"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