Mommy Tip Monday: Road Trip with a Baby in 33 Easy Steps

This wisdom comes from very recent experience.  While I was not getting any sleep last night it occurred to me that when daylight came it would be Monday and I could share it with you as my second installment of Mommy Tip Monday.

Overnight stays with a baby pose special challenges.  Here is what you should do:

1. Put everything you own in a minivan.
2. Put the baby, and any other participating family members in the minivan.
3. Drive to location that is too far to drive home from in one day.
4. Take everything you own out of the minivan.
5. Simultaneously take baby out of the minivan.  
6. Reintroduce him to the people who live too far away to see on a regular basis.
7. Hope he does not cry when they hold him so you can organize your belongings.
8. Take baby back from disappointed grandparents.  
9. Put him on a blanket while you quickly move belongings out of common areas.
10. Feed the baby.
11. Visit and eat a meal while holding the baby.
12. Arrange bedding and put older child to bed while baby cries in exhausted frustration at not being constantly held.
13. Nurse baby for five minutes until he falls alseep.
14. Put baby down and unwind for 45 minutes or so.
15. Turn out the light.
16. Immediately nurse the baby.
17. Put the baby down.
18. Spend half an hour trying to fall asleep.
19. Nurse the baby.
20. Spend 45 minutes sleeping.
21. Nurse the baby.
22. Repeat steps 20 and 21 until 4:20 a.m. when the baby wakes up and smiles at you.
23. Ignore all of the images floating through your brain.
24. Get baby back to sleep.
25. When daylight comes find caffeine.  
26. Continue infant/grandparent reintroduction program.
27. Repeat steps 10-26 as needed until it's time to return home.
28. Put everything you own back in the minivan.
29. Drive back home.
30. Take everything you own out of the minivan.
31. Deposit it in random locations in your home.
32. Repeat steps 13-19.  
33. Sleep until you hear the baby crying or the neighbors knock on the door to complain about the noise.

The Good Baby

I wrote this a few months ago.  I'm re-posting it onto this site in case it's helpful to someone. 

It happens without fail some time in the course of babyhood and has already happened once in Linus's life.  Someone who sees this sweet little baby, finds him charming and wants to be friendly and find out more about him asks "Is he a good baby?"  I pause just a little.  People who know me probably recognize a "look" on my face.

When Lenny was a baby my standard response was "The best kind."  If they asked what kind that was I'd say "human."  The most recent time, since it was someone I knew a little better and was having a longer conversation with than you'd expect to have say, in the grocery store, I said, "I usually think of babies as 'easy' and 'not easy.'  And no, he's not an easy baby.  I don't seem to have easy babies."

Now how I can really know what kind of babies I have a few weeks into the second one is a question for a different discussion.  The point now is why it bothers me when a kind, friendly community member wants to know if my baby is "good."  And since my "not easy" baby is waking up with a series of screams,  grunts and writhing gestures I'll hurry and try to answer it.

First of all, I think that what they really mean is "Does he sleep and eat on a regular (and not too frequent) schedule?  Can you put him down when he's awake and walk away?  Is he comforted quickly when he does get fussy?"  What I believe they are really asking is if he is an "easy" baby.

But what they said was "good baby."  Which implies to me that if my baby nurses every two hours (max), wakes up even more frequently than that if I do something so strange as lay him down by himself, or screams almost every time he needs to move his bowels or pass gas, that he has already achieved a below average score on the "Good Baby Evaluation."  This is not, it seems, what any woman is hoping for when she pees on a stick and holds her breath while waiting for one line or two to appear in the little window.

Well, I'll admit that a baby who sleeps would be amazing and definitely easier!  But my baby's job is not, unfortunately, to make my job easy.  My baby is busy growing and developing and working his way through all the stages of babyhood in an amazingly short span of time.  He needs sleep and food and comfort, but unfortunately rarely on a schedule that's convenient for me.  That doesn't make him a "not good" baby.  Just a "not easy" baby.

My thinking on this has been influenced by a book called Our Babies Ourselves by Meredith F. Small.  It talks about how different cultures view and care for babies and small children.  I read it while I was pregnant with Lenny and before I knew what kind of babies I would have.  I read that other cultures hold or wear babies instead of laying them down - and how much less they cry per day than babies in American culture.  I discovered that research shows biological benefits for babies who sleep in the same bed as an adult (although I had no intention of trying it myself).  Even the role of a baby in society is viewed differently, as it turns out, by different cultures.  (Small has a website where she blogs about children and culture.  Good reading also.)

One study described in the book really stuck with me.  Parents in a conflict-torn area were asked to rate their baby's temperament, as I remember it, on a scale from more easy-going to more "difficult."  After a period of time the researchers returned to the area to do follow-up, but not too surprisingly they had trouble finding many of their original subjects.  When they did find the parents sometimes the child had not survived.  It turned out that the babies who lived were the ones that had been rated as "difficult."  Squeaky wheel babies were better at making it in tough situations.

