Oh Frida!

Morgan is growing like a weed. She is now somewhere around the 14 pound mark, I think. She is 5 months old and already has a tooth and is very nearly crawling. Time is flying.

Last week she had yet another cold. I kept trying to aspirate her nose with one of those rubber bulb syringes from my baby care kit.

 If you’ve used one of these, you know that babies hate them. At least my babies do. My girls turn away whenever I try to use it, and usually the whole ordeal ends with a lot of crying and me giving up. Since Morgan was hospitalized at an early age, I learned the importance of keeping her nose as clear as possible when she’s got a cold. But the bulb syringe has been difficult.

 

Enter solution: NoseFrida! a.k.a The Snotsucker Nasal Aspirator.

Before you use it, you have to get over the concept… or to be frank, the possibility that you might end up sucking up some of your baby’s snot. But really, it’s pretty unlikely. This thing was designed in Sweden and is way more effective than a bulb syringe, and they say even more powerful than the commercial suction machines because it’s powered by a stronger sucker–the human lungs! Yes, you have to suck the snot out yourself. But don’t panic, it’s totally hygenic with filters and a very long tube so you’re not going to get anything in your mouth… although I guess in theory you could. Anyway, with this I was actually able to clear out Morgan’s mucus so that both she and I could get some rest at night when her cold was at its worst. Go to the website, think about it. My older daughter didn’t learn to blow her nose until she was over the age of 2, and kids get a LOT of colds. This is going to be one handy device for the next 18 months!

toxins

I’ve always been a little paranoid about toxins in our environment. And it seems like so many people are getting cancer, young people. Did this always happen? Or are we just able to detect more cancers now? Or is there really more cancer because we’re all being exposed to stuff that makes us sicker?

There was the whole BPA scandal where we found out that we’d all been using plastics for years that contained a hazardous chemical. Now, we still use plastic but are told that much of it doesn’t contain BPA–at least not the stuff that we’re giving to our babies. But get THIS: I saw a Nature of Things episode the other night in which I learned that BPA was replaced with BPS in plastics. Does anyone know if BPS is any safer?

In our house, we’ve switched from plastic to glass & steel. Well sort of… as much as anyone can. We got glass lock containers instead of tupperware (but the lids are plastic). We have stainless steel water bottles & coffee mugs. But when I start thinking about all the food items in my house and what they’re packaged in, it’s mostly plastic except for some glass jars and some canned goods. But even the cans are now lined with plastic, which I think has BPA in it. It would be so difficult to avoid all the plastic. It’s everywhere.

Not to mention the whole radiation issue. There’s wi-fi everywhere you go and I LOVE LOVE LOVE my iPhone and my computer. When I’m rocking the baby to sleep, I sometimes have my ear buds in while I watch a show on netflix, it makes passing the time so much easier. Maya loves the apps and she uses our MacBook computer for all kinds of learning & entertainment. So, am I irradiating my children? Is all my technology safe?

The truth is I have no idea and there’s no definitive evidence to prove that any of this stuff is really harmful. But shouldn’t we employ the precautionary principle? It seems to me we tend to use all these products & chemicals until there is a problem, and then we start to worry. Isn’t this approach totally backwards? Shouldn’t everything be tested extensively to ensure that it’s safe before it’s marketed? I know this wouldn’t suit the capitalist model–corporations would be very angry if there was increased regulation and delays in getting products out on the market as fast as possible.

But what are we to do?

soother fingers thumb

Maya sucks her fingers. It’s a good thing because she can soothe herself and has been able to do so since she found those fingers at only a few months of age.

Maya at a few months of age

But her teeth are going to be atrocious if I can’t get her to stop. My dad sucked the same two fingers. My sister sucked hers obsessively, and she had a zillion dollars worth of dental work done to correct it (and her teeth are perfect now). Maya kind of wants to stop because she knows it’s a “big girl” thing to do… but she simply isn’t ready and still craves it. I’m working on it. Tips for helping her quit are welcome.

In the hope that Morgan wouldn’t follow in her sisters ‘finger sucking’ footsteps (and for numerous other reasons), I gave her a soother from the day she was born. I LOVE the soother. She’s not overly hooked on it and it saved my nipples from that dry, cracked, aching pain in the first weeks after she was born (I was tortured with Maya at the beginning). The soother helps people other than me calm her down and get her to sleep.  It’s so fantastic.

But this past week, Morgan has been pulling out her soother and trying eagerly to suck her thumb. In fact, she’s now practicing the thumb sucking every chance she gets.Determined to master it.

Morgan working on the thumb

I don’t think I can stop her… she’s as fixated on her thumb as her sister is on her other fingers. Whatever will I do?!

Bring on the dental bills.

