If My Heart were a Ball, it would Roll Uphill

Another weekend, another 250 mile round trip to Grantham.

Normally, I don't mind the journey so much, but even though I am able to have my choice of music on as loud as I like, I'm finding it quite hard to keep doing all this driving. Fortunately, once I move I will get the train into London, which is much more civilised and relaxed.

(Hopefully.)

The flat is all done now and on the market. We had two lots of potential buyers in over the weekend, and both seemed to be very impressed, so fingers crossed.

It would be nice to have an end to the uncertainty, and to get back to being a proper family. As we were walking back from K___'s sister's place on Saturday night, she said to me that she is finding it very hard being away from all the decisions at this end - the purchase of the new place is all in hand, but K___ is a hands-on type of person, and has found it difficult to take a back seat with regards the sale down here.

Olivia seems to be taking things in her stride. She was a little grumpy this weekend, but this is almost certainly a result of all the teeth she's been cutting. She now has four on the top, two on the bottom and at least two more on the way. She does an awful lot of talking now adays. Nothing intelligible yet - lots of 'dadadadada' noises (which are not 'Dada' as they are aimed at everything and anything) but it wont be too long. She's very close to crawling now. She pulls herself across the floor in a sort of commando crawl, and particularly likes the bits of my in-laws' living room floor that is bare wood as she slides across that nicely. Normally towards an ornament or something else she shouldn't be grabbing.

Her eating is really good now. She loves; broccoli, spinach, salmon, banana, toast, (bits of) pitta pockets stuffed with cheese, green beans and rice cakes and gets seventy percent or so into her mouth. Having those teeth has made a big difference! Apart from working out what has gone in by what is left in her bib or on the floor, we know it's going in by the smell of the nappies. Christ on a pogo stick, they smell. I gagged at the one before lunch today.

Oh well. That's the deal, and if you haven't worked out you're going to be dealing with stinky pants you really have no business having children.

Here's a pic of Olivia hitting the finale of a showtune from a few weeks ago. I would love to pretend this showbiz move is quite as impressive as it seems, but I have Photoshopped Mummy's arm from the snap.

And I Love What You Do, Don't You Know That You're Toxic

The numerous joys of motherhood...... no 10,422

You take you daughter to a garden party
She is wearing white linen trousers
Her nappy leaks
She had done a poo

And It's Catching Up

I haven't posted for a while so I am going to bring you all up to date with what has been happening in Olivia land over the last few weeks.

Having been poorly for some while Olivia is finally back to normal. We ended up putting her on fast flow teats, designed for 6 month old babies simply because she just took so long to drink her milk while she was recovering that she ended up falling asleep half way through the bottle. We ended up having a poo sample sent to the hospital for analysis as her digestion still wasn't right and the GP was concerned she might have developed lactose intolerance following her illness. The test came back normal though so she obviously just took a long time to recover from her Gastroenteritis.

I got her weighed and the health visitor reckoned she had put 7 ounces on. Considering that this was during a week when she had nothing but electrolyte drink for 24 hours, less than half rations for several days when she wouldn't eat and then watered down feeds to let her tummy recover I am at a loss to see hw this could possibly be so. She had dropped a fair few ounces earlier in the week as well. I had weighed her at home before taking her to clinic and on my scales she was the same as she had been the week before. I am sure they have a dodgy set of scales at baby clinic. I've also had her weighed again since and she is now up to 14lbs 13 oz so is well on target to double her birth weight by 6 months. She is hovering somewhere between the 50th and 75th centiles.

The other week Olivia also went to visit her nice 'Auntie' L but was a bit grizzly and so while Daddy M and Auntie L talked business, Mummy M had to walk round and round in circles in the back garden with a baby who was very tired but DID NOT want to go to sleep.

On Friday the NCT girls and the babies all came over to our place. Everyone brought bits and bobs of food and the Mummies had a relaxing lunch while the babies played on the baby bym and play mat.

Like a Bright New Morning

Well, another bad night sleep for Mummy M. Olivia was tossing and turning all night and I ended up feeding her at 3.30am.

At 6am she had the fullest wet nappy I have ever felt in my life. She had totally filled up the nappy and had soaked through to her vest, sheet growbag and through to the cot sheet. In the name of scientific exploration we weighed the nappy on the baby scales and it weighed 14oz - that is almost a pound!!!!!!! And that is excluding all the wee that went on her clothes and cot!!

On to feeding time...She took 4oz of the final 7oz bottle of electrolyte drink and then went totally postal, although that fact that she subsequently went back to sleep for 3 hours suggested that this might be more due to tiredness than anything else.

After her sleep I weighed her to find that she had lost another 3 ounces, bringing the total to 7oz lost since Monday.

She started back on milk with the 10am feed and has been a bit better about actually drinking it, although she is not quite back to her normal self. She has also started to poop properly again so hopefully she is now on the mend. It has been a difficult few days.

