9 Months - Briefly

Well I didn't get Bean's 9 month post written. . . .although I have been blogging about all of his doctor visits, so that's pretty much what he's been up to. Here is a quickie.

Quick side note, this photo was SO hard to get. 2 seconds before the photo shoot Bean whacked his head on the floor. I tried to edit it out but you can still see the red mark on his forehead.

Stats: 18lbs 1 oz, 28 inches

He is starting to eat finger foods for dinner. His favorite by far is meatballs. I will put a big variety on his tray and he always goes for the meat first. I think a close second are the Happy Baby brand yogurt melts. My son may have inherited my sweet tooth.

Motor wise Bean is super mobile now. He is cruising on furniture and can even climb stairs! We have 14 stairs from our main floor to the second floor and he can go all the way to the top. Occasionally he will even try to stand by himself but he hasn't done it successfully yet, he usually just plops down on the floor. He likes to chase the cat but she is still too fast for him. He will give her a run for her money when he's walking which I think will be before his 1st birthday.

Bean loves babbling up a storm. He will shriek like a banshee when he sees the cat. He also likes to babble "Mama." I think the months of me saying it to him have finally paid off.

I love when I walk into a room he gets a huge smile on his face and kicks his legs with excitement.

He still hates baths. He wants so bad to be mobile in the tub, but he usually just wipes out and conks his head on the tub. I think we need to get him a non slip bath mat.

We are still successfully breast feeding, but this week we finally had to give him a 50/50 mix of breast milk and formula because we burned through my frozen stash. We made it almost 10 months, not too shabby. The only reason why we need to do this is work only gives me one break to pump, I just can't keep up with him that way, even with the extra pumping I do at night.

His favorite toy right now is a stuffed ball that we won from Dave and Busters. If you sit him on the floor he can even catch the ball. You tell him to be ready and he holds his arms out in anticipation. If you lob it just right he'll catch it and then try to eat it.

He still puts EVERYTHING in his mouth.

Bean also got his first cold last month. It was horrible! He was all stuffed up and he slept almost the whole night on my chest in the rocker, from 9pm to 4am. He ran a 102 fever for about 2 days. Having a sick baby is no fun at all. The only upside to it was the fact that he cuddled with me the night he slept on my chest. Much to my dismay Bean is not a cuddler, he is on the move and into everything.

Hopefully when he is older he will cuddle with me in bed and we can watch cartoons together.

This ended up being a lot longer then I planned. :-) Only 6 more days till Bean is 10 months. Once Halloween hits the end of the year flies by. I'm not ready for this!

Tilty

What a month this has been.

So busy. . . full of not so fun things, namely doctors visits.

Two weeks ago was Bean's PT evaluation, and I think we might possibly have gotten some answers. The diagnosis? Torticolis.

I know what you are thinking. "Wait Kris, you said you talked to your pediatrician and you both agreed it couldn't be torticolis because the tilting was only occasional??"

Yeah I thought the same thing. So I asked the physical therapist the exact same question. The answer I got was this: Bean's torticolis is extremely mild. So mild, that to the untrained eye he sometimes looks like he's not tilting at all when he's feeling good. The tilting will also seem to get worse when he's not feeling well, teething, learning a new gross motor, or overly tired.

Hmmmmm. . . .ok.

Honestly at first I didn't completely buy it, but then she pointed out a few other indicators to me. When he goes from a sitting position to crawling he almost always leads with his right leg. Torticolis kids don't like to bear weight on the side of the torticolis (Bean's is the left side). He can do the left, but he'll only do it when forced to. I've been watching him all this week and she was right, he totally does that!

So now I have to do some stretches with him twice a day, and he's going to physical therapy once a week.

Hopefully this will be the end of the tilting saga. Phew.

Sadly though this will not be the end of our visits to specialists. Bean is going to need surgery soon. Nothing life threatening, but it's something that needs to be taken care of and he will need to go under general anesthesia for. . .which is scary. Not sure when it will all go down yet, but probably some time before his first birthday.

Yay more doctors! (that's sarcasm in case you missed it)

Hemp, Yeah Mon!

We are still trucking along in our cloth diapering journey. Since I have at least one friend that is also starting this journey, and a few friends having babies soon that might be interested, I thought I'd write another post about some particular favorites in my cloth diaper stash.

In this post I'd like to talk about my favorite doubler.

For those of you that don't know, a doubler is an extra insert to put into a pocket diaper. They can be made of various materials: hemp, bamboo, cotton, micro fiber, etc.

- Hemp Babies brand hemp doublers are my favorite doubler for sure. They are very thin, dry really fast (even when I line dry), and are super absorbent.

