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Oct 16, 2012

Allergy free

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baby building blocks hipstamaticBaby E did it! Yes, he did. He outgrew his milk protein intolerance/allergy.

Last week, we headed back to the allergy doctor to give him small doses of milk-based formula and see his reaction. The doctor said that, based on the skin prick test results from the previous week, he was confident that we did not need to take things as slowly as with some babies (0.5ml, 1ml, 2ml etc) and that we could start by giving him 5ml and waiting 20 minutes.

The 5ml was duly given and the nurse checked Baby E’s belly and back for any reaction – nothing. After 20 minutes, he had still showed no signs of a reaction (no vomiting or tensing of the body, as he had shown as a newborn) and so we gave him 15ml and waited. Again, there was no reaction from Baby E, so after 20 minutes, we gave him 30ml. Just as Baby E was finishing off that amount and screaming for more, the doctor walked out of his office. He took one look at Baby E, put his head on one side and asked “He wants more? Then let’s give him more!” So we gave him another 30ml, which he gulped down. 30 minutes later and we were allowed to leave with the doctor’s last words – “In the nicest possible way, I hope not to see you again!” – ringing in our ears.

For the past few days, we’ve been mixing milk-based formula into Baby E’s prescription formula and all is going well. I’ve also been giving him little bits of food here and there that contains dairy. And still no reaction.

So that was that; the result we had been hoping for – no more milk allergy. Quite simply the best news that we’ve received in a while.

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Oct 1, 2012

A sensitive soul

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baby finger feedingI have written a little before about Baby E’s intolerance/allergy that we picked up on shortly after he was born. At first, we believed that he was lactose intolerant, but after we switched him to a milk protein free formula and he thrived and after we finally got an appointment with an allergy specialist, we discovered that he has a (mild) allergy to milk protein, but thankfully that he is not allergic to eggs.

As Baby E was about four and a half months old at that time, the allergy doctor ran through how best to introduce solids into his diet as it would be a slower process than normal owing to the risk of him being allergic to other foods too. Luckily, it was all plain sailing though and Baby E gobbles down any food that is given to him (and attempts to eat quite a few things that aren’t). Even foods that are often allergy red flags (strawberries and kiwi fruit, for example) have had no effect on him.

We returned to the allergy doctor last week for Baby E’s eight month follow-up. Another skin prick test revealed that he seems not longer to have a problem with milk protein, which was exactly what we had been hoping for.

So, the next stage is for us to return next week for a morning at the clinic where we give him normal formula and see if he reacts. We’ll start off by giving him 5ml of formula for newborns and wait 20 minutes. If there is no reaction, then we’ll repeat the process with 10ml and wait 20 minutes. Then we’ll try 15ml and wait, 20ml and wait, and so on.

Given that the way he reacted to normal formula before was to scream and scream and writhe and vomit and come out in raised red patches on his arms and legs, I am really hoping that he can tolerate milk protein and has outgrown this allergy (as is often the case in babies his age). I am counting down the days until we go for, what I hope will be, the final allergy test for Baby E nonetheless. I feel sure that the skin prick test result last week means that he is going to be okay. Because, really, life in Sweden is going to pretty difficult for him if he cannot eat any dairy…

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Apr 23, 2012

The battle of the boob draws to an end

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Baby E: three months old

In my Drafts folder, I have had notes for a blog post that I wanted to write about breastfeeding. The draft has been sitting there for about seven weeks now. The notes that I wrote in it were about how breastfeeding seemed to be established after our initial struggles and that we had it sorted now.

Now the breastfeeding rug has been pulled out from under my feet. Baby E is now taking two bottles of formula a day and is likely to increase that to three in the next day or so.

When I took him to the BVC (the baby and child department at the doctors’ surgery) this week for his injections, the nurse weighed him again as two weeks ago, when he was last weighed, he had dropped down to two lines below the curve. In the past week or so he had been extending his feeds to 35-40 minutes, but the day before his feeds had dropped right back to just 15-20 minutes. I was really hoping that this was a sign that he had upped his weight in the previous week and now was getting back on track. However, he had dropped a little further down on the chart and she said that could now see on him just by looking that he was underweight. Not words that any mamma wants to hear.

