Mojo Jojo Gets An Entry

Poor Jojo Mojo.  It’s the classic second child neglect, turned 21^st century.   Her milestones go unblogged.

So, here’s a randomly timed update on J.  She still spits up a lot, but is not so screamy anymore.  I can soothe her now, at least usually.  At today’s checkup, she was in the 25^th percentile for length, 10^th for weight, and 55^th for head circumference.  She smiles.  She coos.  She giggles occasionally.  She has figured out how to work the bouncy seat and can get a pretty high-amplitude bounce going when she puts her mind to it.  She likes her baby gym and can grab onto the hanging toys.  She has rolled over from back to front a few times, but hasn’t gone the other way yet.  Until this past week she was still waking up every three hours to eat, which is Just. Too. Often.  I decided to give her some rice cereal to see if it would help.  I made T video her first solid food experience, but it wasn’t much of a celebratory event.  It was just an exhausted me spooning food into her while chanting, please sleep more, please sleep more.  I give her some by spoon most evenings and I put some in her bottle at about 10:30pm, which had been suggested by a doctor for the reflux anyway.  Now sometimes she’ll sleep until about 4am, which is a huge improvement.  Last night she slept until 6:30am and I got up so happy and rested, I felt like those smiling people that you see waking up to what will surely be a productive day on those direct-to-consumer ads for sleeping pills.  The night before last she was up every two hours, so eh, it’s unpredictable.

Nursing is so much better now.  She rarely screams and pulls away in agony these days, and come to think of it, T hasn’t called me “acid boob” for weeks. 

Here’s a random thing that makes me really angry when I think about it, so I try not to think about it because there is nothing to be done anyway:  this baby was almost certainly exposed to contaminated Chinese heparin.  You know, the stuff that killed several dialysis patients?  I never had any adverse effects, but due to my sticky blood, I was on it for the last month of my pregnancy, which was shortly before the contaminant was discovered.  So here I am, forgoing wine (mostly), cutting back (a little) on coffee, and trying (usually) to do right by this fetus, and meanwhile, I’m injecting some unknown substance that some assholes used instead of the real stuff because it mimicked the structure of the real stuff (thus making it harder to detect) and it was ever so slightly cheaper to make.  None of the press coverage has mentioned that this is commonly given to hypercoagulable pregnant women and that we have no idea if it has any impact on their babies.  I’m thinking about this today because Mojo Jojo had a round of vaccinations and it freaked me out more than it usually does.  Sometimes I want to go live off the grid and eat only home grown vegetables and wear only clothes sewn by hand out of cloth woven by hand from wool sheared off of my own sheep.  But then I realize that we’re running low on disposable diapers, so I make a Target run.

Comments

[cate]

That's just awful about the heparin.

"acid boob" made me laugh. Why isn't that on a mother's day card?

[Katherine]

I worry about the same thing with the heparin. I was on it my entire pregnancy, over 600 injections. Now I'm looking at my son and worrying that the very thing I credited for keeping him safe through my pregnancy might have done some unknown harm. I wonder if anyone is going to address that.

[Jen]

"Acid boob" is hysterical. The heparin, however, is not. That's pretty scary. Maybe you should contact Dateline or something. Seriously!

Living off the grid is tempting. But you're right, disposable diapers, and nursing pads, and all of the other glamorous essentials it requires to raise a baby these days would be a little harder to come by.

Oh, and I feel your pain on the sleeping thing. We're still up every two hours over here. I'm like the walking dead.