Blue Sauce

When your kid is born the doctor hands her over and gives lots of advice, and somewhere in all the instructions is the recommendation to look at her poop every once in awhile to make sure it's normal. You're so overwhelmed that this seems like a good idea, and you move on to the next piece of advice without asking questions.

During the first month you continue believing this is a good idea because a newborn's poop isn't very stinky and doesn't change much. The next five months go by and it's pretty much the same mustard-looking poop day in, day out. And then your kid starts solids.

If you were nervous about starting solids because your kid might choke, you'll be even more nervous about it when you see what comes out the other end the next morning. And later that morning. And again at noon. And then several times in the afternoon. "How many whole pieces of carrot can you have left in you?" you wonder. "Is that an intact pea?" Last week she had post-avocado poop that looked exactly like second-day guacamole that's turned brown.

Somehow the amount of food that you put in seems to triple when it comes out. Half an avocado turned into five pounds of guacamole. The morning after she had green beans we both had to change our clothes before we were done with that diaper change. Solids also cause poop to smell worse than poop has ever smelled before. After the great Green Bean Incident of 2011 Harper's room stank for hours even though I took the bag of diapers straight to the trash.

I tell you all this so that you can understand the difficulty in checking to make sure that her poop is normal. If you can (1) contain the poop in the diaper, (2) hold the diaper without sticking your finger in the poop while controlling a squirming baby, and (3) get close enough to look at the poop without making your eyes water, you'll realize that you have no idea what "normal" poop is supposed to look like anyway.

For example, this morning Harper's poop was blue. Honestly blue. Maybe a tint of grey, but pretty much blue. Last night she had applesauce for the first time, and while I can safely say that the consistently looked pretty much like applesauce, I'm not sure if blue applesauce should be considered normal or not. A few startled moments were all I could stand before I wrapped up the diaper and said, "Bombs away!" into the diaper pail, but it was enough to decide that I'm done checking for normal poop. If the kid is smiling and babbling on the changing table, I'm going to assume everything's good.

Announcing Poop!

I brought Harper into the doctor today for her cough, because she's been waking up five times a night and once she gets started she has a hard time catching her breath. Of course, she didn't cough once while we were at the doctor, was happy and smiling, and was awarded a clean bill of health. I'm not really upset by this, I'm just saying fitting the mold of "paranoid parent" kinda sucks.

The doctor did say, "You sure sound congested, though." Joe and I don't have Harper's cough yet, but we both have head colds. Mine has lasted about two weeks, and today the pressure in my head turned into a sinus headache. The best way to illustrate just how stuffed up I am is this story:

This morning as I was getting dressed to take Harper to day care I heard her rip what sounded like a major fart. I figured there was no way she made that much noise without also pooping, so I did my usual test of holding her butt up to my nose and sniffing. I knew that my nose was pretty plugged so when I didn't smell anything with my usual tentative sniff I got real close and took a few deep breaths through my nose. I didn't smell a thing, so I set her back down and said, "Just a fart? You are obviously your father's child."

Thirty minutes later after making her bottles and getting her solid food ready, I took a quick sip of orange juice before heading out the door and I couldn't taste it. I knew from past experience that meant that I couldn't smell anything either. I looked again at my daughter sitting on the floor and figured I'd better check her diaper since my sniff test probably wasn't reliable. Her diaper was loaded. I mean LOADED to the near rupture point. Even once I had the diaper open on the changing table I couldn't catch a single whiff. I'm not really complaining, because her poop has gotten incredibly stinky since she started eating solid food, but that fact just makes it all the more amazing that I couldn't smell it. Good thing she made so much noise filling her diaper this morning or I would have strapped her into her carseat and cinched her down onto all that poop without knowing it, and instead of sitting in her own filth for 30 minutes it would have been an hour, at which point we would have arrived at the day care and the ladies there would have smelled us walking in the door.

The Dinner Table

After a few weeks of mostly wearing her first attempts at solid food, Harper has now graduated to the high chair and is eating from a spoon like champ. As soon as she sees that you've got the spoon loaded, she opens her mouth and looks at you intently until you fill it. So far we've tried rice cereal, squash and sweet potatoes. I think she likes the cereal and the squash best, though it's kind of hard to tell. (By the way, aren't those some awesome striped tights? Thanks Grandma Linda!)

