The Trixie Update

Or Bottle Wrap (Part 2)

If the accumulation of sterile, empty plastic in our cabinets marked the expansion of a once dominant civilization, then our freezer was littered with a poignant reminder of its passing, embodied in fist-sized chunks of frozen milk.

The whole time that Jenn was pumping and I was managing the milk, there was one issue that we didn’t like to talk about that much. It was a cold, dark secret that guarded against ominous uncertainties. There should always be enough fresh milk in the fridge thanks to Jenn’s dedication. But if something happened that interrupted the milk line, the extra in the freezer was designed to give us a temporary backup supply or even enough to facilitate a gradual transition to formula.

We were lucky and there never was a milk emergency. We kept good track of how much milk we needed, tried to minimize the waste and Jenn was always able to pump enough. We had good reason to try to make it work. Fresh refrigerated milk is nutritionally better than frozen. The freezing process is destructive, and even though the cold slows the decaying process, the milk’s proteins and enzyemes continue to break down as the months go by.

Nonetheless, whenever the milk line was full, but Jenn still needed to pump a little, we added a bag to the freezer just in case. Over the course of the last six months that Jenn pumped, we deposited 17 bags into frozen storage.

I was never attached to these little frozen bags. But for Jenn, I think it was a little different. She obviously didn’t want us to be forced into the emergency supply by unknown circumstances. But she also hated to think about the milk lying dormant in hibernation, eventually reaching its life expectancy and becoming unusable. (Just for the record, she’s more than happy to pitch them now.)

In a standard refrigerator freezer, breast milk doesn’t last more than about four months. It’s just not cold enough. This is where we truly reach the end of the milk cycle. It doesn’t end with a bang, but a cold, silent stillness that steadily envelopes the darkness in a deep frozen catacomb. Now, let’s see if the neighbor’s cat is around.

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Or Bottle Wrap (Part 1)

That’s right. I finally got around to the long-promised bottle wrap-up. (Only took 5 months.) In the process I’ve discovered it’s a bad idea to procrastinate this sort of thing because you tend to forget a lot. When Trixie was on the bottle I could have told you her average daily intake to the quarter ounce. Now I can barely remember when she drank from a bottle at all. I also have no recollection of Jenn ever being pregnant, but she assures me she was. Of course, this site helps a little bit with the details.

To be honest, this would never even have been written if we hadn’t been cleaning house recently. I was trying to find some extra space for dishes in the cabinet and started pulling out bottles. And more bottles. And more. It was hard to believe how much crap was stuffed in there. I had so completely blocked out the whole pumping/feeding/cleaning ordeal that I felt like I was seeing this stuff for the first time. And it was terrifying.

Many of the plastic artifacts pulled from the cabinet were strangely familiar. My hand remembered how to hold them, even though I couldn’t remember why or what they did. Some were labeled with alien and difficult to pronounce words like “VEN-TAI-RE” and “EV-ENF-LO”. But slowly I realized what it was. I was holding a feeding bottle. Trixie didn’t used to eat solid food at all.

It all came back. The pumping, the milk line, the cow’s milk transition, the bottle weaning, and of course, Bottle Telemetry. It was a long time ago, but now I remembered it clearly.

Initially, the main function of Bottle Telemetry was to help me gauge if Trixie was drinking enough milk. We moved past that point early on, but it was still helpful in managing the milk cycle. As Trixie got older and ate more reliably, Bottle Telemetry became more a measure of Jenn’s marathon pumping prowess and less about Trixie’s daily diet. I’m not going to rehash all the numbers again. The charts from ‘We’re All Mammals‘ [June 27, 2004] still stand.

When Trixie was 11 1/2 months old, she didn’t know it yet, but the pumping party was almost over. It was then that we first introduced cow’s milk. Over the course of a couple of weeks, we worked our way up from a 1:5 ratio to a 50/50 mix. When she turned one, we started weaning her from the bottle. Shortly after that (specifically August 8th, 2004) I discontinued Bottle Telemetry. It just didn’t really serve a useful purpose anymore.

The bottle to sippy cup transition went fairly smoothly. My approach was to introduce the cup when Trixie’s resistance was low. I would give her one first thing in the morning when she was still sleepy, agreeable and extremely thirsty. This worked well, but once she was awake she wanted a bottle. Too bad for her I knew she was perfectly capable of using the cup. Shifting her completely over took a couple of weeks and a lot of patience.

She was completely off the wagon — I mean, on the wagon — I mean, through with the bottle — at around 13 months. It could have been sooner, but she caught a cold and we were concerned about her fluid intake.

We crammed all the bottle and pumping related paraphernalia up in the cabinet and swore to never lay eyes upon it again. Until now. Seeing all this stuff makes me want to cry because most of the time I was responsible for cleaning it. It makes Jenn want to cry too, but for different reasons.

