Trisomymommy

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.

Mojo

So I haven’t been blogging lately.  I just haven’t felt like I had much to say these days. Life goes on, rather mundanely, and there is nothing very worthy of note.  But I realized recently that time is flying by and without any record, I will not remember any of it.  I need to keep more notes, even if they capture nothing more than everyday life. 

I’m thinking of this because I recently reread a journal I was keeping a few years ago, while we were gearing up for IVF. In it, I just write about whatever work project I’m struggling with, what I did that day, and my deliberate efforts to manage my sadness and anxiety.  I think if I didn’t have that journal, it would be very easy to gloss over that time of my life and to forget just how painful and scary it was.  Once a problem is resolved, the mind does not keep what it was like back when you didn’t know if it ever would be resolved.  And it really does feel resolved for me now.  I don’t know if I’ll ever try again, but I’m certainly not feeling the urge right now.  Maybe someday I will, and I’ll call up the RE and schedule one final attempt with our few remaining embryos, or maybe one day I’ll call him up and tell him to dump them, or maybe I’ll never call and will just keep paying storage fees throughout my life, never able to destroy something so precious.  I don’t know, and I don’t need to know now. 

Anyway, days are flying by without any record, and I need to do something about that.  So here’s what’s happening.  J is doing better.  Some days she only spits up a few times and doesn’t cry quite so much.  But there are other days that are much worse.  I’m trying to cut out onions, broccoli, and dairy (mostly – I can’t give it up completely, I just can’t) to see if it helps.  I did talk to some more doctors and nurses about her issues and, on their advice, tried Maalox.  It didn’t help, so we’ve just moved on to Zantac.  I wish I had been more aggressive about pursuing this earlier.  I guess I was concerned that I was overreacting to what might just be fairly normal baby behavior.  But then I took her to B’s daycare and after a long, painful day, the caregiver told me that J was the crankiest baby she’d ever seen.  And this woman has seen a lot of babies.  She also said that they had nicknamed her Mojo Jojo.  I didn’t know who that was, so I had to ask the internets. This is Mojo Jojo: 

I had to agree that there is a striking resemblance.

I’ve taken a hiatus from stay-at-home momhood to finish a work project that I meant to get done during the pregnancy but… well… didn’t.  The deadline is looming and I found I was not able to get anything done while caring for Mojo Jojo and I was getting very anxious about it.  So for the time being, I’ve saddled B’s day care with the crankiest baby ever.  My hope is that I’ll be able to wrap it up in about two more weeks and take her back out of daycare just as she hits three months old, which is when people say babies cheer up. 

The first day I brought her in, the daycare called in the middle of the day to say, “Did you know that she has thrush?”  Hey, that’s me, #1 mom who doesn’t even know that about her own baby.  Actually, I had suspected it two days earlier, but then the symptoms seemed to go away so I thought I had been wrong.  The treatment is gentian violet solution, which is dark purple.  Seriously dark purple.  As dark as India ink.  I swabbed the inside of her mouth with it, staining her entire mouth and lips purple.  Then she spit up, sending purple dye all over the changing table and her clothes.  Then she put her hands in her mouth, turning them and everything they touched purple.  It was purple chaos, and it earned her many strange looks from people, but it worked.

Miss B is doing great.  She keeps getting more communicative and more engaged and it is so much fun to hang out with her now.  That is, if she has napped.  She is resisting naps a lot and sometimes she is extremely cranky.  She is such a little girl and not a baby anymore.  Last night as she was eating, she started spitting for fun, so I touched her lips and said, “No spitting” and made a stern face.  She smiled a new smile, one that I hadn’t seen before.  While most of her smiles erupt from a natural and immediate surge of joy, this one was slightly coy and self-conscious, and I could tell by the way she was studying my face that she was trying to get me to smile back at her.  It took all of my self control not to.  A major milestone has been reached:  Miss B has learned to play the cute card.