So when someone asks me if my baby is "good" part of me wants to say "Yes!"  He's very good, after all, at reminding me that he relies on me to meet his most basic needs.  If rebel forces were hiding out in the bushes waiting to raid the village for already scarce food supplies he would be the one to make sure that his mommy remembered that she needed to get enough to eat so she could make milk for him.  If wild animals were lurking in the darkness beyond the edge of the fire he would be the one to make sure that at least one adult was awake often enough to scare the creatures away.  And he won't be the child who lays quietly in his car seat on top of the car while a parent who is tired and distracted drives away.  He will already be screaming at the top of his lungs.  He is good at being a baby.

Now you may argue that in modern life these "skills" are not so useful and may, in fact, put the baby at risk.  I agree.  But it doesn't seem useful to me to try to change the way my baby is hardwired.  It makes more sense to think about how I can change my life and my attitudes in order to care for him and meet his needs.

Before you say it, I know that I need to take care of myself too.  And believe me, I'm doing my best.  But I'm not sure that responding to my baby when he cries, or sleeping with him in my bed (yeah, I changed my mind about that one) or holding him instead of doing something else really leaves me more tired or stressed than I would be otherwise.  If you look back over the course of this blog you'll see that I'm mostly tired.  And if you talk to the parents of new babies you'll find that they're mostly tired and stressed.  It's hard.  And sometimes I struggle with feeling like it would be easier if I were just doing it "right."  But whether I'm getting it right or not I feel sure that my baby is very good at his job.

What I Learned When I Went Dairy Free While Breast Feeding

All over the map, right?  That's me.  Here's another topic that I know just a little bit about.  So naturally I'll use the internet to tell the world.

The story is that when Linus was about six weeks old he was sleeping very poorly and I was extremely exhausted and miserable.  Whenever a tiny baby who's breastfed is also very gassy (which seemed to be related to the bad sleeping) people always seem to point out that it could be dairy.  This happened with Lenny also, but I didn't try cutting it out because I have lots of food intolerances.  I already can't eat wheat, corn, soy, most red meat, lots of different nuts.... I'm probably leaving something out.  Also, I have Irritable Bowel Syndrome, so changing my diet can end up making me pretty uncomfortable.  Plus there's not wanting to eat too many gassy foods like beans for fear they'll make the baby more gassy.  Too complicated.

But with Linus I finally got desperate enough to try it.  I planned ahead.  I decided on some substitutions and went to the grocery store.  I spent a day cooking dishes for the coming week.  That went pretty well, actually.

 I use spelt instead of wheat flour.  I substituted coconut milk for cow's milk in these orange muffins.  I actually zested an orange when I made them.  They tasted awesome, especially straight from the oven.

 When I can't make a creamy dairy-based sauce I have a tendency to make a tomato-based one.  I started using ground chicken during this time and found it very convenient.

 I made this to put in wraps for lunches.  It has black-eyed peas in it which are high in....calcium, I think.

Here's a view you don't get on Pinterest.  After all the cooking there was some cleaning up to be done.
















So I managed to go dairy-free and actually get enough to eat.  And I learned a few things that were useful to me.  Here they are in case they are useful to you:

• Coconut milk based dairy substitute doesn't taste that good by itself.  But it's OK if mixed about half and half with orange juice (get the fortified OJ so you're getting more calcium and vitamin D).  It's also not bad with a little cocoa mixed in and warmed in the microwave to make "hot chocolate."
• Orange juice isn't so bad if you get the expensive "not from concentrate" stuff.  And it generally helps me feel better when I'm feeling depleted from breast feeding.
• Having some food cooked ahead of time made my life much easier - and I ate better.  Although since then I have found that having that knowledge is often not enough to get me to actually do the cooking.
• It's possible to get chocolate chips that are free from all the stuff I'm trying to avoid.  Worth it when options are very limited.
• Sometimes it worked better to eat food that was "safe" for me and let the boys eat something else.  This is not new to us, but it happened a little more often during the dairy free time.
• Doing searches online for "dairy free" wasn't that useful.  Mostly it came up with recipes that were also free of gluten and were possibly even vegan.  I found it easy enough in baking to substitute coconut or rice milk for cow's milk.  
• For main dish foods it was most useful to think of "normal" foods that could be made without dairy - soups, stews, stir fry, curry, and even some pasta dishes were pretty flexible.  Thankfully the wisdom of "crowd sourcing" also stepped in as I got help from friends on Facebook.
• Bacon!  Thankfully I can eat this and since I needed to keep some fat in my diet.... Also I ate more chicken than usual and some legumes to keep my protein up.
• Unfortunately I also found out that diary was not the source of Linus's problems.  It took a long time to figure this out because when I started eating it again he had a different problem which seemed possibly to be related and I went off it again.  Related to this, if you are breastfeeding and stop dairy then start it again you may experience changes in milk supply.  I had to start more gradually the second time to avoid problems.

So now I'm back to my regular diet - more or less.  I'm still drinking lots of that expensive orange juice and eating more bacon than I was before.  And I try to do some cooking ahead - when I'm not too tired or too busy blogging.