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2005-10-06 - 11.07pm previous entry next entry
Sixth toothie, and things about nursing
I am just heating up a slice of humble pie ;) Thank you so much for all the messages! I didn't realise so many people can't see Arthur's video clips with dial-up - what a shame! Kat, somehow I did miss your congrats for Arthur on his first step! Thank you for that message!! I'm soooo glad you guys liked the video clips! :) Of course I am biased, but Arthur is so cute when he laughs ;) I am so happy to keep catching him laughing on video! Anyway, I officially realise how good my online friends are ;) Thank you! xx
Arthur got toothie number six 2 days ago, right when I expected it! I love how I always know to expect a tooth exactly 3 days after I see that eroded dent thing on his gum. So far I haven't missed seeing that the day it appears, so I always find the new toothie right when I expect it. He is still teething though, but I remember that he had some bad teething pain for a good few days after all his other teeth came through. This evening he has such hot red cheeks, and they look kind of puffy too, poor Arthur. We gave him Calpol before bed tonight. The new toothie is still just a wink of white, but you can just about see it. He had four at the top now, and two at the bottom. Here is his latest toothy smile, taken this morning!...
This boy NEVER stops smiling!! Mind you, he has been that way since he could first make his facial muscles do it, hehe! I remember when he was 8 weeks old I posted this entry and Marlen said that she never saw a baby Arthur's age smile so much! :) Funny how I still remember specific comments about my cutie from so long ago! He really has been a smiler, since the early weeks. He smiled at 4 weeks old for the first time, and he just constantly looks so happy and smiley! I love that :) Here he is again, a bit later on today:
Well I can't stay for a long entry tonight because it's getting late and I am already so tired. I have had a little more energy today though, which is good. I think I may have a little less milk today. Arthur has been clingy and wanting to nurse all day long, which is really unlike him. Maybe it's just that he is taking less at night now? But I suppose the greatest likelihood is pregnancy induced milk reduction. I have also noticed - I can't remember from when, because it seems to have happened gradually - that when Arthur is nursing on one breast, the other doesn't leak and wet my clothes any more. In fact I don't leak at all any more, except when he is nursing and then pulls away when my milk is letting down. Then I leak from the side he was on, but not all over the place or anything. Today I was remembering how many pairs of breast pads I used to soak through in a day a few months ago - crazy amounts!!! And how when Arthur came off the breast, a little jet of milk would be spraying out in a 2-or-3-inch stream at him, hehe! It's so different now. I guess my milk supply IS totally different now that he's at such a different stage of breastfeeding. Those things were when he was exclusively breastfed. I haven't noticed any less milk since he started solids, but the supply hasn't been so ferocious I suppose. He has certainly had plenty. At the moment I am getting nervous that he isn't getting enough, but I think that is unfounded because every time he nurses, he gulps and gasps during the let-down for a while. He is nursing for longer today too, and yesterday now I come to think of it, which makes me wonder if it's taking him longer to get the amount he's used to getting. Lately I have been checking after he's finished and I think he isn't getting any more milk - I squeeze to try to express a little, and always get white milk right away, so I guess there's still enough there. It just makes me feel a bit uneasy that there are signs that something is changing there. I want to be sure I keep a close eye on my supply to be sure what he is getting.
He is eating the same amount of solids. I think his tea is getting bigger though, and sometimes he seems ravenous for lunch! I always nurse him after meals, but today he has wanted to nurse such a lot. He has been sort of clingy and whiney more than usual as well. I hope he's not coming down with something, but it could just be teething pain. I have let him clamber on me and cuddle as much as he has wanted to today, and have stayed close to him, playing on the floor with him most of the day. For the last 2 hours till Neil got home tonight, I just opened both bra flaps and gave him full access to both breasts during our play time! Just having them visibly available seemed to make him more settled, and he did nurse like eleventy times over that period. He got milk each time because I could hear that he was, so that was reassuring.
Over the last few days, Arthur has started to let me cradle him for long nursing sessions on the sofa again, which I LOVE!!! He has been such a wriggle-bum for months now, and since he could sit up without support he has nursed snack-style, for brief moments, sitting, standing, climbing, kneeling, anything but the traditional cosy cradled baby position! And often trying to move about while nursing, which gave me serious elastic nipple syndrome, haha! Anyway, I love the longer, quieter, cosy nursing sessions. Sometimes when I am nursing him, I look down and watch him and really realise that he is nearly a year old, and I feel so amazed and proud that I am still nursing him! It feels like such an achievement for me. I don't think I had any major concept of nursing a baby for this long before I got pregnant with Arthur and did some reading about it, and figured it was the best thing for him. I guess I just figured once they are on solids, babies lose interest in the breast and weaning is easy. Now I know! ;) It feels such a sense of freedom to have no agenda on weaning - with the exception of night-weaning now that we are soooooo sleep deprived, hehe! But to have no goal like that, it's so nice. But the "down" side is that I am dreading when he chooses to wean himself! I am so hoping he will want to continue nursing through my pregnancy, even for comfort when my milk is sparse, and enjoy nursing for a long time to come yet.
