Baby Food

This is the time when Ada begins trying food. She has shown the signs that she is ready: sitting up, grabbing everything and putting it in her mouth, gagging; these skills develop simultaneously in babies. Also, she just turned 6 months old, which is a common time for breastfed babies to start trying food.

This period is all about tasting. She eats very little. She plays with her food. This is baby-led weaning.

Ada has tried apples, grapefruit, lemon, carrot, squash, celery, tomato, and avocado. She is eager to taste anything. She puckered up when she tried lemon, but kept going back for more.

When appropriate, we give her whole chunks of food. Otherwise, as in the case of squash, we cook the food. We place the food in front of her and let her grab it and put it in her mouth. If she wants to grab the food but has trouble, we will either place it on a spoon and hand the spoon to her (when the food is mushy) or hold the food in front of her and let her guide our hands to her mouth (when the food is slippery or hard to handle).

Her two bottom teeth enable her to scrape off bits of the hard food (apples, celery, etc.). She works the food around in her mouth a bit, tasting it. Usually the food makes it way out her mouth again (that's a reflex that babies have). She swallows some food, somewhat by accident, and that passes through her without being digested.

Elimination Communication

We decided before Ada was born that we wanted to try Elimination Communication. We went into it with no expectation of catching all or even some of Ada's pees and poops. It's fun to try, and it's far less stressful to try this out now than potty training will be a year or two from now. There's no notion of success or failure, and there's no pressure on Ada to perform.

We've recently seen some unexpected results. In the past couple of days, Ada has pooped/peed in the potty 3 times. She has also been staying dry while sleeping.

We haven't noticed any visual cues for when she needs to go, we just take her and hold her over the potty after the following situations

• When we change her diaper. Babies sometimes don't like go in a diaper that's already messy, so they hold it until they encounter the fresh air.
• When she wakes up. The need to poop can wake a baby up, so we take her to the potty when she wakes up.

I say "we", but really Erinne has done everything and I just write about it.

Unsolicited parenting advice

I'm shocked by the things people say to us. It's like having a baby suddenly makes it OK for people to say all kinds of things to us that would otherwise be inappropriate. You wouldn't go up to a stranger and tell them that you think their clothes are ugly. You would not point at a couple across the street because they look adorable. And, you wouldn't call your mother/father/sibling just to tell them that they need to do the dishes more often. But, you would tell someone to their face that they're not doing the right thing with their baby?

First, let's distinguish between what is appropriate advice and what is inappropriate advice. It is certainly OK for someone to give advice when it is requested, or when it helps solve a problem we are having. It is not OK to give advice that contradicts our current actions or parenting style. So, for example, when Erinne posts a status update on Facebook and asks for suggestions on getting our baby to sleep, the responses that we get are appropriate. When someone points to us and says, "your baby cannot breathe in that wrap," or when a friend says that we should not feed our baby whenever she wants to eat, that is completely inappropriate.

The most offensive thing about these comments is that they presuppose that we are incapable of making good decisions for our child. We researched extensively and came to a conscious decision about how we want to raise our child, and it is not OK to tell us that that is wrong.

OK, I'm done talking about why some things are inappropriate. Next, I want to give some concrete examples of things people have said to us and why these things are incorrect, not just offensive.

"Your baby can't breathe in that wrap! Your baby is too hot in that wrap! Your baby is cold and needs a blanket!" We have had these things shouted at us. We have had a nurse roll her eyes at us because she did not believe us when we said our baby is fine.

I usually try to respond to these comments by providing as much information about the subject as I can, to show that I have educated myself on this and that I know what I am doing. Do people really think I don't know if my child is suffocating? Perhaps if I looked older and dressed better, I would appear more responsible and people would not do this to us?

Then, there's the advice we get from people regarding how to raise our child. If you find yourself giving us parenting advice that you know is in contrast to our chosen method, you might want to stop and ask yourself if your belief actually comes from a rational study of the facts, or if that's just what you believe. Also, don't assume you know more about this than we do; having raised a child yourself does not make you more qualified.

Rather than finish this article with examples of parenting advice that people give us inappropriately, I will follow it up with an article that talks about our particular parenting strategy and the advice that people sometimes give us that contradicts our strategy.

Pictures

Pictures from the pregnancy and birth are available here.

Baby Ada

Baby Ada was born 7/23, 10:43 PDT. She weighed 6 lbs 14 oz and was 20.5 inches long. I think her head circumference was 13.5 inches.