She recommended either breastfeeding him more each day or to give him formula for some feeds instead. She did not say it directly, but she was certainly leaning towards the second option and even gave me a large tub of formula powder for babies with a milk allergy.

I left there with very mixed emotions. I have not ever really loved or enjoyed breastfeeding that much, but I feel sad that it is coming to an end, simply because this time I have fought so hard to keep going with it. On the other hand, I just don’t love it enough to fight hard for three more months of breastfeeding Baby E when we are under so much stress at the moment. In fact, Husband and I believe that it is most likely this stress that has contributed to this problem. Since Baby E has been born, we have been travelling frequently down to southern Sweden to spend time with Husband’s sick father, we have bought an apartment, we have packed up numerous boxes of our possessions, tidied and cleaned our apartment into a minimalist white box, put the apartment on the market; and we have very recently made a last-minute trip down to Skåne to say goodbye to my father-in-law, then travelled back down for his funeral, and finally this week been through a real estate trauma. All this while juggling life with a toddler and a newborn. I guess my stress level might have been a little higher than usual.

But still, I cannot help but feel to blame for Baby E being so underweight. Shouldn’t I have noticed this before? What about a mamma’s intuition? He has not been crying out for more food, he has not had problems sleeping, he has not seemed short of any of the developmental milestones. The only sign that he is underweight has been his weight when measured by the nurse. Yes, he is small but then both boys were smaller than the Swedish average when born and both have so far remained smaller the average. However, now that we compare Baby E at three months with how much Little O weighed at the same age, we can see there is almost a one kilo difference.

So, my goal now is fatten up my poor little boy, and if that means formula, so be it. It certainly has done his big brother no harm.

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Feb 4, 2012

Breastfeeding breakthrough

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Photo © English Mamma

Well, the appointment that I had at Amningsmottagningen, the breastfeeding clinic at Karolinska hospital, on Wednesday was a very mixed experience.

On the one hand, I left there with some confidence that I could achieve a proper latch with Baby E and that, with some practice, we could actually have pain-free breastfeeding (woo-hoo!). On the other, I am glad that there was a delay in getting the appointment and that I had not gone a week earlier when I was in a much more fragile state…

You had to fill in a form on arrival that asked about how your labour had been, if were breastfeeding fully, partly or not at all, how many formula feeds you had given, whether you felt under stress etc. So I filled that all in but on some of the questions I did struggle to know what to put. Are you under stress – Yes / No. Well, it’s really not as simple as that, is it? Yes, I felt under stress: I’ve just had a baby, I’ve got the baby blues, I have a 20-month old as well and I am struggling with breastfeeding. However, although there are tears (Baby E’s and mine) every day, some days are definitely better than others and compared with some people, I know that I’m not really under that much stress. (Surely a sliding scale of how stressed you feel would be far more appropriate?)

So, I met the lactation consultant and handed over my form, She asked what type of stress I feel under – of course, that was the one question that she honed straight in on. Unfortunately, I got a little bit emotional explaining how it was hard at home with Little O as well and that the two days of the previous week when he’d been unable to go to preschool had been horrendous as he was upset about Baby E’s arrival and was tending towards hitting rather than stroking him. Her response was that it was good for me to cry but that my children were too close in age and that was the problem. Errrm, excuse me? Oh, okay then, I’ll just send one of them back then…

She then examined my breasts and told me that the sores that I have were really nothing and that they didn’t even need to be drained (? – is this an option? maybe something got lost in translation?). We woke Baby E and she showed me how to get a good latch. And, and, and… It worked and there was only minimal pain, caused by those (very minimal) sores. This felt like such a breakthrough. I sat in that chair for the next 20 minutes and fed Baby E and how glad I was about those happy hormones that are released by breastfeeding, otherwise I might just have stood up and clouted her during her discourse into why breastfeeding was the only option, why I should NEVER EVER again give Baby E formula, how that was most likely the cause of his evening crying, how he actually didn’t really even have colic as she’d had one woman whose baby cried 24/7 and had to be carried in a sling and the whole family had had to wear ear plugs, whereas Baby E “only” cried from around 4pm to 1am, and why I am stifling Baby E’s development by swaddling him (despite me explaining that this is a great way to minimise colic, as well as being very comforting for newborns). Oh, crazy lady.

