The Trixie Update

We’ve almost come full circle when it comes to breast milk. Jenn started to pump at 4 weeks because she had to go back to work. From those precious, few first ounces to the thousands and thousands that have added up over the past 11 months, Trixie owes her Mom a great big sloppy, milky thank you. And what better way to say thanks than to readily take to cow’s milk?

We started transitioning her to cow’s milk 2 weeks ago and she’s doing great. She drinks a 50/50 mix just fine, but we’re waiting to get the final word from the pediatrician before we turn off the tap. However, it’s already made a huge difference in the amount of work we have to do.

Back when Trixie was drinking 32-36 oz a day, Jenn used to pump 14-16 oz in the morning, and then 8-10 oz at lunch and dinner. Now that Trixie is eating lots more solid food, she’s only drinking 20-24 oz a day. Cut that in half with cow’s milk and Jenn only has to pump 3 oz a side in the morning and the evening. That’s a huge savings in time for her. It also means there’s far less dishwashing for me — not only because she’s not drinking as much, but also because she’s using sippy cups pretty well now and they are much easier to clean than bottles.

All and all, when it comes to eating and drinking, life isn’t too bad. Sure Trixie can still get fussy at mealtimes, and it did take Jenn three days to find that piece of cheese thrown from the highchair last Monday, but for the most part, Trixie enjoys eating and she’s getting better at it every day.

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Thanks to an email suggestion from a reader who wanted to stay above the frothy milk fray, I just went out and got some antibiotic and steroid-free whole milk. (TTU locals: It’s the Maple View Farm brand that comes in the glass bottles at your grocery store.) I had a glass and I was surprised to find that it tastes substantially better than the regular milk I usually drink. Who knew?

Anyway, I have never given that much thought to store bought milk until now, but it seems a lot of our readers have. Let’s see what you guys are buying: choose your poison in the new poll. (If I missed a type of store bought milk, let me know and I’ll add it to the poll.)

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I wanted to revisit a couple of points on this topic before moving on to something else.

I’m still amazed at the final production numbers. I had no idea what to expect when I ran the data, but over 9,000 ounces was staggering. And this is coming from someone who thought he had a handle on numbers. I also know that Jenn pumps for at least 1 1/2 hours every day, but I didn’t realize that added up to a quarter year of 40-hour work weeks. My point? Breastpumping and nursing moms do a lot of work. Guys, thank them for what they are doing. Girls, you do a lot of work. It’s an insane job, and we appreciate it.

My other point? Class Mammalia. We are members of an amazingly diverse group. There are plenty of things that set us apart as the dominant species, but when you consider the evolutionary adaptations that link all us mammals together, it can be humbling. We all give live birth to our young and we all nurse. Nothing else on the planet does that. This rule applies whether you are talking about a 5 pound house cat, a 6 ton elephant or a 145 ton blue whale. Rhinoceroses, mice, kangaroos, dogs, chimpanzees, squirrels and camels. They all nurse their young. Just like we do. I just think it’s amazing that we all share this. Thanks for humoring me.

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As we approach the one year mark, it seems like a good time to look back over Trixie’s milk history. Our initial goal was to feed her breast milk until 6 months, then to get through winter, then 9 months and finally we pushed the quit date back to 12 months. From our perspective it couldn’t come a minute too soon.

First, I want to say that as much as we’ve both come to hate breast-pumping and all the work it entails, we’re glad we did it for Trixie’s sake. That having been said, breast pumping sucks.

I still find the whole thing a little mind-boggling. We live in cities, drive around in cars, surf the internet, and talk on cell phones, but beneath it all, we’re still mammals. Nothing drives this point home like being aware of a mother providing sustenance to her baby.

