Someone should be beaten: BAM-jingle!

Or, more likely, already was.

11 dogs have been poisoned near us, 2 have died. Some sick person is out there, and I'm guessing it isn't someone who has had a great life.

So we're going on a sniff-sabbatical, at least when I'm walking the pupper. It is pee, poo, and stretch your legs time. Leave the sniffing for finding all those food crumbs I drop that miss baby A's head or neck. There's more than enough to go around.

Strange country, this one. In some ways they really love dogs, let them in restaurants, on trains and buses. One restauranteur put a bowl FULL of dog cookies down in front of the pupper once, and I only realized it wasn't the usual water bowl 2 seconds later. In other words, when she was half done scarfing them down. I think that is officially her favorite restaurant now. And many news stands will give dog cookies. A few times when M has run out on an outing, he goes to a stand that does this and buys a paper, just to score an extra snack to make it home.

And other times, you see parents cross the street when they see the pupper coming. And crap like this poisoning happens.

I'll stop now before I just get mean.

Oh, so today was a crazy realization day, both good and a bit freaky. We went to a friend's place, me and the pistachio, to wait out the cleaning lady, and the friend (also with a new baby) had one of those wooden play areas you can put the baby under with little toys hanging down for them to look at and eventually grab.

So I know that A can kind of hit the toys on her version of this with her feet. They hang pretty high. But I was thinking that it was hit or miss. Yeah, ha ha! There was a little wooden toy on this thing, with a jingle bell in it. So, I shake it gently for A to see. "Look little baby, see the pretty sound?" I stand up and turn around to go get something from my coat and I hear "bam-jingle!"

How cute. She hit it by accid.....bam-jingle! Um, wait, she did it again. Ok, move the baby over 4 inches. She looks around, still doing that fake-out baby random arm and leg flailing thing, and bam-JINGLE!

Oh. Wow. I moved this thing FOUR times, near her left then right arm. And each time, she looked around, and on the first try....bam-jingle!

This baby can aim.

Bow to your sens....BAM-jingle!

sleep-deprived blogging is a bit like drunk dialing....

not such a great idea.

That last post is exhibit "A".

What J's email reminded me of was that I didn't make one thing explicit (or even implicit, for that matter). The issues I was talking about are ones where the pros and cons are either so well balanced or so complex, that there is nothing but your own personal limit to help you decide which way to go.

This is the case with the breastfeeding. Baby A cries half the time because she can't focus or calm down enough to latch on, and I have to resort to walking around, bouncing, holding her vertically to help her start. So maybe she is too stressed out by all the crying before latching. But breastfeeding is also the best way to help her little under-mature body and overstimulated brain calm down and relax. She can get really tense. There are another 3-4 matched pairs of pros and cons. Add in experxts on both sides - "you have to breastfeed at all costs!" vs "millions of babies grow up great on formula and she's already stressed out enough!" and it is a zero sum game.

The plusses and minuses really do cancel out.

And I am left with just my personal limit.

For now I'm still breastfeeding.

Well, you tried your best....is a useless phrase

Unless you are calling yourself by the second person, looking in a mirror, and saying it to yourself.

I don't think it works very well coming from anyone else. I think the only person who can really decide to give something up is the person doing the giving up. And that in order to be able to say "I tried my best" and have some semblance of peace about a tough decision, one you've been wishing like mad you didn't have to make, I think you really need to feel like you tried your best.

At least I do.

Which is where we get to some advice on how to help me make tough decisions, especially if you think I should go and I keep wanting to stay. Be it going away from my first PhD program, getting out of depression with medication, or right now, stopping breast feeding.

The thing about me is, I actually do have a point where I say enough is enough. And I can forgive myself, or the world, or whoever I need to, to be at peace. Like with my C-section. I tried my best to have a natural birth, 17 hours of excruciating back pain (the baby's skull was turned towards my spine), with massage and hand pressure from M, with 2 hours of laughing gas and screaming until I was hoarse and almost passed out, then with an epidural, and when that didn't take on the left side, moving it, upping the pain medication, and finally agreeing to a C-section with a local instead of being forced to have one under general anethesia if another 2 hours of pushing on a local drug hadn't worked. So I tried my best. That was it. I wish it had gone differently, but I tried my best. A modicum of peace is mine.

And with the PhD. I went until I was depressed and had to start medication. At that point, I knew I'd tried as much as I had in me. Done.

And now I'm here with breast feeding. But I don't yet feel like I got to try my best. Like I got to give everything I have and still have it fail and be able to walk away at peace. Sure, someone else may be able to walk away without having gone through it, but that isn't how I work. I know this about myself.

