Breastfeeding Mommas: Be Careful of Mother's Day Massages!

It was my gift certificate from last year, and I wanted to use it up before it expired. So I went and laid down on my belly for an hour. It was a lovely massage. I felt very pampered and a little smushed. Two days later I have the beginning of mastitis! My milk duct is clogged and I feel like I have the flu.

So, the moral of the story is to use your massage gift certificate before it expires, but lie on your side and not your belly!

 And if you do get mastitis, La Leche League has some helpful stuff to say.

happier breastfeeding times ~

The Japanese Secret to Raising a Healthy Baby!

Mugi-cha! In English, it's called Barley Tea, though we think mugi (mooghee) cha is much more fun to say.

My friend Kyoko told me that in Japan, mugi-cha is the first drink babies have besides milk. It is unsweetened, so its very friendly to their teeth, and has a taste that is more fun to drink than say, water. It's kind of nutty and smokey, and also super easy to make. You don't need to heat up water. Instead, you just throw the jumbo tea bag into a pitcher of cold water and it steeps just like that. Mommies and Daddies and friend's of mommies and daddies seem to like it too. Very refreshing!

A happy, messy, mugi-cha drinker.

And a cleansed mugicha drinker too? The people say its supposed to be very good for you!

Though, I gotta admit, I did love hearing him say, "ap-po jute" long ago...

Ouch! What to do if your almost 2 year old bites (you).

Note the open mouth and teething ring in Isaac's left hand!

His biting was driving me to the edge, and sometimes over the edge.

At least he was only biting me, and sometimes Jeremy, or a good neighbor friend of ours, and not his park-friends. That would be really really bad.

But it was making me mad, really mad. I timed him out over and over again, but even though that had worked for other stuff like not opening the refrigerator, it didn't seem to make a dent in biting. Sometimes later he would sing a little song that went something like, "Don't bite Mommy, don't bite Daddy, don't bite Dampa....", but it was only a song.

In my despair I turned to the millions of other mommas on the internet and found they had published volumes of biting articles! I felt much less alone, and learned some interesting and helpful stuff too: I learned that little ones are not good at impulse control because the impulse part of their brain is very undeveloped (go figure!). We have major leaps of impulse control growth at ages 1, 3, and 6, and our brains keep improving on this until we are 30! Until we drink or do drugs and then we turn into a toddlers again. Lack of impulse control is one of the things that make toddlers so cute and funny when they say things like, "Mayonnaise is climbing up up up the door!" and of course what also makes them not think before they bite.

I realized I was taking his biting a little too personally.

I also learned that repetition in saying, "no biting." firmly does help, as does removing yourself from the situation i.e. not letting it happen in the first place. All the articles seemed to agree that biting your kid back is a very bad idea (I have to admit the thought did cross my mind) because you should be setting an example for how to behave. They said to explain instead that biting hurts and no one likes to be hurt, but don't explain too much.

All this info seemed very basic, but it was helpful, and implementing a combination of these strategies has really helped. He hasn't bitten me in almost a week!

Here is what I did and am doing:

1. Whenever I know he is about to bite I say, "No biting.", and walk away, or gently push him off of me.
2. I'm not giving him anymore time-outs for biting, unless he really becomes a wild animal and I just need him to calm down.
3. I give myself a timeout if necessary, for example going into the bathroom after he bit me and shutting the door. That took attention away from him and gave me time to splash cold water on my face which felt lovely and healing!
4. He often bites while I'm cooking, so I bring a chair over for him to stand on and help/watch me cook.
5. I offer him other stuff to bite.
6. I ask him what he actually needs and wants.
7. Finally, I stopped getting so mad. I heard that even getting mad gives kids attention that they crave, plus it was making me feel terrible.

If any of you reading are feeling as I felt, I feel for you! Take a deep breath, your wild one will be tamed soon!

Baby Portrait Taking 101, Featuring Isaac B.

First of all, go outside! Indoor light is yellowy and dim compared to natural daylight. Try to pick a day that isn't too crazy sunny, so your photos aren't bleached looking. Overcast is great all around, or go earlier in the morning, or later in the afternoon for an extra dramatic effect.

You found me!

If your camera has settings, set the aperture (that should be found by looking for the letter A on your camera's dial) as low as you can. That will make your little one clear, and everything around him or her, nicely blurry.

I am running in through the one clear area of the park, what fun!

Its kind of hard to explain how it works, but basically, your camera will let in more light, and in return for that give you a smaller depth of field to focus on. You can also use a low aperture if there isn't very much light, and you want to make your camera's "eyelid" open as much as possible. Come to think of it, it works with us too! If there isn't much light we open our eyes wide, and when we can't see something far away we squint our eyes, and make far away stuff clear.

wide open eye, medium eye, squinty eye!

Ok, back to your picture taking:

Isaac as baby-heartthrob

Don't be scared to get close up! Especially if you want your little one to look like a soap opera star.

I am feeling very contrasty!

Play with your photo after you take it! If you like the quality of this photo above, go to the contrast button on your photo editing software (even the most basic ones (like mine) will have it!) and up it as much as you can stand. It can give your photo lots of "pop!", and look like candy, and who doesn't like a baby that looks like candy?

Ok, that's all for now, happy picture taking!

Potty training success!

Oh I am ridiculously excited about the newest developments that have happened today: Isaac was pee-peeing when asked!

Last year during potty practice

It's helped that he has been really excited lately about dumping the little potty into the big potty. So, today, when he wanted to "dump!" the little potty, I explained to him that the little potty was empty and that he would have to make a peepee in there first so that we could have something to dump. He sat back down, made a little grunt, and out came a little pee! I had two fists up in the air cheering him on I was so darn happy.