I suspect that some of the information presented here can make people feel a little uncomfortable. I think most guys don’t like to think about women’s breasts in their capacity to produce upwards of two gallons of milk a week. It’s not the sort of thing you want to dwell on when you’re in a bar on Friday night — or ever. (Guys, you might want to stop reading here.) Similarly, I imagine most women who haven’t breastfed, or who are getting ready to have a baby, must be pretty freaked out when told they possess the capacity to supply a baby with hundreds of ounces of milk a week. (Don’t worry — it doesn’t all hit at once.) But lastly, those who have pumped or breastfed might find this data validating. You know how much work it was, you just never had solid numbers to back up your gut feeling. Now you do.

We began collecting bottle-feeding data October 13th 2003, when Trixie was around 12 weeks old. During this time Trixie got the majority of her milk from the bottle. She still nursed a little bit, but we were forced to start using bottles early on because Jenn was back at work at 5 weeks. Since I was the one staying home with Trixie, and since I don’t have boobs, she was going to have to drink Jenn’s pumped milk from a bottle.

Trixie drank about 30 ounces of milk a day for the majority of the period we collected data. 30 ounces a day doesn’t sound like much, but when you start to look at the total amount consumed (and produced) the numbers grow very quickly. Trixie drank hundreds of ounces of milk a week [see below]. Her peak was week 44 at 232 ounces. If 232 ounces is too abstract, think about it this way; it’s about 19 cans of Coke per week. That’s a lot of breast-pumping! And of course, these numbers don’t reveal the full story. They are only a record of what Trixie drank. When we take the left-over milk in the bottle into account, it turns out that in week 27, there was a combined total of 245 ounces. But this number still doesn’t account for milk that may have been put into freezer storage that week or any possible nursing that took place.

I think it’s still easier to look at the milk production/consumption in even broader stroke. In this chart we see how many gallons of milk Trixie was drinking a week.

But what’s the really big picture? Since we started keeping records, and as of 3:40 pm today, Jenn has pumped 8,009 ounces of milk. This is more than 62 gallons. Of these, Trixie drank 6,939 oz or about 54 gallons. All pumping moms out there will be sad to hear that since Oct 12th, 2003, 1,070 ounces of milk have expired in the bottle and had to be poured out.

But that isn’t everything either. In the 12 weeks prior to starting data collection Trixie probably got about 100 oz a week by nursing. Adding an extra 1,200 oz to the 8,009 gives us 9,209. Also there’s probably about 100 oz in the freezer now, and we lost about 100 when the power went out during the hurricane. Finally I have to confess that I’ve poured out milk when too much has built up in the milk line. Maybe another 50 oz, at least… sorry, Jenn.

All and all, I think 9,459 oz is a fair estimate of the milk Jenn has pumped since Trixie was born. This translates to about 74 gallons of milk over the past 10 1/2 months. We also estimate that she spends about 1.75 hours a day pumping which means she’s logged approximately 525 hours making food for Trixie. This is almost 22 straight days of pumping. Put another way, it’s more than thirteen 40-hour work weeks — and that’s on top of a full-time job. For my part I’ve been mostly responsible for washing the 2,880 feeding and storage bottles we’ve used over the past 8 months. I say mostly because despite all work Jenn does, there are times when she has done the bottle-washing for me. As much as I would have liked to, I’ve never been able to return the favor by helping with the pumping.

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Thanks again for all the great ideas. We’re sorting through and trying out everything. We’ll revisit the food report at some point and see how things are going. In related news, posting will probably be a little light this week now that I’m spending an extra nine hours a day feeding Trixie. In the meantime, enjoy tomorrow’s TPOD inspired by all the mealtime exploration and feeding discoveries that have taken place.

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Well, I thought I hated mealtimes last week. As reported on Friday, thanks to the overwhelming advice posted here, we have turned our feeding operation around 180 degrees and now Trixie is only self-feeding. The fact that she took to it so quickly means you all were right on the money.

Over the weekend we’ve been giving her things like yogurt mixed with rice cereal smeared on toast and blueberries for breakfast; bananas, carrots from a can, cheese, goldfish crackers and sliced turkey for lunch; and frozen peas, macaroni & cheese, mashed sweet potatoes and veggie burgers for dinner.