Jinxed

I have clearly been too vocal about how well things were going. Right after my last post, Maya woke up with a terrible case of diarrhea. Honestly! I can’t believe it. Not only that, Morgan had been sleeping up to 8 hours a night and she went back down to 3 hour stretches last night. Maya who had been getting up at 6am slept until 8:30, but the baby woke up at 6:30–Murphy’s Law!

Maya’s newest stomach problems decided to begin at the exact time that her friend arrived for a play date, and right when the baby woke up screaming with gas pains. Maya’s anxiety over having “splat poo” as she calls it has been reborn, only much more intense this time, as she screamed hysterically that she wanted me to “make it stop” in between accidents because she couldn’t make it to the toilet on time, poor kid!

My gracious friend departed pretty quickly and I don’t blame her.  She’s 38 weeks pregnant and came with her little boy who is the same age as Maya. The morning was supposed to be a relaxing relief for her, instead she was holding my baby while I ran around helping Maya with her hysteria and clean-up. What a scene! Thank you, Universe, I am officially humbled… please forgive my hubris.

hippo candy

Sometime in December Maya got hit with a stomach bug. Not the barfing kind, but the other one, you know the ‘D-word’. She was pretty sick. Running to the toilet, having an accident in her pants in a public place (oh what fun!) and not really understanding what was going on. She even put herself to sleep for a nap when she got home… after she basically declared that she would never nap again. She was a bit freaked out by the whole thing. It passed quickly and we were all relieved.

Afterwards, I wanted to help speed her recovery so I purchased some intestinal flora for kids, you know little animal shaped vitamins with probiotics in them. The bottle had little hippos on it and Maya LOVED them. And why wouldn’t she? They taste like candy. She asked me why she was allowed to have these ‘candies’ every day, in fact twice a day without question. Afterall, I ration all her other sweets religiously. Naturally, she was perplexed by the free for all allowed by these magical ‘hippo candies’. So I explained that they would help give her “log poops” and could help prevent diarrhea.

Well somehow she got freaked out that she was going to have diarrhea every time she went to the bathroom unless she had the hippo candy in advance and she was having these anxiety attacks before every bowel movement, holding it in and frantically asking if she was going to have a healthy BM before every bathroom trip and double checking that she had taken her hippo candy. Poor kid,she became obsessed with the consistency of her poops! It was a bit of a scene. We worked hard to convince her that getting a stomach bug is actually rare, it doesn’t happen often.

Finally, after a month of more poo discussion than I ever thought I’d participate in, she is over it and has stopped asking me every day if she is going to have diarrhea and has stopped obsessing over her probiotics.

Convince me we’re normal here, what does your toddler obsess about?

baby fat

I’m finally feeling recovered from my c-section. My recently dislocated shoulder is giving me a bit of grief–all the baby rocking and lifting Maya isn’t great for a shoulder that hasn’t fully healed. But aside from that I’m feeling like I really want to kick start the weight loss from what I gained during pregnancy and re-sculpt my body, because I used to be really fit! I love working out and I’ve missed it.

But when you’re stuck at home with two kids, what are you supposed to do? Well, my sister who is a personal trainer, boot camp instructor, and fitness guru, has directed me to the Bodyrock website. Okay, I know it’s kind of soft porn because of the hot girls with big boobs bouncing around (and I just lost all my male readers who are now watching Bodyrock TV…), but the workouts are actually excellent. The people on the site really know what they’re doing and the best part is that you can do all the workouts in your own home, and they’re pretty short which means I can squeeze them into my day. There are loads of archives to scroll through so that you can target the areas that you most want to work on. I watched a host of videos yesterday and then my dear sweet hubby let me go to the gym for an hour to get a quick workout in, and I put to work a lot of the stuff I’ve gleaned from the site. I don’t have much weight to lose after baby, but I have a LOT of re-toning to do as things got stretched out the 2nd time around in ways that I don’t even want to think about.

I know that I won’t have much time to exercise once my mat. leave is over, so I’m doing my best now to develop good eating and exercise habits that will put me in the kind of shape I want to be in when this blissful year of being a full-time mom is over!

The Boring Room

Morgan has been sick with a sinus cold for the past 10 days. I took her to the doctor three days ago because she looked like she was working really hard to breathe and I just wanted to make sure it was not a big deal. She didn’t have a fever and she wasn’t coughing, which I thought were the big things to watch for. My doctor took  a look at her and sent me directly to the ER to have a pediatrician examine her immediately.

It turns out that newborns are incapable of breathing through their mouths; they can only breathe through their noses. I had no idea that they couldn’t switch to mouth breathing if their noses became plugged up, and Morgan’s nose was super plugged. The pediatrician at the hospital gave her some decongestants and they put her on an oxygen monitor which revealed that her oxygen saturation was dropping and so they gave her a nebulizer with epinephrine and then gave her oxygen. Then they told me that she needed to be admitted, probably for 48 hours.