So Unpleasant Inside and Out

Having woken us up at 12.30 and then woken me at 2 and 5am, this morning Olivia woke up properly at about 7 and showed very little sign of improvement. It is strange as she is still so happy in herself when she is awake, but the stream of nappies had not slowed and she still showed little interest in feeding. It is crazy as she can spend literally an hour sucking on the bottle and you would swear she was feeding but when you check the bottle she has actually only taken about half an ounce. It is like the bottles that came with baby dolls when I was little, where you tipped the bottle and the milk disappeared but then when you put it upright again all the milk came back.

Yesterday, not knowing how fit I was going to be, F_ has arranged with his boss to take today as holiday to help out with the childcare. At 8am I spent 10 minutes pressing the redial button on the phone trying to get hold of the doctors surgery to try and get an appointment for Olivia. We were told to come along at 10 and they would fit us in in between sessions.

The doctor was very kind and understanding. He looked Olivia over and reassured us that she was not showing signs of dehydration and had not suffered any real harm. He asked us if she had lost any weight. Luckily I had decided to weight Olivia that morning to check the situation myself and she had lost 4oz since Monday. He did agreed that we needed to nip the situation in the bud as by now she had been ill since Saturday.

These were difficult words to hear as her Mummy, but we were told to 'starve' her for 24 hours. We were to stop giving her milk and instead give her a powdered electrolyte solution, which should allow her digestive system to recover and reset itself. Babies can apparently manage quite well for days without being fed as long as they get the essential fluid and salts etc. He asked us what flavour she would prefer, Blackcurrent or Citrus... Now bearing in mind that she is 3 months old and has only ever tasted breastmilk, formula, Calpol and Infacol, I'm not sure that she had a strong opinion either way! We opted for Blackcurrent. We have to give her 1 to 1.5 times the volume of her normal feeds in the clear drink.

Although she screamed at first, probably because it was something new and she didn't know what was going on, she soon got used to the new drink. I'm not sure if she finds the new drink easier to take because of the thinner consistency meaning she doesn't have to suck hard to get it out of the bottle, or if her appetite had returned, but Olivia has been draining 7oz bottles of the electrolyte solution pretty quickly. She has had 28oz of the solution today on top of 7oz on milk we got down her before we went to the doctor. We have to continue this tomorrow morning and then hopefully she can return to milk.

Presumably due to the volume of fluid in her tummy, the drink satusfies her for a short while and then she cried for food. It is truly heartbraking to see her poor little face crying and wondering why mean old Mummy won't give bubba her milk. I just keep focusing on the fact that we are trying to help her and that her bottom will thank us for this in the long time. The doctor had warned us that we had to stick with it and not cave in and give her milk this evening and that it would be pretty hard going 'starving' her.

He wasn't wrong. It is starting to be a bit of a theme through these posts, but hopefully tomorrow will be better.

Maybe You're Just Too Upset Inside...

So, when I went to clinic with my friend E_ and her baby I_ it turned out that we were leading parallel lives. I_ had been poorly since Friday and had sickness and diarrhoea all weekend. E_'s hubbie had also come home sick that lunchtime. I began to suspect that I was paying even more for my afternoon of decadence on Friday because I think Olivia caught a sickness from I_ or one oft he other babies, as at least one other had been poorly the previous week.

By Tuesday morning Olivia still wasn't feeding and after her first bottle of the day it was a struggle to her her to eat more than 2oz before she fell asleep. We thought that surely the constant stream of dirty nappies had to end at some point as what was coming out seemed to be exceeding what was going in. We thought wrong. You would not believe how much poop could come out of such a small person in a 24 hour period. I'm glad that we are an environmentally friendly family because otherwise Olivia would have to have her own personal landfill full of poopy nappies.

F_'s Mum and Dad phoned to say that they had both spent the morning vomiting, so we had truly spent the weekend spreading the love far and wide in our family - oops. F_ was very worried as he had visited his elderly Nana and feared that he may have given her an illness that she wouldn't be strong enough to deal with, but luckily she has not gone down with anything.

F_ was still off sick and I spent the morning boasting that it was a good job that one of us was hardy cause if I got ill who would look after the baby? Immortal last words as several hours later I was running a fever of 101 and felt pretty rubbish, although with me it was a headache and aching joints but no gastrointestinal problems, thankfully.

Feeding Olivia became a constant job. It was like going back in time to when she was a newborn and we spent all day cup feeding her. As she wouldn't take a full feed and we wanted to get as much into her as possible we tried feeding her small amounts more regularly. This effectively meant that we would start a feed, the feed would take an hour, during which she would consume about 2 ounces, and then an hour later it would all start again. She still only took about half of her daily formula load.

We both agreed that if the situation showed no sign of improvement by the next morning we would take her to the doctor.

This World Sharpens Teeth

Well, after the previous night's little adventure, Sunday could only be an improvement, surely?

We woke up a little later than normal, a small blessing as a result of a certain person's late bedtime. We had anticipated that Olivia would probably have woken in the night for a feed, but apparently not. So she would surely be ravenous come breakfast time. Well, not quite. She took five of her normal six ounce feed. Good enough, we thought; she'll not come to any harm on that.