Correspondingly, Trixie has managed to turn every single meal into an unbelievably insane mess. We’ve had to mop up the kitchen three times a day. Having survived one weekend of this crap, I can’t believe the results of last week’s poll. The top-ranked answer was “I LOVE feeding the baby?!!” Are you guys crazy? There’s clearly something I’m missing here. I think there would be less mess in the kitchen if I gave a plate of spaghetti to an orangutan and left the house for the weekend. We must be talking about different aged children or something.

Naturally, I want to figure out what’s going on, so I’m putting up a new poll to get to the bottom of this “I LOVE feeding the baby” thing. Together we can help fight baby mealtime! (Seriously, who has good advice about stopping messes?)

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I wanted to thank everyone again for all the advice that poured in today. It was a real eye-opener. So much advice has been posted to this blog since its creation, but today’s comments were just so immediately applicable. We took a special grocery store trip this afternoon and are all set.

Anyway, as a small token of appreciation, I’ve got a TPOD going up for Saturday (the last time there was a weekend TPOD was eight weeks ago!) So thanks again. You guys are great!

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Currently, the absolutely worst part about owning a baby is the feedings. Not the breast or bottle feedings — there’s nothing too tricky about that after the first couple of weeks. I’m talking about the food feedings. The three-times-a-day, get-that-the-hell-away-from-my-mouth, what-makes-you-think-I-need-to-eat, applesauce explosion, extravaganza. Please note that in the prior sentence, the word applesauce may be replaced with yogurt or blueberries or carrots. You know, just whatever happens to stain the worst on any given day depending on what you’re wearing.

For those that don’t have kids, you might ask, “Why is it so hard to feed a baby?” Well, have you ever tried to get a cat to swallow medicine? No? Don’t have cats? OK, have you ever tried to shovel a spoonful of food in the mouth of a stranger on a bus? Yeah, that’s it. Now you’re with me.

From Trixie’s perspective I can only imagine that she thinks I’m trying to poison her. The second I strap her into the highchair, she starts hollering and getting revved up. It doesn’t matter whether its the sweetest tasting baby carrots or big bowl of spicy chili*. She starts shaking her head back-and-forth “NO” before I can get the spoon anywhere close to her mouth.

Her behavior has lead us to an evolutionary struggle. I’m constantly creating new games, distractions and outright tricks and she’s developing resistance to my attacks after only a few bites.

In general, games don’t work so well. She doesn’t go for the “here comes the airplane” thing. Sometimes we’ll play the game where she throws something on the floor and laughs, laughs, laughs. This is good because it’s pretty easy to stick food in there when she’s cackling. But she’s not always in such a hilarious mood.

Tricks have the shortest life. My favorite was when I would throw a couple of Cheerios on the tray. She would meticulously pinch one and bring it toward her open mouth. In that split second I could shove a spoonful of peas in there. Poor kid. It was such a confusing experience. This deception would only work about two times before she would stop picking up Cheerios at all and just sit there with her mouth sealed shut glaring at me.

Distractions seem to be the way to go. I’ve cycled through every utensil in the kitchen drawer. Ice cream scoop, bottle opener, chop sticks, spatulas and even the jigger. Each of these is good for at least a half-dozen spoonfuls. Recently I discovered the holy grail of mealtime distractions: ice. She gapes openmouthed at the ice as if it were the Hope diamond — for like ten minutes. By simply holding an ice-cube in my hand while letting her paw at it, I can get her to eat an entire jar of baby food. It’s pretty amazing.

Of course, I doubt this will work forever. All ice melts. But when the time comes, I’ve got a back-up plan - something that in Trixie’s eyes is even more sacred and sought after than a brilliant, glinting chuck of ice. Its mellifluous jingling is a Siren song. That’s right, it’s the car keys.

* We don’t feed the baby chili.

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We’ve had a little throwing up problem lately. As documented in last Tuesday’s Pedialyte entry, Trixie threw up for the first time in many, many months. Now just a week later, she did it again. There’s no need to rehash the details. You can simply skim through the Pedialyte story and replace all instances of “Jenn” with “Ben” when it’s in the context of someone getting thrown up on.