I guess I should back up a little and explain why these are my new favorite. We started having leaking problems a few weeks ago. It was SO annoying. Putting clothes on a squirmy wormy baby who wants to crawl away is not fun. So when he was leaking around his legs 2-3 times a day I was at my whits end. Now I'm going to be honest here and I'm not entirely sure why the diapers were leaking. First thing I did was do a little stripping of my diapers, which is just washing them over and over with no detergent (to clean any detergent build up out). Then I thought about it and the times that the diapers were leaking, the inserts were TOTALLY soaked. This lead me to think that maybe Bean is just peeing more. I only single stuffed my diapers up until that point; so I started double stuffing.

Double stuffed diapers are pretty bulky if you use the regular micro fiber insert with the new born insert that most pockets come with. This is why I love the Hemp Babies doublers. They are so thin that I don't really notice much of a difference between a double and single stuffed diaper. Also, since I started doing this we haven't had one leak!

Generally we will change Bean about every 1.5-2 hours when we are at home (just to be safe), but sometimes when you are out this isn't so easy. Cue hemp doublers! Bean can go at least 3 hours in one of these diapers with no leaking, maybe more if you feel lucky (I think we once did over 4).

Another thing I love about these doublers is the price! Usually a hemp doubler will run around 5 bucks each, Hemp Babies are only 3 dollars at Kelly's Closet (see link above).

I've also tried the Baby Kicks hemp doublers as well. They are really thick and nice for over nights. The down sides? Very bulky and they take FOREVER to dry. Even the rare occasion when I throw my inserts into the dyer the baby kicks hemp is still slightly damp after a full cycle. It's pretty annoying, and not energy efficient.

Anyway, I hope some of this info helps, and that everybody is having a good week.

Eye Check Up

Just wanted to do a quick post about Bean's ophthalmologist appointment.

To summarize:

We went on Wednesday. The doctor was great. He basically said he thought the neurologist was nuts for suggesting anything was wrong with his eyes because he looked so perfect. He did a bunch of quick tests. No eye muscle problems, no vision problems, no need for glasses, just a cute little boy who was super brave and didn't even cry when he had eye drops to dilate his eyes.

He said we didn't even need to go back or follow up unless I felt there was a need or another problem.

Sigh

It was just so refreshing to actually have a doctor say he was ok and there was nothing to worry about (his eyes at least).

I also enjoyed the fact that he literally said word for word what I've been telling Hubs, "If it was a problem with his vision it wouldn't be intermittent." EXACTLY! Thank you Mr. Doctor. Maybe you don't all stink.

Next week is PT evaluation and his 9 month well visit. I can't wait till all this is over.

Odd Mom

I think I have mentioned this before, but in case you didn't know, I am very lacking in the "mommy friends" department.

Don't get me wrong, I actually have a bunch of friends (IRL and fellow bloggers) with kids, but the problem is they all live far away! Some not so far, I have several that are a 30-60 minute drive away, but that's still far in my opinion. I have thanked my lucky stars for Laura when I found out she was pregnant with her daughter. She is only a 15 minute drive away! But still, even when we hang out we muse about how we wish we were only a few blocks apart so we could just walk to each others houses.

Anyway. . . .in an effort to try and make new friends in town I signed Bean and I up for story time at our local library.

I guess I should preface this by explaining a little bit about myself. I'm kinda sarcastic. Even though I know it's not nice, I sometimes make fun of people. I honestly don't mean any harm by it! I swear! I just find some things that parents/people do funny! I don't think it's wrong what some parents do, and I'm not judging them, I just can't help but laugh. Combine that with my inexperience with kids and people with kids . . . . yeah. . .do you see where this is going?

I'm not sure what I expected story time to be for "kids two and under".

We sang.

Oye.

Random cute picture of Bean playing with a spoon and bowls. I just hate posts with out pictures.

Have you ever seen the documentary Babies? It's awesome by the way, if you haven't seen it rent it! There is this one part in it where the San Fransisco dad takes his daughter to a class, and they are singing some song about "the earth is our mother" and his daughter takes off and tries to run out of the class room.

It's funny! My husband and I joked about how the baby probably thought the class was ridiculous and that's why she tried to make a break for it.

So there I sat with Bean, in the same type of situation.

It was SO hard to take it seriously. I kept thinking to myself, "Be friendly! You might make new friends." But all I wanted to do was joke about the stuff we were doing, but I didn't know anybody in the class, and I didn't want anybody to be offended.

I found myself saying stupid word vomit to the other moms (Horrible small talk about where they lived. I think one mom thought I was a crazy stalker.) and when I came home I kept thinking they probably think I'm some kind of weirdo.

Even though I was horribly odd, Bean enjoyed it. He smiled at all the kids, bubbles, and scarves. I guess I will have to be brave and take him back next week. Now that I know what to expect hopefully I will fit in better. :-)

That and I can sing my aria before class so my voice is warmed up for "I'm a Little Tea Pot."