 

Our feeding challenges come more from her being so darn exhausted by the time dinner rolls around than from her being a picky eater at this point. And by dinner time, I'm talking 5:45 or 6pm at the latest. The last few weeks she's apparently decided that napping is for sissies and has napped for a total of 1.5 hours all day. By the time 5pm rolls around, she's ready for bed and really ticked off that we don't agree. Because she takes such mini naps, they've started counting the individual minutes of her naps at day care. Usually on the little paper report of your kid's day they round up to the nearest 5 or 10 minutes, but today the report said "11:10 to 11:32." This is what she looks like running on 22 minutes of nap time.

We couldn't get her to smile again no matter how many funny faces we made. There was just no delaying bed time at this point. After this picture was taken she was asleep within 15 minutes, and she'll be out for the next 12 hours. At least she sleeps at night!

There might be a few of you who wonder about our selection of high chair decor, knowing that pink is not necessarily our favorite accessorizing color. We needed a high chair when my nephews came to visit after Harper was born, and we hadn't had a chance to get one yet. I looked up some reviews online and told Joe which model to buy on his way home from work. He arrived with a box containing the right model and the words PINK in big letters across the front, which according to him magically appeared only after he'd ripped the box open and dumped out all the parts. Our nephew cared more about eating in it than what color it was, so we kept it and here we are.

Milestones

Last week Harper reached a couple of baby milestones. First, she slept through the night on Friday. She's been sleeping about ten hours for months now, but since she goes to sleep at 6pm, that means our "morning" has been starting somewhere between 4 and 4:30am. Friday night, however, she slept from 6:15pm to 6:15am. That would have been wonderful, except that I fell into the universal parent trap of "It's 4:30 and she's not up yet." First I thought, "This is great, she's going to sleep longer, so I can too!" which was followed by "It's 5am and she's not up yet. Oh my god, it's 5:30 and she's not up. Now it's 5:45. 5:50. Doesn't she need to eat? 5:57. She's actually going to sleep through the night! 6:03. How much longer can she go? 6:07. When should I just wake her up? 6:12. Don't get up and stand in her room. She's fine. 6:14. Don't get up. 6:15. Thank god, she's awake!"

For those nursing moms reading this, you'll also understand that this meant 12 hours of no feedings, so the last two hours weren't exactly comfortable, and there was a parallel conversation in my head of "Oh my god it's 5am and she's not up yet. How much longer can I go? Should I pump? If I pump now she'll be up wanting to eat 10 minutes later." Once it was 5:30 and I'd upgraded from baseballs to softballs and lying on my side was no longer an option, I finally did get up. I look forward to the days when sleeping in isn't such a complicated and stressful event...and might even be defined as sleeping past 6:15am. For now, though, 6:15 will work, especially since the 12-hour sleep only lasted for the one night, and the past two nights we've been back to starting our mornings at 4:30.

In the last few weeks we've started giving Harper some rice cereal in the evenings, and on Friday she finally figured out how the spoon-and-goo process was supposed to work (which maybe contributed to the big sleep). Last night she had her first taste of squash, which went over much better than I thought it would. At first she was confused and just held the food in her mouth, staring at us with big eyes that said, "What did you just do to me?"

After a few bites, though, she figured it out again and started "helping" with the spoon, which included sucking on it like a bottle and shoving all her fingers into her mouth after the squash. Then she started playing and waving her arms around, which helped us achieve the milestone of "baby needs a bath after feeding."

 

 

And finally, she'd had quite enough squash and tried very hard to arch her way out of her infant seat. The double arms and legs flailing caught Joe and his loaded spoon by surprise, which led to the next milestone of "parent also needs a bath after feeding."

After we'd cleaned her up and gotten her pajamas on, she threw in one last achievement for the day: a sit-up. I'm not sure I can say she sat up on her own, because she only lasted about three seconds once she was upright, but while she was lying on Joe's lap (supposedly going to sleep) she managed to do a sit-up all by herself. I saw her sit up and I looked at Joe with a mix of wonder and frown, just in case he had propped her up to see the football game when he was supposed to be putting her to sleep. He saw the frown and raised his hands above his head to say, "Look Mom, no hands" and prove that she was doing it all on her own. She did it one more time, and then it was off to her bedroom with Mom for the real bedtime. Besides, someone needed to spare her the pain of watching the Vikings tank.