Cradle 'til You Drop

There is one rule to bedtime: Bedtime is a Rule. Ever since baby started to settle to her own daily schedule we have kept her bed time at 11 p.m. Baby slept well and barely woke up for nighttime feedings. Then she became a bit too excited about all the fun new things she sees and learns and it took a really long time for her to fall asleep. She was just really playful and there was no way we could get her to sleep. Sometimes she postponed going to sleep by over two hours. Eventually it just made no sense to keep to the schedule. Baby goes to sleep when baby is sleepy, which could be anything from 8 p.m. to 1 a.m.. We were completely okay with it because it meant less work for us.

However, this free spirit approach backfired. Gradually baby started waking up more and more often during the night. She fell asleep at a random time and woke up at random times (NB! Notice the plural. Random TIMES! ). From sleeping 7-8 hours like clockwork, she had gone back to waking up several times each night. Things were especially bad after triple vaccine shot. Baby slept through most of the day (and cried most of the time when she was awake) and she woke up almost every hour during the night. Four nights later I was happy she slept a whopping three hours in a row! As if the several wake-ups weren't bad enough, she didn't go back to sleep after 8 a.m.

According to some specialists, baby's daytime napping should not be limited in any way because daytime napping only helps babies sleep better at night. Apparently over-sleepyness is one of the typical reasons why babies sleep badly at night. The opposite seems to apply for our baby. She slept so badly at night that she was often over sleepy during the day. She had mood swings - from tired and grumpy to excited and giggling. She skipped one nap after another and when night fell, she went to sleep at a completely wrong time. After analyzing what had changed in recent time it was obvious that we just have to start enforcing the 11 p.m. bedtime rule again.

So yesterday me and Erkki just kept cradling her until she was asleep a little after 11 p.m. And woe and behold she didn't wake up even once until 5 a.m.. I was well on my way to sleeping until at least 10 a.m. ... LOUD NOISE ... I woke up. WTF?! What time is it? And what is that horrible noise?! It was 8:15 and someone was ringing our DOORBELL. It's the kind of doorbell that has such an annoying loud sound that we warn our friends never to ring it. The sound is by far even more annoying at 8:15 a.m.. It was a neighbour who wanted to ask if our radiator is now warm and if we have talked to our upstairs neighbours about airing out their radiator. I admit we didn't get a chance to talk to the upstairs neighbours last night because I only found out about it at noon. I had plans for the evening so the first chance to deal with that problem was after 10 p.m. and I DON'T VISIT STRANGERS AT INAPPROPRIATE TIMES! If I only had known that it was such an urgent matter...

Perhaps tomorrow morning I will get to sleep in.

Oil Before Diet

"If even these pants fit, I'm gonna write a blog post!". About a week ago I went over all my clothing to see what fits and what doesn't. All the pre-pregnancy clothing fits me! My body shape is a little different from before so some clothes that used to look okay on me are now great and some others are horrible but they (almost) all fit and that's what really matters for a food-obsessed person like me. I'm still 1 or 2 kg heavier than before but I am not worried about that, because the clothes that don't fit are tight shirts. And it's not the stomach part that's too tight...

I want to share some important health information. Do not try this at home! I heard about a special cleansing diet: Lemon detox diet. People spend the entire day drinking natural lemonade with maple syrup and pepper. Of course you can't use regular maple syrup - you have to order the special detox blend of maple syrup (!) which costs $80 per liter. So people spend up to 15 days drinking only this lemonade and eating nothing and this is supposed to be super healthy and cure the following illnesses: headaches, common cold, stiff neck, nose itching , rashes, nausea, fever, anorexia, depression, overweight, bad breath, sexual disorders and many more. I think the list speaks for itself and needs no special comments on how ridiculous this diet is.

I'm not on this detox diet. I'm not on any diet. I just try not to eat massive amounts of sugar but I barely even choose what else I eat. That includes all the things I'm not supposed to eat at all, like dairy, nuts and chocolate. Compared to those it's not so bad that I also eat up to a kilo of fresh apples or plums without any guilt.

Not only am I not on any diet, I'm actually consuming pure oil with a table spoon. I found a store in my town that sells good quality flex seed oil (linaseemne õli). It's the bast natural source of omega-3 fatty acids. Flex seed oil has 50% more omega-3 than fish oil. I know I don't eat enough unsaturated fats so I started taking one tablespoon of this oil every morning. These fatty acids have numerous health benefits, my favourite being it's effect on brain functioning. I don't even know what it does but I am quite sure it is good for an infant's brain development. I also think it might have a good effect on my nails and hair. Especially now that all the vitamins and minerals I eat have been shared with Siiri for over a year now and it's finally starting to wear me down. I have much more faith in the safety and health benefits of flex seed oil than multivitamins.