Medical Updates

Here are some updates on Bean's head tilting:

Once again he has stopped tilting, of course, but we still took him to the neurologist.

It pretty much went how I expected. She said he looked good, checked all his reflexes and asked a bunch of questions. Honestly I don't think any doctor is going to tell me what I want, which is "stop worrying everything is fine." If they can't stick a specific label on what is going on they will never say it's ok because of liability.

There were two things that Bean is doing that the neurologist didn't like. She had asked us if he was saying mama or dada. Well he had about a week where he was babbling mama a bunch (he didn't know what it meant, but he'd make the noise), and lately he really hasn't been babbling mama (that week he was growling and making raspberries a ton). She said that wasn't normal. I don't really thing it's so odd, he's found other noises he likes to make more? I dunno. . .I'm not the doctor I guess. The second thing she didn't like was she said it looked like maybe he wasn't tracking things evenly with his eyes. In the same breath though she said it could just be he's still developing, so now we have to see ANOTHER specialist. An ophthalmologist. The thing I don't understand is if it was a problem with his vision why would he randomly stop doing it? Wouldn't it be more constant?

She said she would like an "image series" which I'm assuming means MRI, but she said that there really didn't seem like there was enough that was suspicious to merit risking anesthesia to take it. So instead she said she wanted to see us back in 6 weeks. Which I totally think is pointless. For what? Does she really think things will change in 6 weeks?

I guess I'm just frustrated. I want answers and I don't think I'm going to get them, and I feel like the doctors are just going to order tests and keep referring us to specialists.

So we see the ophthalmologist this week, physical therapist next week and his 9 month "well visit" is next week too. Oh yeah, and I'm also seeing the eye doctor this week too.

I hate doctors.

It's going to be a rough two weeks.

8 Months

Late again on this!

8 Months Old!

Ok seriously? Time needs to slllllllllooooooow down! Yup 8 months now. Here we go.

Once again I'm not entirely sure on the whole height/weight thing. I do know about 3-4 weeks ago when we had to take him to the pediatrician for a check on something he was 17lbs 6oz. Quite the growing boy!

- Sleeping - Still same stuff with the sleeping. 10 hours at night, and unpredictable naps during the day. I'm thankful that he doesn't wake at night though!

- Eating - Fruits and veggies, a big variety. We will give him some melon in those mesh feeders that he enjoys. He will also eat a "puff" or two. The past week or so he has been able to get one or two in his mouth by himself! So super cute when he self feeds. No teeth yet! We enjoy those gummy smiles though.

- Motor - He is getting so strong and independent. In the past month he went from sitting to pulling up and crawling! He is not super fast yet, but he definitely has it down. He LOVES standing. He loves it so much we thought he might skip crawling completely. Sometimes when we try to get him to sit down he will go all rigid and completely refuse to sit because he wants to stand so much.

I have a feeling Bean is going to give me a run for my money. He already manipulates me to get what he wants and he's only 8 months old. He cries if I take a toy away that he wants, or if I don't let him do something that he wants to do. Oye! This parenting is hard work.

End of this month is his 9 month well visit. I'm not looking forward to more vaccines, but it will be fun to see how much he's grown.

The only other thing I guess I can mention is Bean's head tilt. About 5 weeks ago when he started getting mobile I noticed he was always tilting his head to the left. Honestly sometimes it's not really noticable if you aren't looking for it. When I tell people who see him on a regular basis, nobody has a clue what I'm talking about. Anyway, after a few days he didn't stop doing it so we took him to the doctor. She diagnosed him with having torticolis. He had to go for a head/neck x-ray to make sure he had no spinal chord abnormalities. The x-ray came back non specific (normal) which basically meant it was probably a muscle issue. During the week while I was researching a pediactic PT to take him to he stopped tilting! A friend of mine googled head tilting in 7 month olds (I try to stay away from googling baby issues, you alway read freaky stuff) and she said she saw a ton of hits for tilting being related to teething. We figured that's what it was.

I took this photo on the first day I noticed the tilt, he was doing it pretty badly.

Well about a week ago he started doing it again. Granted he still doesn't have his teeth yet, but I called the doctor back and told him that I didn't think he had torticolis because he wouldn't randomly stop doing it if he did. The doctor agreed with me and now we have to take him for the PT evaluation and a neurologist evaluation (he didn't agree with our internet teething theory). The PT appointment I'm not so nervous about, but the neurologist I am. I don't want him having any more x-rays or any big tests like a cat scan or MRI where they might have to sedate him.

This photo was taken when he stopped tilting. Totally straight!

In the past week that he's started doing it again sometimes he seems pretty straight and then other times he seems to tilt more. The baby sitter told me she thinks he tilts more when he's tired, so maybe that means it's just a muscle problem that needs some PT. I'm trying to stay positive.

We go see the neurologist first next week. So say a prayer that she says he's ok and doesn't need any scary tests.