We suspect that last week’s ordeal was the result of over-eating. We don’t really have an explanation for the latest round. The doctor’s office isn’t concerned as long as she doesn’t have a fever. And Trixie was right as rain the next morning. So we chalked it up as another anomaly — until she threw up one more time last night.

The problem with last night’s incident is that there are too many variables to figure out the cause.

1) She was way over-tired because of her interrupted sleep pattern from the night before.

2) She was very upset and crying hysterically when she threw up. This is in contrast to the previous night when she was relatively calm and yet threw up four times.

3) She only got upset at night - she was totally happy during the day and didn’t fight any of her naps.

4) So are we encountering some kind of horrific, nighttime, sleep-training backslide?

5) She didn’t have any strange foods yesterday at all. Just milk, green beans and Cheerios. Nothing new there.

6) And finally, she’s teething again.

Anyway, I included the above details just in case someone was going to ask about them. I think it might be a little of everything. At any rate, it seems to have passed. She was super happy today and she’s currently sleeping peacefully. We’ll be fine. But this brings me to main reason for this post… what’s the worst thing to clean up?

You don’t have to be a parent to answer this question. Maybe you had a college roommate who would come home drunk and mistake the hall closet for the bathroom. Maybe your coworker got a little too crazy at the office party. Maybe you have pets. Whatever the cause, please vote on what you think is the worst thing to clean up. Personally, I am so sick of washing vomit out of everything that I could cry. I almost want her diaper to leak just for some variety. Voice your opinion in the new TTU poll (to your left under ‘Latest TTU Comments’.)

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The advertising on the box says to use Pedialyte instead of sports drinks or juices to replace lost fluids in sick children. I’m surprised this line of thinking hasn’t been picked up outside of the dehydrated baby market. Pedialyte should be the ultimate underground sports drink. There could be a cult of Pedialyte junkies tearing up the court in pick-up games across the country. It could be kind of like that pacifier fad back in the 90’s.

Anyway, Trixie staring crying about 10:30 last night. Jenn went to comfort her but came out holding a wet blanket. We thought maybe her diaper had leaked. We go back in, turn on the lights, and see that she had thrown up everywhere. Food was splattered on the wall, the floor, the sheets, Frank, the bear, her clothes. It almost seemed that maybe she started throwing up in the standing position and then ran around the crib a few times. To use an art metaphor, it was Pollack in action, minus the drinking and cigarettes.

This was the first time Trixie had thrown up in maybe 7-8 months. We were a little concerned, but it looked like she had just eaten too much during the day. Otherwise, sometimes babies get a little stomach virus. It’s normal, although not particularly comforting at 11:00 at night.

We gave her a bath to get all the throw up off, got her some fresh, clean clothes and took her to our bed since her stuff was all in the washer. Three minutes later, she throws up again. Sheets, pillows, mattress cover, herself and Jennifer - all covered in it. Jenn gave her another bath (actually the third for the day, because we gave her one before bedtime) while I stripped the bed and tried to figure out who gets to sleep where.

We dried her off once again, did the fresh clothes thing (for both Jenn and Trixie) and decided that she needed to drink some fluids. We did haven’t any clear juices in the house so I had to make a trip to the grocery store. While Jenn was holding Trixie and looking for Pedialyte coupons, Trixie threw up again, completely covering both of them. (Somewhat unfairly, I didn’t get thrown up on the entire night.) Jennifer and Trixie had to take one last bath (the 4th) while I ran to the store.

Triumphant in procuring white grape juice and Pedialyte, we tried to get Trixie to drink some. No dice. I don’t really blame her. The stuff is insanely sweet, maybe a little like refined and concentrated Red Bull. We kept cutting it with water to see if she would drink some until we had worked our way down to 1 part Pedialyte to 1000 parts water. At this point we just her a couple of ice cubes in washcloth, which she greedily sucked and put her off to bed.

Everything seems fine this morning. She has some sleep to catch up on but is drinking plenty, and is happy.

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