Lately baby has been doing some darn cute things. She has gained a great deal of control over her hands. One time I put her to bed to let her wind down a little so she'd sleep better at night. For a little while she talked with her Worm and then she got really excited about something so I went to take a look at her. She had pulled the blanket over her head and was wailing her arms around with great enthusiasm. She loved the trick so much that today when she got hold of a tiny towel, she pulled it on her face and shrieked with glee.

I normally wouldn't post photos of my baby in a public blog, but here she's doing a sneaky robber trick and has done a great job of hiding her face.

Baby update: at her 4th month doctor's visit she weighed 7.3 kg (gained 830g in a month) and was 63.5 cm (grew 2 cm). That's approximately the size of an average Estonian 5-month old baby girl. She sure does grow fast.

She got her triple vaccine today - diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis. This is the vaccine I was most afraid of because I read about one case where a baby cried for a couple of days and then had autistic behavior right after the shot and it lasted for months. Vaccine gave that baby minor brain damage. I always assume that vaccine side-effects are exaggerated by mothers and I never even considered not vaccinating Siiri against those dangerous diseases. But now Siiri gave me quite a scare. She slept for four hours - she woke up twice and cried in a really sad way. She was very upset about something and I couldn't help her in any way. Fortunately now she's awake and she's in a much better mood. Perhaps she's okay after all.

Where I Draw The Line

About a year ago I was having a messenger conversation with a friend who has little children. We had just about finished the conversation and there was a few long minutes of silence when suddenly she said something more. "sorry I was away, one of my kids just pooped so I had to go and was it off." I was thinking, " DID I NEED TO KNOW THAT?!". Bodily functions is not a topic that people normally talk about. I can't really imagine someone filling a conversation with comments such as, "You wouldn't believe the turd I made yesterday!". But when it's about little children, talking about poop suddenly becomes normal.

Back then I thought this would never become a normal topic. I saw no reason to be having conversations about when and what and how much my kid pooped. Only the highest form of house hen would stoop that low. Now months later it's actually a conscious effort not to talk about such things with friends. I know it sounds horrible, but I talk about it with my husband. You see, baby's general mood and well-being depend so much on her bowel movements that it's actually a relevant thing to mention. It's as important as how much she slept and how much she ate.

I do talk about diapers without a problem. I don't have a problem with mentioning that I'm going to change a diaper. Perhaps it's because a diaper is a like a piece of clothing. Saying that I'm changing a diaper is about as embarrassing as changing a kid's shirt. Mhh, or should diapers be like knickers? Perhaps it should be as bad to talk about a baby's diapers as a 10-year old girl's underpants. I'm not sure why but a diaper is still more like a shirt than underpants, despite how it's worn.

Another thing I don't like to talk about is weird rashes. Baby's embarrassing medical situations are something that shouldn't really be discussed in public. I remember reading a short news report about Brad Pitt and one of his adoptive children. He was saying that this child has the most horrible diaper rash and he and Angelina have tried just about everything to get rid of it but nothing has worked. People were commenting and recommending a cheap product called butt paste. I'm not making this up. I was reading and I felt really sorry for that child. All those strangers discussing what should be smeared on her ass. Years later people will dig it up on the Internet and all her friends will know about the horrible rash on her butt. It's different when the rash is in a really visible place like the face - everyone who sees the baby can see it anyway, so I wouldn't really call it an embarrassing medical situation.

There is one thing, however, that I talk about quite freely and I can often sense that other people find it embarrassing: breastfeeding. When it comes to breastfeeding, I don't think it's normal for people to be appalled. If they have a problem they just have to get over it. In Estonia breastfeeding is quite common but many people think it's icky and private. Breastfeeding in public has often been compared with pissing in public. I think that's just WRONG. What's so embarrassing about breastfeeding anyway? Boobs? Naked boobs? Then why is it normal to talk about going to a sauna? In sauna people are EVEN MORE NAKED! Sometimes it feels like breastfeeding is seen as as much of a private issue as having sex. I've often heard that breastfeeding is the most natural thing to do. Perhaps this is why breastfeeding is a shameful thing to do - it's just TOO natural, just like sex. In our modern urbanized life it's polite to hide every indication that we are really just animals in clothing. Nudity, sex and breastfeeding is for animals, not for us humans.

I don't really practice public breastfeeding. It's just too difficult to ignore all those years of knowing that it's not nice to show my boobs in public. It's weird though - I've been to nude mixed saunas with most of my male friends but I still go to the other room to breastfeed my kid when they're visiting. Talk about false shame!

So even though baby poop has become a normal household topic and I happily make people blush by talking about breastfeeding, I take consolation in knowing that things could be much much worse.