A little background about our potty training life to date: We've been doing EC (elimination communication) with Isaac since he was 4 months old. Basically that meant letting him go without a diaper quite often, and putting him on the potty whenever we changed his diaper, came in from outside, before sleep, after meals, or when we didn't have anything better to do. It was lots of fun and we've had some very quality family time hanging out on there. We've read countless books, sang a million songs, dropped things into the potty (accidentally) and fished them out (yuck!). We've had guests visit with Isaac on the potty. We've had sing-a-longs with those guests too!

Due to all this potty positivity, Isaac has been mostly pooping in the potty for probably a year now. We used to read his signals; there was a wide eyed staring kind of expression, a bit of a lean forward, sometimes if we were almost too late, a small grunt. Now he will often (not always) say poo-poo when he has to go, much to everyone's delight.

Pee-pee on the other hand has consistently eluded us. EC advocates advise putting them on the potty as soon as you take them out of a snuggly style baby carrier, and that used to work. The idea is that they don't want to pee when they are close to you, so that when you separate and take off their diaper, the change of atmosphere will make them want to go. Isaac is way too big to be carried around anymore, and our living room floor was getting peed on way too often. It really just seemed like luck whenever we could get him to pee in the potty. Or he would pee in his fortified underpants (I sewed little pieces of towel into training pants) and then say, "uh-oh! pee-pee!"

So today, when he peed when I asked him to, like 5 times, elation set in.

This is a really big deal!

Update: He isn't doing peeing on demand anymore...all that excitement, and now more peepee on the floor. Poop!

Scooter Fever, How to be on the Lookout

Uh-oh, he looks pretty happy.

I've wondered when Isaac would catch Scooter fever. It's a virus, and it can spread like lightning from one sweet talkin', quick turnin' 5 year old, to one big eyed toddler with a simple suggestion:

"C'mon, I'll pull you!"

It happened today, just a few hours ago in the handball court across the street.
Keep your ears open for, "Sootoo!", "Sootoo!" If you hear that, it means they just caught it.

How did he learn to say that!?

Isaac just said his first serious, long-ish, sentence!

"Cat knocked over modem - big crash!"

We were stuck in traffic and he was saying "Cat knocked over!" over and over again. I really wanted to hear a noun at the end of the sentence, and Jeremy had told me earlier that it was the modem the cat knocked over. So I told Isaac, easy as that! No way Isaac knows what a modem is.

Big crash!

This language learning phase is really somethin' else. I'm so tickled by it!

This morning I gave Isaac a strawberry, and he happily asked for more Seba-da-yee.  And then more Seba-da-yee, until I had to stop myself from asking him back, "You want another sabadayee?"

I did a small bit of online research into how babies learn to talk and found some good stuff.

In the Huffington Post, there's an article about a new study which suggests that young babies learn language from lip reading as much as hearing sounds - I had no clue!

And in Parenting magazine, a basic overview of how it happens and how they study it. There is info on when language learning starts when its starts (in the womb!) and how fast they learn (very very fast!), and what we can do as parents to help (play!, read!)

Language learning with Grandpa

I remember before we had Isaac and I was nervous and worried about how to be good parents, Jeremy said that all we had to do was feed, and clothe him, love him, and read to him. I liked it laid out simple like that.

Tooth Brushin' Blues

This article from the NY Times has got me worried!
Preschoolers in Surgery for a Mouthful of Cavities 

The many personalities of teeth!

I'm feeling very remiss. Every night I try to brush his small chompers, but to a frustratingly sad outcome. Isaac clamps his little mouth shut, and all my cajoling is to no avail. I've tried brushing my own teeth to get him to want to copy. I've tried singing silly tooth brushing songs. I've tried letting him use my or his daddy's toothbrushes, which are way more exciting than his own.

I get a few swipes if we're lucky. And he loves the little brushes as nifty little objects, but much prefers to do my teeth (much too roughly), or the surface of the bathtub, rather than his own.

Ok, so the Times has given me a kick in the pants. Tonight, we brush!

The Discipline Begins

Yes, this little angel in a panda hat can drive me nuts.

I've been feeling pretty beat up lately by Isaac's shrieking, biting, intensely wanting stuff, intensely not wanting stuff.

So it was a wonderfully serendipitous moment when yesterday Jeremy sent me this book excerpt about discipline and your wonderful yet terrible toddler. It's helpful, inspiring and short. The author, Dr. Michelle Cohen, has a no nonsense approach that I like. It's along the lines of puppy training.

I like how he says not to make the little guys say sorry because they aren't sorry, since they don't understand sorry yet. I like how he explains to deal with a tantrum about putting on a winter coat.  This is what you are supposed to do:

1. Pin him down
2. Put on the coat
3. Go out

I feel like roaring like a lioness when I read those directions!  Woohoo! It is much easier though to feel strong and purposeful and lion-like sitting here in the quiet after-bed-time, than in the moment of upset. No matter, today I took a stand.

Isaac bit me, and I told him not to. He did it again and I picked him up, put him in his crib and left his room. My goodness, he screamed. He SCREAMED! It was a good thing that I had lots of dishes to wash.

He was a little clingy and upset when I took him out 2 minutes later, but he didn't bite me again, and cheered up pretty quickly. An hour later and we repeated the same scenario. No more biting after that. I dunno, maybe it worked?

Cornstarch is Not Just for Lemon Meringue Pie!

Its for baby bottoms too!
Or wherever else they need a little smoothing and drying.
Its also cheap and doesn't smell weird. Natural, like I like it.
I got this advice from my yoga student Leah, who seems to know what to do in this mommy-ing maze. She gave me very emphatic advice to get it out of my kitchen cupboard right away and onto his skin.
Isaac and I are both very appreciative.