I think that many other people are like this, too. They need to feel like they tried their best, in a rough relationship, at a job, in any pursuit which they know it might be time to give up, which their brain tells them is too much, but which their heart hasn't been able to let go of.

So I think that the best thing to do to help me, and people like me, when you see them trying to make a really tough decision and holding on to the option you really think is too hard, and for which you are completely ready to forgive them, is to remember that it is more important that they be able to forgive themselves.

Let them try their best. With that boyfriend you hate, or in that job you think is sucking them dry. Or with breastfeeding a tense, screaming baby who has to be bounced upright to start latching. Unless you've made the same decision in the past, you kind of can't play that role for them.

So I started writing this 3 days ago. Kind of lost any further thoughts, cause that was some 36 feedings (bottle and breast) ago.

That said...

there are moments, half hours, even, when little A makes me laugh. She has eaten, and pooped, and suddenly her smile comes out. This huge, toothless grin, that can be shot just as easily at me as at the mobile above her changing table. Or the corner of the ceiling.

And she coos. Like a champ. She oohs and ahhs. She makes raspberry sounds (I say she's imitating the sound of pooping, and will continue to consider it her first word). Sometimes it seems, like the dog, she's most vocal when M and I are talking to each other.

She stares and furrows her brow, then smiles again. She aims and kicks things with her legs.

She completely melts my heart. And it is those moments, after I laugh and coo back, that also break my heart because I think "if I could just find out why she's in pain and help fix it, she'd have more of this." And more sleep, and better eating, etc. And after each remedy we try, especially now that it has been almost 12 weeks, I get a little scared that if it does work, we could have done it earlier and spared her the pain.

I know. The world doesn't work that way.

But you know you wish it did.

"Bow to your sensei"

There is this mock martial arts commercial in the movie Napoleon Dynamite for "Rex Kwan Do," a school run by a militant, gruff white guy named Rex who wears American flag parachute pants, beats up prospective students during a demonstration, and barks the phrase "bow to your sensei!"

He's not much of a sensei, this Rex.

But after 11 weeks of all sorts of self-doubt and worries about baby A, I decided that she makes one of the best teachers I've had. If we'd had an easier baby, I probably (we probably) would have bulldozed her with our desires, our schedules, our lives...I can be that way. But this little pistachio will have none of that. When she's hungry, you'd better move it before her little body goes into breathless screaming. We still can't tell if she needs to eat or poop most of the times she's crying. Probably both. Breastfeeding has gotten really tough unless she is super sleepy. Otherwise, she cries from the instant I try to feed her.

On a boppy. On my lap. In my arms.

The solution for now is to hold her vertically against my body and bounce with her. She calms down enough to go for that boob, and voila!, she's feeding. Or crying again. Then maybe gas pain is more than hunger pain.

I have long since chucked out the nursing bra box with its perfectly made up mother and her serene baby nursing in a meticulously clean house.

Anyway,....I can still wind up trying to feed her every hour. And she can still be in gas discomfort every hour. And there is very little planning we can do ahead of time to go anywhere with her, because I'm still holding out a teeny bit of hope for the breastfeeding to start working again.

When we hit that magic 3 months when colic is supposed to go away.

Or tomorrow, when we take her to high-needs-baby-cure #25: the osteopath.

And once an hour, I need to take a deep breath and be ready for a crying, back arching baby who seems for 45 seconds to hate the idea of breastfeeding. And then, when the wind changes direction, or the Earth's magnetic field wavers, she's feeding and content for 15 or 20 minutes. And relaxed, finally, and sleepy.

So far, we've had people tell us to ride it out. To give her fennel tea. To give her water. To pump and only give bottles. To forget the bottles and make her only breastfeed. That she's in pain. That she's throwing a fit and crying on purpose. To give her tummy massages. To give her warm baths. To switch to only formula. To use only soy formula. To have hope. To give up hope. That she was gaining weight just fine. That we are starving her. For me to stop eating dairy. For me to stop eating everything. For me to drink fenugreek. And finally, my all-time-favorite...that I just need to relax, follow my instincts, and it will be fine.

Those are the times I want to scream myself.

I've realized that "follow your instincts" usually comes with a silent "when those instincts are in line with what I, the advice giver, think is best for your baby," attached right on the end.

In any case, I keep trying my best to go with the moment. I have just a little bit of hope stored up for tomorrow's visit, because if I get too much, I'm back in "first house closing date" territory. So I go back to "this too shall pass", and look at the little image I printed out to go with the card on her sleepy hammock:

Bow to your sensei