to top

Our Favorite Bottles: Dr. Brown’s

Reader Christine asked, i'm 4 weeks until my delivery and wanted to see what type of bottles you are using now. i have the medela bottles for feeding with orthodontic nipples, born free, and breastflow. can you review what bottles you tried and what you liked/disliked? i just received my target completion certificate and want to hold off on purchasing bottles until i can get a better idea of what bottles are really good. This was a very timely question, because we had just switched bottles last week and I had been meaning to blog about our great bottle search. In the past two weeks, when Claire was suffering from horrible colic, we decided to try different bottles to see if a different...

Continue reading

My Goth Baby (And More Breastfeeding Woes)

In my last post I asked if anyone could guess why my breastmilk has turned purple. Well, kalen, mlwindc, and LatteLove got it right: it is due to gentian violet, which I am using to treat our latest bout of thrush. While gentian violet is proven to be one of the most effective remedies against thrush, I had been reluctant to try it because of the ick factor, the "ick" being that it is messy. Gentian violet is a deep purple solution that seems to get everywhere once the bottle is open, and it is almost always guaranteed to stain fabrics permanently and skin temporarily. Before giving Claire a cotton swab of the purple stuff, I had dabbed her lips and area around her mouth...

Continue reading

Breast Fest 2010 Postponed

Unfortunately, J and I have decided to postpone Breast Fest (that's my name for my 24-hour, breast-only, no-bottles-allowed marathon) a week or two. We have always known that Claire has a "witching hour" — a period at night where a baby is extra fussy and cranky — but it has progressed to full-blown colic over the weekend. The past few nights have been hell. None of our usual tricks seem to work, and as soon as she seems to have calmed down, she will start screaming again once we relax. Her fussiness has considerably gotten worse during the daytime too. (And before you give any suggestions, please know that yes, we probably have tried it already. We have tried everything that friends have suggested,...

Continue reading

Wednesday. It’s On.

I am pretty sure that I do not need a lactation consultant. Claire has a perfectly good latch. I do not have any supply issues. I am comfortable in different breastfeeding positions. I have read La Leche League's The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding front to back, and am always visiting breastfeeding support forums, so I am certainly informed. What I do have is an impatient and lazy suckler. One out of every five times, she will take from my breast and drink for a good 10+ minutes straight. It is only the other four out of five times that she will only suck for a minute or two, tire of it (because it's more work than drinking from a bottle), then proceed to start screaming. And the...

Continue reading

Crotch-Punching Cloudy

Last night J and I decided to dress Claire in her take-home outfit to see how it would fit her now, at 6 weeks old. (She was positively swimming in it when we brought her home from the hospital, as even premie clothes were too large on her for the first week of her life.) No surprises there — the shirt now fits her a bit too snugly. We kept the outfit on for her nightly picture with Cloudy. J even snapped a picture with his phone and immediately uploaded it to Facebook, only to receive the following question from a friend: "Is she crotch punching Cloudy?" We immediately took another look at the picture in question, and sure enough, there it was...

Continue reading