I need to take more photos of Arthur breastfeeding. I know I will regret not having done so when he weans and it's all just a warm fuzzy memory. I have some recent ones from a month or so ago, but they reveal waaaay too much of both of us, so they are just for me to gaze at wistfully! :)
Arthur is waking. It's 10.38pm so a normal wake time for him really.
Okay, I'm back - now it's 10.47pm. Arthur is so precious. I love him so much. It's amazing how mushy I continue to feel as I nurse him, even though he's not a little tiny baby any longer. He DOES seem so much littler at night though, when he's half-asleep :) I could have stayed next to him all night just now, instead of getting up and letting Neil take my place. He didn't want much milk and got gaggy pretty quickly. I think he is way fuller at night than he used to be, because he quickly gets that gaggy face after not-that-much milk, like he is just toooo full. After that he just went back off to sleep, snuggled with his tummy against me, his hand on my neck, his leg flung over my hip. I can't think of anything more.... I can't even thing of the right word! Wonderful? Intimate? Cosy? Those don't really describe it. It's wonderful anyway :)
Last night I nursed him at 12.30am. I just wanted to. Usually that is in our window where I don't go in, but I jumped right up and went to nurse him. I just couldn't keep away! I sometimes just NEED to be near him, as much as he needs me close to him. After that I came back to bed, and he did not wake again till the dot of 6am!!!!!!!!! Wow!! Of course *I* woke at 4.30am feeling all restless and thinking, "Where is my little man?! I miss him! Will he wake soon?!" etc! I fully expected him to wake at any time, but I guess I fell back to sleep thinking about it because next thing I knew he was waking and it was 6am. Amazing. I don't expect the same again, because it never works that way! In a way it's perfect for me because at the moment I LOVE to be disturbed to nurse him. It's even nicer and easier now that he is waking less frequently - I WANT to nurse him in the night now that he's waking less frequently. But I will be careful not to disturb the pattern he's starting to develop, by lumbering in and giving him the breast when he might happily let Daddy rub his back to fall back to sleep! Sometimes I just will though. I love nursing him soooo much. If he does have more long stretches of sleep, that is great too, since it means he is better rested and I get better/more sleep too!!! Yay!
I need to go to bed. I'm sure there's more to write. OH OF COURSE THERE IS!!! I almost forgot, Neil finally managed to phone the place where he applied for the job, and they told him he did not get it. Bummer. BUT, it turns out to be quite positive, because they gave him great feedback and said that they would like him to apply for a couple of other jobs within the same company, as they feel he is much more suited to those. These two jobs are currently up for applications, and the closing date is October 14th, so Neil can get onto that right away! Yay! I feel like somewhere along the line he is meant to work for this company, and we are meant to relocate because of it. I think these jobs would mean we have to move to slightly different locations than the other job would have taken us, so we'll have to look out schools, churches and houses again, but that's okay. God will lead us to the exact right place to bring up our family, so I'm confident :)
I will leave you with two photos of something I found Arthur doing yesterday in the kitchen! He has such a thing for drawers at the moment, urgh! This means trapped fingers and paperwork all over the floor a lot of the time! We need to fix some sort of thingy to them so that he can't open them really, but he loves them so much, and we have soooooo many drawers in the house that we couldn't possibly child-proof them all! He rarely traps his fingers though, and when he does it's because I wasn't right there watching, which I usually am. If I'm with him he is okay, and he does learn from trapping his fingers sometimes. He will avoid the drawer in question for a while but then forget all about it a few hours later!
Anyway, the kitchen drawers (ones that I bashed together from a plank of wood, painted white, and bought 3 basic wooden handles to put on them!) are especially rolly and contain interesting things, like boxes containing enormous rolls of 100 food bags with tie handles...
Little monkey! It took me ages to re-roll them all up again! Longer than when he unravels an entire loo roll (!!) because they are slippery. But I can't bear to restrict my monkey boy from such mischief! I'm sure it's good for his character or something, hehe! Plus otherwise I would not get to giggle with my husband when he comes home from work and we have put Arthur to bed, and I show him the photographic evidence of what Arthur has been up to today!
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