J at 6 months

We had a little scramble to get all our paperwork together for him, but we were thrilled to be able to adopt J in February. We named him J, for my father who passed away last November. Our boy has been growing like crazy, in his body and in our hearts, and we are so blessed to have him and Z. We call him “little monster” and “bubba” because that was Z's best attempt at pronouncing “brother” when we brought him home.

He is growing well, but differently from Z. He's about average for height, but he's thinner than she was. It seemed like it took him until he was three months to have anything you could call a bootie, and he never really got the fat rolls. He struggled a lot with his digestion the first few months. We finally figured out that he was allergic to milk around 3.5 months, and that made a huge difference. He stopped spitting up literally overnight when we changed his formula and he's been a happy baby ever since. He is up to date on all his shots and the doctor says he's hitting all his milestones. He started on solids this last month and really loves to eat! He wanted nothing to do with cereal, really, but loves any kind of soft veggie or fruit that we give him, and he's done great on the little bit of beef and chicken he's tried so far. I think his favorite is apple, but it's hard to know for sure because he's so enthusiastic about everything!

He cut his first teeth, found his feet, and got up on all fours all in a week last month. It's like he was racing to see how many milestones he could hit and how fast. Not long after that, he was crawling. It wasn't a big dramatic moment, he just looked across the room at a toy he wanted and started motoring over to it. He was so pleased when he got there, though, that he kinda forgot how he had done it. It was several days before he did it again, and a few days after that before he finally mastered it and added it to his daily repertoire of tricks.

Some of his favorite things to do now are to grab onto faces and chew chins and noses. He knows the word “zrbtt” (I think most people call them “blowing raspberries”) and if Z starts giving zrbtts to me or Rose, he will crawl across the floor to do it, too. He especially likes to zrbtt people on the cheeks. He's very slobbery, so you have to love him a lot to let him do it. He has a great grip, though, and can all but do chinups off my ears. I had been growing my hair out, and trying out dreadlocks, but he was getting his sticky little fingers so tangled in the locs, and then he barfed in them and I couldn't get the smell out, so I had to cut it short. He still gets a good grip on it and pulls me in close so he can chew my nose, but at least now it's easy to untangle him. He's got swimming lessons coming up in the fall, so we can't wait to see if he learns as quickly as Z did. He loves to play and splash in the water, and we've taught him how to float on his back and hold his breath and go underwater already.

J has been to East Texas for a family reunion, and to Houston to visit with the cousins, and to Austin to visit with our friends and family there, and also to College Station to visit with our good friends who live there. His cousins just love helping with getting him changed and dressed and fed, and they are very excited when they know Z and J are coming for a visit. He hasn't gotten to go on any real vacations yet, but we do have one coming up in October, we'll be going to the beach. I think he'll love crawling around in the sand. He's a good traveler and likes to babble in his car seat and he sleeps well in the car.

He's the apple of his Zeidy's eye (Zeidy is Yiddish for grandfather, that's what Rose's dad is called) and loves to tug on Zeidy's mustache and sit with him in the recliner when we go visit. Rose's mom goes by Bubbie (Yiddish for grandmother) and she loves to hold him and feed him his bottles. We try to make sure we see them once a week, at least, so J is very familiar with them and always gets excited when he sees either of them open the door.

My mom recently moved to a new house, so we've been to visit with her a couple of times in her new place outside of Austin. J did his first rolling over there, on the rug, at Easter. My mom is very fond of him and often calls him by my dad's nickname. She reminds him sometimes that he'll have to be a little bit tough to hold his own with such a feisty big sister, but tells him it's okay to be sweet, too.

He's surrounded by music all the time, because we sing to him and to Z as we play our way through the day. He likes to have lullabyes at night, and his favorite toys are a little play piano and a musical table that is covered in noisemaking gizmos. He is definitely a pacifier-loving baby, and never was very interested in his thumb or any other soother. The day he figured out how to put his own pacifier in his mouth was probably one of his happiest, and that's saying a lot because he is a very happy baby. He has an easy, bubbly laugh that he uses all the time. Everything from funny sounds to bouncing on a lap will make him laugh out loud. He enjoyed a bouncer, liked his swing, and LOVES his jumpy seat. He can sit and bop up and down in his jumpy seat for what seems like an hour at a time. He's a funny sleeper, he wakes often as he tosses and turns but it's easy to get him back to sleep. He takes several good naps during the day, but doesn't yet sleep through the night.

And even though he's very nearly 8 months old now, I am so proud of myself for getting this and Z's updates written, that I don't even care that it's late. Writing anything at all is a victory right now.

Don't say it!

You know how if you say something like, "I can't live without cheese!" you're supposed to immediately knock on wood so you don't jinx yourself?  Yeah, I shoulda done that.

My totally amazing young son (who I breastfeed) is allergic to cow's milk.  Which is the primary ingredient in my favorite food: cheese.  Also, cheesecake, cheese dip, cheese fondue, baked brie, cheeseburgers, nachos, lasagna, eggplant (or anything else) parmesan, those little plates of cheese that come out with a wine flight, and every hors d'oeuvres on the planet (that's worth eating).  I can do without ice cream.  Seriously, I can! I've liked sherbet and sorbet better since I was 3 and got to pick my own flavor at the Baskin Robbins in the "old" mall in Kingsville.  I always drifted away down to the left end of the little display case, to where the Orange Sherbet, Rainbow Sherbet, and Daiquiri Ice were kept.  That was my favorite frozen stuff and it still is, Bluebell's Pecan Pralines 'n Cream notwithstanding.