Erinne started having strong, frequent contractions at 11pm Monday night. From 11pm to 7am, her contractions were consistently 5 minutes apart, and we did not sleep Monday night. We were very disappointed when the contractions died down Tuesday morning. Erinne napped Tuesday. I slept a lot Tuesday night, though Erinne barely slept due to the contractions. On Wednesday night the contractions got even stronger, and Erinne was in significant pain. At 2am (Thursday morning) one of our midwives came to our apartment to check Erinne's progress. At 7am the same midwife picked us up and took us to the birthing center.

The labor was awful; Erinne had a hard time dealing with the pain. We spent a lot of the time in the tub. While in the tub, Ada's head started to show. It was difficult to get her past Erinne's pelvic bone. Erinne got out of the pool and started using a birthing stool. Ada shot out like a rocket. All three midwives and I screamed when it happened; we were not expecting it. There was something about the position she was in (not having her chin tucked down?) that caused her to come out all at once. At the beginning of the final push, all we could see was the hair on Ada's head, and then she came out all at once.

She has been very mellow in the first few hours of her life. She is quite active and alert, and can crawl on our tummies looking for food. She was able to latch onto Erinne within the first 10 minutes after being born, though she did not suck. The second time we tried to feed her, she latched on easily again and started sucking. We believe she was able to get some colostrum this time.

Breastfeeding in third world countries, and why we boycott Nestlé

The information below comes from this Wikipedia article, this web site, and research that Erinne did (some articles reeked of stupidity).

In less economically developed countries (LEDCs), using infant formula over breast milk contributes to health problems and deaths in infants for three major reasons:

• Loss of natural benefits from breast milk.
  
• Formula mixed with contaminated water.
• Formula over-diluted in order to save money.

Nestlé makes infant formula, and campaigned heavily to promote it in LEDCs as superior to breast milk. Mothers were duped. In just one generation, many towns were converted from being fed almost exclusively by breast milk to being fed almost exclusively by formula (this is something Erinne learned when researching this problem, but I do not have a citation).

New Belly Pics

From Baby

From Baby

Russian Pancakes

This is all you need to know make some deliciousness:

• 1 egg, 1 cup flour, 1 cup milk.
• Use a large, shallow, greased skilet.
• Tilt the skillet to spread the batter around and keep it thin.
• Top it with every wonderful thing you can find
  

Tonight we topped our pancakes with strawberries, bananas, pecans, and maple and agave syrup. It was basically the best thing ever.

We have a 2.5-hour birthing class on Monday nights. We take the bus back halfway and walk or take the train the rest of the way, so we don't get home until around 9:30. On the bus ride home, we spent a while thinking about what we would like for dinner (basically trying to remember all the recipes we knew but hadn't made in a long time), when I remembered these so-called "russian pancakes" from More-With-Less. Stopped on the way home to grab some toppings, and by 10:00 we were stuffed and happy. Ada must have liked it, too, because she is doing jumping jacks.

Co-sleeping

A BBC article Bed sharing 'risks babies lives warns against co-sleeping with your baby. Here's a quote from the article:

"We need to make all parents aware that the most comfortable place for them to sleep is the most dangerous place for their baby."

I think the true purpose of this article is to scare the reader.

The article does not back up this claim. The article does not provide evidence that sudden infant death occurs more often when co-sleeping than when not co-sleeping. The evidence simply shows that smoking, drinking, and premature birth are all risk factors for SIDS, regardless of whether co-sleeping is practiced. To conclude from this evidence that co-sleeping is a risk factor would be like concluding that driving is dangerous simply because drunk driving is dangerous. No, driving is dangerous because you are more likely to die while driving than while not.

The article cites a statistic that out of 50 cases of infant death, "31 were found to have been sharing a bed or sofa with a parent". So, 62% of deaths occurred while the parents were sharing a bed or sofa with their baby. This statistic is useless unless compared to the percentage of parents that regularly share a bed with their baby. If 80% of couples co-sleep with their baby, but only 62% of sudden infant deaths occurred while co-sleeping, then what would you conclude?

There is in fact evidence that co-sleeping decreases the risk of SIDS. Erinne found this article, which dives into the statistics in much greater detail and shows that co-sleeping is less than half as risky as sleeping in a crib.

hiccups

At this stage, the baby's central nervous is developed enough that she starts hiccuping in the womb. When it happens, it is very rhythmic.

Baby kicking videos

See our baby kicking here and here.

Baby belly

See Erinne's belly grow big here

Baby update

The baby has been squirming and kicking a lot over the past month. Her movements have been getting noticeably stronger each week, and she is now starting to cause Erinne some discomfort when she wiggles around in there.

Although the ultrasound technician said that the baby is definitely a girl, she wrote "probably girl" on the documents that she sent to our midwives. We have a lot of pink clothing that we are prepared to use, even if the baby turns out to be a boy!

Ultrasound pictures from several months ago are here.