Eat Your Heart Out

Piper Blue, 6 months, 3 weeks, 2 days

Adventures in Eating

I have been busy, very, very busy. Being Piper's mother is a full time job and I also have another full time job - high school art teacher. I have been back to work since September and it is now December 27th. I had a lot of fears and concerns about returning to work, some of them we had to work through and some problems that arose I never even considered until it was too late. One of the issues turned out to be eating.

Piper loves to eat. Her dense layer of "protection" is a good indicator of that fact. She is also at the 90th percentile for weight for her age, when she was born she was under the 20th percentile. Our pediatricians are very happy with how she looks and have told us not to be concerned about the pounds she has packed on. In fact, she is very healthy and looks like a happy, breastfed baby and she is all-to-happy to breastfeed anytime, anywhere, but don't give her no stinkin' bottle!

When Piper was about 4 weeks old, Griffin and I started giving her a bottle of breast milk once a day. We had been warned by a lactation consultant that if we didn't get this started soon she may reject the bottle altogether. Many breastfeeding mothers have been caught by surprise when they try to return to work and find out that their baby won't take a bottle. I was a little alarmed when I heard this, so we got to work on it.

The first bottle Griffin gave her I had prepared. I warmed the expressed milk and put the nipple on the bottle, however, I neglected to put the extra device in the bottle that makes the milk come out slower, so Piper sucked down that bottle in about one minute. It was pretty amazing! We thought there was no way she would have any trouble accepting a bottle.

At this time, Piper was pretty cranky on and off. We were still so new at the parenting thing that we were making lots of mistakes. We were mistaking her crankiness for colic and were giving her a herbal remedy called "Colic Calm". It has fennel and ginger in it and it supposed to help with digestion for crabby babies. It did seem to help her, so we gave it to her every time we couldn't get her to stop crying. We found that just pouring the dose into a rubber nipple was the easiest way to get her to take it. Pour the liquid in the nipple, pop the nipple in her mouth, she sucks it down quick as a wink. We could have put anything into her mouth and she would have sucked on it. She would have sucked the stripes off a Bengal tiger, but all that was going to change.

It turns out that sucking is a reflex for babies. Newborns have all sorts of reflexes that help them survive the first months of their lives. Some of them are throwbacks to when we all lived in trees and some are important instincts like sucking. This particular reflex, sucking, disappears at around two months of age. Sucking is then no longer a reflex, but a choice. Stripes on tigers are once again safe!

From months two to three we saw the change in Piper's eating habits. She became less willing to take a bottle and started freaking out when anyone would try to give her one. She would scream, cry, thrash and generally meltdown. This was heartbreaking for me to hear and my 'faucets' would turn on and leak pitifully in response.

Since my return to work was coming up very quickly, we all knew we needed to get Piper to cooperate. Jan, my father-in-law, was going to act as our 'manny', not Piper's wet nurse, so she needed to accept a bottle again, right? Well, maybe not.

The first week back to work was hell for everyone involved. Piper refused to take a bottle for the 9 hours I was out of the house. All sorts of people said, "Babies won't starve themselves. She will take the bottle eventually. Let her get hungry enough." Yeah, right! Piper clearly inherited a double dose of stubbornness from both me and Griffin.

No matter how hungry she was she wouldn't drink more than a fraction of an ounce of milk from a bottle that first week. When I would get home from work she was crazed with hunger. Her face was puffy and red from crying and her nursing was intense and frantic. I felt horrible for her, I can't imagine how Jan and Griffin dealt with her all day like that at our house.

We all decided we needed to take another approach. If the 'mountains' can't come to Piper, Piper would go to the 'mountains'. The second week of school Jan started bringing Piper in for lunch. My lunch period is 44 minutes long at 10:15 in the morning. An ungodly hour for me to eat lunch, but apparently, just right for Piper.

Everyday I would meet Jan and Piper in the main office and we would all go down to the nurses' office for me to feed her. During the first couple of weeks, nearly every time I got to the office Piper was crying. She would be so relieved to see me and would start trying to rip my shirt off the second she was in my arms. When I got to feed her she would look at me with a mixture of love and something like worry or confusion. "Where have you been? I am so hungry!"

This arrangement became great for Piper. She loved seeing the teenagers in the office everyday. She loved the secretaries that made a big fuss over her and she began to accept her new feeding schedule. Of course, this wasn't an ideal situation for the rest of us. Jan had to drive her 35 minutes each way on Route 80 which is filled with texting drivers doing 90 miles an hour. I was missing lunch everyday and eating whatever I could whenever I could. Griffin was taking care of her from 6:30 to 9am and then 12 noon until I got home at 2pm instead of working at his home office. We were all making sacrifices for Piper.

Many people suggested that I liked having Piper come in for lunch a little too much and that I should be working on the bottle thing again. Believe me, as much as I loved seeing that chubby face light up when I walked into the office each day, it was putting a major strain on me. Not only was I loosing the time I had to eat lunch, but also I lost the time I had to get other work done. Lunchtime is often used by teachers for prep and planning. I did some planning in my head, but Piper was a real distraction. In addition, I wasn't particularly thrilled to have her schlepped back and fourth to school on a major highway everyday. Not to mention winter would be coming soon and driving Piper in snow and sleet was out of the question. We all knew this couldn't last forever.

Piper loves to eat; I said it before and I'll say it again, and again, and again. Piper loves to eat! When she was around five months old, or even a little younger, she started grabbing food off my plate when I was holding her during dinner. I would wrestle the food out of her pudgy little hand before she could get whatever it was into her open mouth. That was straight where she was going to put it, right into her mouth!

Griffin and I had decided to do "baby led weaning" with Piper. The concept is quite simple: from birth to six months only breast milk, from six months on, she can eat almost anything she can get into her mouth by herself plus all the breastfeeding she wants. At five months and three weeks, we gave her some baby yogurt from a spoon. Piper was intrigued and delighted with this new taste sensation. She kept telling us she was ready to eat 'real' food. Soon after we sat Piper in her highchair and put some of our dinner in front of her, she quickly grabbed a piece of whatever it was and began gnawing on it. She knew just what to do!

Now, more than four weeks later, Piper is eating everything we eat, just the way we eat it. No mashing, no mushing, no spooning it into her mouth. We put all of her food onto her tray and she chooses what to eat and when. At first she would just chew and eventually spit it all out, but now she swallows most everything her little gums have mashed up. More is going in than coming out of her mouth. It is so easy to do and now that I have gotten used to seeing her occasionally gag out pieces of food that are too big to swallow, I can actually enjoy eating dinner! (It's easy to panic when your baby is cough, cough, coughing out a hunk of cheese, but this is how they learn how much to put into their mouths at once.)

All of this eating couldn't have come at a better time. Jan's knee had begun bothering him more and more. This was the knee he had replaced three years ago. After a while, he starting having so much pain that he could hardly carry the little chubster into the school. It was awful for me to watch and yet, at that time Piper still needed to come in to lunch. Words cannot express how much I appreciated Jan's tremendous effort for Piper. Jan finally had to have an operation on his knee and his days of bringing Piper to school were over.

Piper is now being babysat by two of Griffin's aunts. Griffin brings Piper over to his parents' house in the morning and on Mondays Aunt Joan watches her and the rest of the week Aunt Ann watches her. Piper happily eats anything they offer her, except of course, a bottle which occasionally someone still tries with her. She looks at the bottle and back at the person offering it to her with an expression that clearly says, "Me suck? No, you suck. Get me some cheese!"