So, when my wife was considering the Paleo and Primal diets, I urged her strongly to go with Primal. Why?  Because of the CHEESE, of course!  And every time we got into a conversation with someone about how and why she was eating a Primal diet, this would come up.  And I'd loudly -- and likely melodramatically -- exclaim that I would absolutely DIE without cheese.  As my friend pointed out tonight, when you say things like that, God quirks an eyebrow at you and says, "Really?"  And then He laughs.  Likely melodramatically.

Which brings us to how I totally screwed myself out of cheese for the near foreseeable future.  Because a baby who is allergic to cow's milk is allergic typically to the proteins in it, which pass through breastmilk from mama to baby.  So I'm off the cheese for a while, and all milk-derived products.  The great news is that I'm friends with some awesome dairy-free eaters, and they've already turned me on to some great resources and substitutes that will make this transition as easy as can be.  The hardest thing so far has been finding a non-dairy milk that will do as a coffee creamer.  I'm totally unenthused about non-dairy processed creamers, like Coffee Mate, so I've been exploring the almond milk (fail), coconut milk (fail), flax milk (reasonable), and hemp milk (reasonable) alternatives.  Oh, and I'm allergic to soy, so soy milk is Right Out.  The problem with most of these milks as creamers is that they don't have the right pH and fat content to actually cream the coffee.  The flax leaves an oil slick on the surface of the coffee but tastes good, the hemp milk is grainy and falls out of solution (albeit making beautiful spiral patterns) like miso soup does.  I'm still searching for the perfect alternative coffee creamer, so if you know of one, please feel free to advise me!

How to Breastfeed an Adopted Baby

I'm not surprised at this, really, but by far the most frequent question I get about the adoption is "How do you do THAT?!?!" when people find out that I'm nursing my sweet girl. I've been researching this for so long that I've almost forgotten what it feels like to not know this is possible. And as I was recently reminded when talking with some friends of mine, the methods I used are relevant to many other situations, breastfeeding after mastectomy, breastfeeding with low (or just insufficient) milk supply, and breastfeeding after hysterectomy, etc.

This post, unlike so many of mine, has a short version: hormones and plastic baggies.

I'm sure the hormones part makes sense, even if you couldn't immediately name the hormones involved and their biological roles, anyone who's got passing familiarity with the reproductive system knows that its functions are hormonally regulated. There are basically four hormones involved in making a woman lactate, and three of them are available (directly or indirectly) through medicines. For the deathly curious, the three I mentioned are estrogen, progesterone, and prolactin. The only complicated thing about the prolactin is that the drug recommended to increase it in your system (Domperidone) is only available from what's called a compounding pharmacy and the use of it for inducing lactation is considered off-label. That said, it's also considered safe. The other two hormones, obviously, are available via standard birth control pills, though high-progesterone pills are recommended for this purpose. There is so much more detailed information available on this, if you're interested, at Ask Lenore. There is a whole protocol there, which is what I followed, on when and how to take the meds, what to do if you have lots of notice, if you have little to no notice of your adoption, if you can't take the birth control pill, and all the other variations on my situation you can imagine.

As for plastic baggies, that's all part of what is called a Supplemental Nursing System. There are two big providers out there, Medela SNS and Lact-Aid. I use the Lact-Aid system because of reviews I read like this one. Basically, it's easier to use in more situations and holds up better to long-term use, which adoptive nursing certainly calls for. What it does is let baby take formula from a plastic bag via a tube at the breast, so s/he is getting all the breastmilk available, but is also getting his/her nutritional needs met, and because suckling stimulates supply, the formula supplementation actually serves to sustain mom's supply.

That's the basic gist of it, and I hope the information is useful to someone else out there. I wouldn't have known about this if it weren't for a similar post in an online journal, so I'm here to spread the word.

screaming babies

THIS IS AWESOME!

It's totally safe for work, just a serial from the comic strip Non Sequitur on the subject of small children on commercial aircraft. Really, as much as I travel, I've been stunningly (*crossing my fingers, toes, and a few hairs for good measure*) lucky on this score. Yesterday, I was on a plane with a small child and his mother, and they were both very well behaved. He was somewhere between 2 and 3 years old and I base this guess on what I know about language development in kids. At that age, tykes have enough word-sounds at their disposal to communicate pretty much exclusively with their caregivers. I offer you a hypothetical: I'm standing in the kitchen at my sister's house (okay, maybe this isn't entirely hypothetical) and my niece comes in there and says, "muh!" So as I stand there, I start running through all the things that this could signify - Mom, More, Movie, Mickey and the Motorcars, Marvelous Mel's Monster Movie Marathon... I'm at a loss. I don't know what the kid wants. My sister passes by and sees her daughter plaintively trying "MUH!" louder and more insistently at the idiot grownup who is alliterating in the kitchen. "Oh," she says. "You want more milk, honey? Ok. Bring me your cup." Whereupon, my niece toddles off and comes back with a purple plastic elephant, I think; whatever it was did not look like anything I would describe as a 'cup'. My sister performs some ancient Indonesian massage ritual on the elephant that looks like something Indiana Jones does when disarming booby traps in the Temple of Doom and when she finishes, there is a hollow space inside the elephant that she pours milk into. She performs the ritual in reverse, hands the elephant to my niece, and the kiddo toddles off happily, sucking on the elephant's trunk. I think.

Anyway, that's about where this particular flying kid was in his stage of vocabulary development. He made sounds that only his mother could possibly have interpreted as words, but he had no trouble parsing her instructions regarding sitting up and keeping his seat belt buckled. She did a good job keeping him quietly entertained, fed, watered, and calm throughout the flight. So, if you flew to Tucson yesterday with a little boy who likes his Thomas the Tank engine and were sitting next to a gigantic amazon who was working a crossword -- kudos to you and your kid for flying well. Not everyone manages it so gracefully.