I was kind of shocked that it was so serious, but the doctor said that because she is so little and her airways are so small combined with the inability to breathe through her mouth, she was at risk for stopping breathing. After 48 hours, they reassessed her, but she was still sounding plugged up and needing oxygen at night. This meant our two day stay in pediatric isolation turned into a 3 day stay in what big sister Maya called “THE BORING ROOM”. I was basically on my own sleeping on an uncomfortable cot taking care of Morgan 24-7 while my husband was back at work, and my mother took care of Maya–THANK YOU SO MUCH MOM!

Finally, Morgan is feeling a little better and we were discharged from the hospital today. She’s still stuffed up, but not struggling to breathe nearly as much. Although, I’ll be watching her very closely from now on, just to be sure she’s truly turned the corner.

Here are some photos of our days spent in “The Boring Room” over the past three days:

The Hospital Bed

Morgan's Movember Moustache

The turtle nebulizer

More of Mr. Turtle

Big sister is unimpressed

Finally feeling better

 A big thank you to the wonderful nurses and doctors at Victoria General Hospital, without your care and kindness I think I would’ve lost my mind!

specialist’s findings

We met with a pediatric urologist about Morgan’s horseshoe kidney a few days ago. While things are looking good, it’s not all sunshine and roses.Her kidneys are working properly, and this is good. She is, however, at risk for developing kidney stones later in life as well as having UTI’s. Nevertheless, it may be the case that she won’t ever have either of these problems–only time will tell. But the specialist did say that because of their shape and location, horseshoe kidneys tend to drain poorly and that’s what can cause problems. So, we’ll see him again in a year for another ultrasound to be sure things are continuing to go well.

The more concerning aspect for me is the fact that this type of kidney malformation means that her kidneys are located much lower than a normal set of kidneys. Typically, kidneys are located high up and are protected by the rib cage. But horseshoe kidneys are lower and located closer to the belly button in the front of the body, leaving them exposed and more prone to injury/trauma.

My husband and I enjoy many sports and we want to encourage our girls to participate in all kinds of activities until they find their niches. Contact sports, or sports where Morgan could be hit in the abdomen, are much more risky and could be catastrophic if her kidneys were hit hard enough. Of course, we don’t want to be paranoid and keep her in a bubble, but knowing that she has to be careful for her entire life is scary for me.

I know that I fell hard a LOT of times as a kid. I got the wind knocked out of me quite on countless occasions doing all kinds of reckless things. What’s to stop Morgan from having similar accidents? The urologist made it clear that the intestines are much more forgiving than the kidneys, so these kinds of accidents would be much worse for Morgan. And kids fall a LOT.

Happy as I am that she’s doing so well despite having unusually shaped kidneys, I can’t help but worry about how we’re going to keep her safe and well with her fragile condition. Isn’t that what every parent wants? To keep their child safe from harm? We’re seeking to strike a balance here between freedom & safety, but I’m just not entirely sure what that ought to look like…

A sigh of relief

We had some serious concerns about Morgan’s health when she was in utero. I couldn’t really bring myself to blog about it, because I was so worried.

At my first ultrasound they were only able to find one kidney. This led to several other ultrasounds as my pregnancy progressed, the last of which revealed that she does in fact have two kidneys but they are fused together forming what is known as a horseshoe kidney. This is a fairly common malformation of the kidneys, but it is a condition that can be associated with other disorders, particularly chromosomal disorders. It could also increase the child’s risk for conditions like polycystic kidney disease and chronic urinary tract infections.

All of this information completely freaked me out. I began to curse modern technology for making me aware of all these possible problems, which we couldn’t confirm or disprove while I was still pregnant. I’m a worrier anyway, which is why I didn’t do any first trimester genetic testing. But then, when I heard about the kidney malformation, I began to wish I’d done the testing to confirm that nothing was amiss.

Ultimately, the doctors told me that while there was no evidence of any problems, we wouldn’t know for certain until the baby was born. I tried to accept what I could not control but all of this weighed heavily on my mind.

When Morgan was born and I saw her and held her, I got this feeling that everything was okay. I stopped worrying so much because she seemed so healthy. Even though she appeared totally normal, the pediatrician immediately scheduled a kidney ultrasound and genetic testing (in part, to allay my fears). The ultrasound confirmed the existence of a horseshoe kidney, but also indicated that the kidneys appear to be functioning normally. We will follow up next week with a pediatric urologist to get more information, but this is extremely good news. Today, we got the results from the chromosomal testing which were also totally normal. I can’t even adequately express my relief with words.

Now, we can move on and simply enjoy our time getting to know Morgan and settle in as a family of four. I couldn’t be happier!

Baby’s birthday eve

Well, I’d love to say things are going well and we’re all ready to go. But sadly this is not the case. Maya has a terrible stomach flu and has been vomiting nonstop for hours. My husband has some sort of other flu bug and I am going in for a c-section in less than 10 hours. This is the craziest night ever!