Boobs and Poop

A few weeks ago, we took our (then) 9-month-old baby on her first cross-country trip, complete with a layover. We lost 3 hours heading from west to east and forced her to suffer two separate ear-popping take-offs. To boot, we'd subjected her to an hour-long car ride, remote parking at LAX, a shuttle and airport security before the aerial adventure even commenced. It was a long day for us all, but baby girl was in a great mood anyhow. She smiled, clapped, cooed and made many friends. She was actually impressively well behaved. The day was of course not without incident. During the first flight's departure, my husband was holding the baby. He had her wrapped in a soft, warm blanket and was trying to feed her a bottle to ease the discomfort of ear popping. She didn't seem interested in the bottle, even though she'd not eaten much that morning. So he propped her up, she let out a giggle and then he smelled it. He nudged me. He cautiously moved a corner of the blank...

Thank you, Cleveland Clinic Children's Health Team ! I thought about recreating this, but it's just so well done I decided to share it as is instead. I can't compete, and frankly, I don't want to. Behold:

Image taken from this article (which is riddled with misspellings but very funny). My baby's boogers are ridiculous. They're usually grayish or white, so I'm not talking about a sinus infection or anything. She just gets these giant, hard boogers on a regular basis. They're like obstructive boulders that stymie her breathing. I expend a lot of energy extracting them from her nose and studying them on a daily basis. I even call this apparent ritual our "daily booger excavation." I once called it a "daily booger extraction" but those days have long passed. It's truly an operation that requires planning, precision tools, patience, dedication and time. I'm a booger archaeologist, unearthing the remnants of a very recent past from my daughter's nasal cavities. Recently, baby girl has also taken an interest in my boogers. The other night she was struggling to sleep, so we snuggled. She settled in, stuck her finger up my nose and only...

So we dove into feeding the baby formula because I wanted to quit pumping. I have quit pumping. I'm still nursing (more and even more frequently over this past week). This is because I think we dove into the formula too quickly. Baby girl's stomach was quite upset last week, and I think it's because we started feeding her up to 4 bottles of formula each day. We didn't take the expert advice of subbing one feeding for a bottle in a progression until she's weaned. I just stopped nursing her during the day, all of a sudden. Last Wednesday, baby girl threw up all over our nanny. All over her. I washed nanny's clothes and gave her an extra outfit to wear. Within minutes of changing, baby girl threw up on her again. I called the pediatrician and he said to go back to exclusively breastfeeding until the stomach issue cleared up. So back to breastfeeding I went, and it was like starting over on so many levels! I think I had allowed my milk supply to drop a teen...