There’s more to this than just a giant pile of empty plastic that represented one of the most arduous periods of our life. How about the stuff that used to go in it?

Coming Tomorrow, Part 2: Do Milksicles Dream of Frozen Sheep?

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Trixie has successfully infected us once again. Jenn and I are horribly sick, providing further evidence that BIDS never goes away. I guess that shouldn’t really be a surprise because, by definition, BIDS isn’t going anywhere until there is no longer a baby in the house. And until then, every single germ Trixie brings home stands an excellent chance of exploding into our own private hot zone. The only good news is that before I got sick I almost finished up a two-part story (with pictures!) that should be up tomorrow.

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The Trixie Update has undergone a minor face-lift. It’s something that should have been done a year ago, but at the time it seemed more important to change Trixie’s diaper. There’s now an About Us, Contact Us and a Trixie Update 101 page, all designed to help new visitors around the site. I think it might be interesting to long-time readers, too. Please let me know if I forgot anything or if I can make it more useful. Thanks-

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Trixie is doing better today. Her fever has broken. I’m sure it’s not gone for good, but it has been below 100 all morning. Unfortunately, there’s still a lot of snot. A whole lot. I think she’s excreting some kind of mucus cocoon. I’m terrified of what I might discover when I go in after her nap, or how many arms and tentacles it might have. Thanks for all the well wishes.

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It’s my understanding that the “danger” fever zone is about 104. Above that and you might need to rush to the ER. But at what temperature do you personally start to panic? What’s your fever threshold for your baby? Vote in our new sick-day poll. (Poll is to your left under Latest TTU Comments.)

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It’s like someone puréed a jellyfish, unscrewed the top of her head, poured it in, and now it’s slowly seeping out of every hole on her face. It’s the sort of thing we’ve all seen on at least 6 different X-Files episodes. It’s also the most pitiful I’ve ever seen her. We took her to the doctor, and she’s got bilateral ear infections. Welcome back to the Amoxicilin Club.

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The neighbor’s tabby got into the house today. He’s always hanging out on our stoop, staring and pawing at Trixie through the glass, and today he slipped inside. I had to pick him up to get him out and, man, cats weigh nothing. It was the first time I had picked up a cat in several years and I remembered them weighing a lot more.

It was like getting one of those frosty mugs they sometimes have at the cheap pizza places. You know the ones. They look like they’re made of heavy glass, but they’re actually super-lightweight plastic? And when you pick up your drink the first time you practically throw it in the air because it doesn’t weigh anything close to what you expected?

Picking up that cat today was the equivalent of spilling my drink all over the place. We’re both lucky he didn’t hit the ceiling.

I am so used to picking up Trixie all the time, that by default, and stupidly, I expect most things I encounter to weigh about as much as she does. She not only dominates our household, our health, and our life, she’s moved on to fundamental units that govern my ability to communicate with the rest of the world. In short, Trixie has become my new unit of measurement. She’s remapped my sense of scale and weight. Cats used to be heavy. Now they are about as light as a pair of socks.

And it’s really not a great system. It creates all sorts of conversion problems. I mean, I can tell someone that a cat weighs .326 trixies (t), but they aren’t going to know what the hell I’m talking about. It’s also not a stable standard. Trixie’s getting bigger on a daily basis. This makes a trixie more akin to a fluctuating exchange rate than the precisely defined (and currently more popular) kilogram and pound. Jenn used to weigh about 17.1 t and now she only weighs 4.7 t. Did she lose weight? Did Trixie grow a lot? With this system, who the hell knows?

Still, most of these problems can be overcome by means of wheel chart. Something along the lines of the Nuclear Bomb Effects Computer, only more complicated. I know it’s not going to be an easy sell. The trixie will have to compete against the madison (m), the olivia (o), the aiden (a) and more. We face a coming crisis of standards that will make us long for the old English/Metric disagreements. I’m afraid we’ll become paralyzed as hannah (h) to jacob (j) to bailey (b) conversions grind our national infrastructure to a standstill. We’ll eventually be forced to fall back on long forgotten units of measure. What a cute little baby, we’ll say. “One stone, and 40 pennyweights??” “Holy crap! I hope you got an epidural!”

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I appreciate you guys (Summer, Maddie’s Mom) letting us know about the mention in Parents magazine (Feb 05 p.60). I had no idea we were in there. I was preoccupied reading the Feb 05 issue of Web Etiquette. There’s this awesome article about giving people a heads up before you publish their link in a national magazine.

Just kidding, Parents, thanks for including us! If you’re visiting for the first time, the more popular sections are Milk Week and the charts and graphs in Metrics. Thanks for stopping by.

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Breaking all previous records, Trixie used the potty three different times today. Scientifically speaking, she did no.1 twice and no.2 once. However, she also rounded out the day with a nice big no.16 on the only spot of carpet in the whole house, and now Jenn is currently out buying some Resolve. I don’t really know if today counts as a net gain or loss.

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