But as I said, she taught me how to get a good latch and that has boosted my confidence considerably. And I’m just choosing to ignore all the other crazy that she came out with.

The only downside…? I have to go back next Wednesday for her to check that I’m following instruction correctly. Bracing myself already!

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Jan 3, 2011

2010 review

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To celebrate the new year, I thought I’d take a quick look back at 2010, month by month.

January: I got itchy feet. Just knowing that I only had a couple of months left in which I could travel but not really enough time to do so, made me want to get the hell out of Sweden and go abroad. I also discovered the joy of the Mother-to-be treatment at Centralbadet (bliss!) and the perils of eating spicy Thai curry when five months pregnant.

February: We ordered our pram. I started to walk like John Wayne. My midwife became convinced that my job was going to cause me stress – little did she know that the stressful moments are what make my job. And I discovered just how hard it was to understand the in and outs of the parental benefit system here in Sweden.

March: I found out that yoga, Baby O and I did not a good combination make. I tried everything to combat the dreaded stretch marks. I lost sight of my feet. The T Family went skiing, and I slunk around the resort feeling sorry for myself at not being able to join in. I listed ten things that people do not tell you before you become pregnant. I discarded Rennies in favour of Gaviscon in an attempt to stop the heartburn and acid reflux.

April: I read as many books as I could find to prepare myself for every eventuality. Baby O allegedly reached the size of a watermelon. I started packing my hospital bag (little knowing that it would not be used). I stopped working. My inner control freak came to the fore. I had a pregnancy photo session at home.

May: I celebrated the purchase of a new camera lens by setting up a photo blog. I decided that the imminent arrival of Baby O would not give me enough to do, so I signed up for the Day Zero Project. I tried different tactics to encourage Baby O into the world, including city walking and hill walking. And then, on 11 May, Baby O was born!

June: I struggled with breastfeeding. I heard about the Wonder Weeks. We travelled to England and I found blogging increasingly difficult to fit into the day.

July: I struggled further with breastfeeding and started Baby O on formula once a day. I fell in love with the Baby Björn carrier. And my blogging became even less frequent.

August: Baby O was subjected to his three-month injections. We encountered another Wonder Week. And I tried to win new friends at my Swedish mothers’ group.

September: I was such a bad blogger that I did not even log one post during the month of September…

October: We booked our flights to Thailand.

November: Baby O mastered “commando rolling”. And I promised to try harder to blog…

December: Hmmm, well, that was one promise out of the window, as in December I again failed to blog. However, I do have a batch of excuses to hand: O started “commando creeping”, then got sick, then started teething, then got sick again, then made me sick, then we went to England and he made my mum and grandmother sick, then a first tooth popped through and then we came home!

So, 2010 was a momentous year – the year that we went from being a couple to a little family. It is certainly a year that we will never forget, with ups and downs and ups again and full of happiness.

Happy 2011!

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Jan 2, 2011

New Year’s non-resolutions

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Happy New Year!

Well, here I am again, trying to kick-start my blogging. I am not really one for making New Year’s resolutions, so I am not going to promise to blog more; instead, I am just going to try to.

So, what has been going on with us since last time I posted? A whole heap of new developments from Baby O. We’ve gone from “commando rolling” to wriggling on the belly, to creeping and now we’re at “commando creeping” – wriggling along on elbows and belly like that Action Man toy that your brother had. Except that O is now so confident doing it that he can scoot around the whole apartment in that way and pretty damned quickly too. So, yes, we’ve started baby proofing. Not everything, mind, but a great many things have been moved out of reach or one shelf higher. Not that I am sure how long that will last… On New Year’s Eve, he started trying to stand on his own.

Photo © English Mamma

We spent Christmas in the UK, which was great fun for O as he was spoiled rotten by grandparents. And we were able to see how the flight to Thailand could be. As O has not been on a plane since August, when he was only three months old, we were interested to see how his seven month old self would react. He was a star. Our flight was due to take off at 6.20pm, forty minutes before his usual bedtime, but when we checked in we were told that it was delayed until 8pm. Okay, we thought, we’ll just carry on with bedtime at 7pm as usual. So, we fed him his milk, wrapped him up in his sleeping bag and slipped an eye mask on him and he slept from 7.15pm until we arrived in the UK, waking only once for a nappy change mid-flight, even though the plane did not in the end take off until almost 10pm.