Except that every subsequent bottle that she was given, Olivia seemed disinterested after just a couple of ounces, and not only that, was taking about as long as it would normally take her to finish the whole thing. She seemed to be favouring one side of her mouth. 'Oh ho!' we thought, 'Teething!' She seemed fine in herself, however. In fact, she's discovered the most delightful new noises, a series of coos and warbles that make her sound a little like one of the Clangers. It's lovely to watch her get to grips with these joyous new sounds, and it just makes us smile to hear it.

In the afternoon I took her out, as I often do, to give K___ a few hours off. We went to see Nana (or rather Great Nana now, since my mother has become Olivia's Nana). Great Nana was wearing woolly gloves, which I noted immediately, since it was quite a warm day, with low cloud cover making it feel close. Olivia seemed to be on great form. She was making her new noise and generally being quite entertaining and Great Nana seemed very happy to see her namesake.

Then we set off to my parents, just a short buggy ride away. Well, for Olivia; I had to push (she's very selfish sometimes - it's so babyish). On the journey round, Olivia fell asleep. All right for those not stuck pushing the buggy, isn't it? At my folks, she stayed asleep for another twenty five minutes or so. Upon waking, the chirpy girl who had entertained her Great Nana was gone. This one was sullen and whingy. I changed her nappy, but that didn't seem to improve matters and Nana and Grandpa didn't manage to get even the most miserly smile from her. It was about the right time, so I tried her bottle.

It normally takes Olivia about ten to fifteen minutes to do a six ounce bottle. After half an hour, she had just about managed two. She kept pushing the teat over to one side or pushing the bottle away. It seemed as though she was sucking the teat, but she must have just been mouthing it. In the end I just gave up. Cue a load of tears from Madam. It was no fun for my folks, so I packaged her up and took her home. For the remainder of the day she refused to take more than a couple of ounces per bottle and had LOTS of very runny nappies. She seemed so alert and okay in herself (for the most part), we weren't too sure how concerned we ought to be about dehydration. In the end, we phoned NHS Direct and spoke to a nurse. She established that Olivia's mouth was moist and her eyes were bright and there was still wee in her nappies and that her fontanelle wasn't sunken and said that as long as there was a wet nappy every six to eight hours, it wasn't too serious, but we needed to keep an eye on it.

As K___ would be visiting the health clinic to get Olivia weighed on the following day, there wasn't anything too pressing to worry about.

Now Wash Your Hands

We've been away at my parents' but normal service has now been resumed. Olivia was generally very cute and everyone was entranced by her. Being the comedian that she is Olivia decided to play a little trick on Grandma. I could smell that Olivia's nappy was not quite the 'fragrant roses' (to coin a phrase from our friend S_) and so I said to my Mum that I thought she needed a change. Grandma then picked Olivia up to give her a sniff and it was at this point, too late, that I realised that she had poo running out of the leg of her jeans (Olivia that is, Mum has been potty trained for years:) and it was now running all down Grandma's front. Olivia thinks she is very clever indeed, Grandma is not so sure...

When You Get to the Bottom ...

I took Olivia along to baby clinic as usual on Monday and again she made a bit of a show of herself. While we were waiting for a changing mat to be available all the mothers near me started to sniff at their babys' bottoms. As I was the closest to the offending bottom I was too well aware the it was Olivia's nappy creating the fragrant smell sensation. Little did I know that the smell was the least of my worries.

Once a mat became free, I went over to strip her down to be weighed. I didn't need to get as far as looking in the nappy as there was poo in the pocket of her jeans and all over her vest. The nappy was so full of poop that it was leaking out of the leg holes!!! Of course as the clinic was only a few streets away and I was in a rush I just grabbed the little nappy changer and not the full changing bag so I didn't have a change of clothes with me. It is sods law that I carry tons of stuff about with me all the time and whenever I actually need something it is always the day I haven't brought it with me. So I ended up having to take her home wearing socks, a short sleeved T shirt and a clean nappy - not a great look but luckily it was very warm and I also had her cosytoes on the buggy.

This week she weighed 12lbs 3.

We took ourselves apart, We talked about our faces

Olivia is growing well. She is now within 3oz of her birthweight. We are going to keep a close eye and get her weighed weekly to make sure everything is progressing well. It is a difficult balance to make sure she gets enough nutrition when we don't know how much breastmilk she gets.

Dad to be (or should that just be Dad!) or F as I will now be calling him noticed changes in her after he had been away for 5 days. He says she looks like him. I guess that now I just think she looks like herself!

It is funny because although she is only just over 3 weeks old it seems like we have always had her. We are in a routine now and so we've kind of started to forget what things used to be like. I guess things will change again next week when F goes back to work. We will miss him so much. If only we could have that elusive lottery win so he didn't have to work, although I think the main thing hindering us in winning is the fact that we don't buy tickets :)

Olivia is still in biodegradable disposable nappies due to the truly explosive nature of her poops and the fact that we were away at my parents' but we are going over to the washables at the weekend - watch this space and see if our eco-parents credentials crumble in a tidal wave of poo. She had a whole day and a half where she didn't poop once, then a large firm poop and then the poop gates were opened and she was back to doing one every feed. I bet Daddy will miss that when he goes back to work...