my public service announcement of the day. I’m off to eat painkillers and curl up sick now. Thank god dinner is in the slow cooker already.

Dear Collective Power of the Internets,

Potty training. What’s the deal with that?

Now I wasn’t going to talk about potty training here, but I am so freaking sick of it.

Amy will not poo in the potty or on the toilet. She’s dry all day with accidents being very rare. BUT, if she needs to poo, she will ask (scream, wail, cry) for a nappy so she can poo.

I have no idea how to proceed. She understands everything we say, but flat down refuses to poo in anything other than a nappy.

Things that haven’t worked so far:

Bribes
Stickers
Reward charts
Chocolate
Growling
Pleading
Crying
Ignoring
Ice-cream
More Bribes

Things that have worked:

Uh. Nothing. She has never pooed in a potty. Ever.

So. You guys have a ton of collective knowledge between you. What worked for you?

Note: If we refuse to put a nappy on her, she will just wail, scream and cry and then not poo at all. At least, not until we put her in a nappy for bedtime. I’m not prepared to have her just in knickers overnight because she wets the bed between 2-4am and seriously, we’re not getting enough sleep as it is without adding in wetting the bed stress. She is not constipated, she is just stubborn.

Sigh.