This has given us a little more confidence that the flight to Bangkok should not be too much of a nightmare (fingers crossed!). That said, the only thing that is predictable about babies is their unpredictability!

Now that we’re back home, we’re just trying to get O back into a good routine as Christmas threw things off kilter a little. This was mostly because of teething though. Two days after Christmas, O’s first tooth broke through the gum, followed by its neighbour this morning. Huge relief all round as he had started showing the symptoms of teething back in mid-October. In the UK we were able to buy a couple of tubes of Bonjela teething gel and that has been a lifesaver for the nights. O has still been woken by the pain of the teeth cutting through the gum but I am sure that this has been lessened considerably by the gel.

As well as these great developments, O is now only three meals of solids a day (breakfast, lunch and tea) in addition to milk and is proving that he is a little boy with a big appetite, and we are just about to take the big step and move O into pull-up nappies.

Our little baby is growing up so fast!

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Aug 27, 2010

First date nerves

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Yesterday was the first meeting of the mothers’ group organised by the BVC (baby health centre) and I was full of nerves. The butterflies in my stomach were threatening to take over. I was nervous not just about meeting new people, but also about having to speak to them in my poor Swedish and of being judged by them. Not a good way to be thinking from the get-go.

My fears centred on being judged for no longer breastfeeding. Here in Sweden, breast is most definitely best and the midwives hammer that message home to you during your pregnancy check-ups and immediately after the birth. Don’t get me wrong, I also believe that, if you can, breastfeeding is the best thing for babies, but I also take a more realist approach: nothing is perfect in this world and breastfeeding certainly is an uphill struggle. So, I was a little apprehensive when I had to produce my bottle of formula to feed Baby O during the meeting.

Of course, everyone was lovely and the bottle feeding prompted an interesting discussion about who was breastfeeding, who was pumping and who was formula feeding. I shouldn’t have worried, should I? After all, we’re all in the same boat: first-time mothers from the neighbourhood and of about the same age just trying to work our way through babyworld and do the best for our little ones.

Afterwards, four of the six of us went for coffee afterwards and I felt it was a bit easier then to come out of my language shell and speak a bit more in Swedish to them. I had a really fun time in the end, despite all my fears beforehand.

But, typically, my fears have not been totally allayed. Now I feel like I’ve just come back from a first date: did they like me? Will they call me? Will they ask me out another time?

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Aug 24, 2010

What’s so wonderful about it anyway?

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Photo by BabyDinosaur on Flickr

Oh dear… I don’t really mean to do it, but it seems that whenever I find time to blog these days, it is invariably about a growth spurt or a wonder week.

So, yes, that’s right, you’ve guessed it: Baby O has just come through a growth spurt/wonder week. Although he was 14 weeks old last week, we think he hit Wonder Week 12.

Crying – check, sleeping problems – check, hunger – check, feeding problems – check. Yep, looks like it.

And this one I found more painful than the previous, mainly because I had a cold and as this was the first one we’ve been through when we haven’t been staying with family, family who were quite happy to pick up Baby O at his first cry and walk him round and round the garden and generally keep him entertained the whole day long. So, quite a shock for the poor little chap this time that he wasn’t being held for 12 hours. I was worried that he would catch my cold and also I did want to do selfish things like go to the toilet, take a shower, get dressed…

I think I might have been quite irritable about the whole thing. In fact, I know I was, otherwise I wouldn’t have posted a status update on Facebook saying that I had better see something bloody wonderful at the end as compensation.

Another first was that we were handling a growth spurt with bottle feeding rather than breastfeeding (that’s a whole other post there about how that came about). Let’s just say that by the end of it we had finally worked out the correct quantities to give but by that time the growth spurt had come to an end – just in time for Saturday - Pappa time. Hmmm, thanks for that, Baby O; I get a week of crying, grouchiness and refusing to nap in the day, and Pappa gets a little angel.

So, that’s Wonder Week 12 and/or the three-month growth spurt done and dusted. So, now I promise that my next post will be upbeat, cheerful even, and you can hold me to that…!

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