Well there is good news and bad news with this month's monthly-birthday update. The good news: Caroline is growing and developing perfectly fine. She is right on track with her physical growth and motor and cognitive skills. The bad news: we've had a return of her pain/fussing/crying/uncomfortable symptoms and I feel terrible that she's in pain again.
Looking back, I can see now that it started about two months ago. She was sleeping through the night just fine since she was 12 weeks old, and all of a sudden 2 months ago, she started waking up crying at night. At first we thought it was the 6 month growth spurt, and we waited it out for about a week. Then she had a cold. Then she was cutting a tooth. Then another cold. Then another tooth. It seemed like it was just one thing after another and we just couldn't catch a break. Sometimes she would wake up crying and would take a bottle, so we thought she was waking up out of hunger, but sometimes she was just crying inexplicably.
A few weeks after the night wakings began, she stopped eating well. She never used to refuse a bottle, and all of a sudden she was adamantly refusing to eat her 7 pm bottle. It didn't matter that it had been over 6 hours since she last ate...she just would.not.eat. Her daily consumption dropped to about 15 ounces per day. Babies her age should be eating closer to 30. She was never a voracious eater to begin with, and usually took 20-25 ounces per day, but 15 was a new record low for her.
And of course she didn't want anything to do with solid foods either. I had lamented her poor eating skills since we started solid foods. At first I thought she was just a picky eater. Then I thought she didn't like the texture or consistency of the baby food. She frequently gagged and choked and then refused to open her mouth and accept any more food. (You've seen the video montage, right?) Then I thought she might be food-avoidant since she spent so much of her young life throwing up. I was coming up with every excuse in the book, and it didn't dawn on me what might be going on until a few days ago.
The fussing and crying...the night wakings...the problems with eating....it all started when she began eating solid foods.
I think she has some type of food allergy/intolerance issue with something she's eating. I thought I was well-prepared and careful about introducing foods, but I missed it because I had assumed any food intolerance issues would present with vomiting, which is what it did with her milk allergy. But it didn't. And it's taken me 2 months to figure this out, and I feel awful that she's probably been uncomfortable and in pain for so long.
I had asked the on-call pediatrician about her eating/sleeping issues a few weeks ago when she went in to be checked out for her cold. His ridiculous advice was something about 'tough love' and letting her cry it out b/c she'd developed a habit of waking up to eat and we needed to break that habit. I wanted to punch him. In fact I want to punch most doctors these days. I have NO FAITH in the entire medical establishment. But just for precaution's sake, I made an appointment with her GI last Monday to discuss her issues. He basically said yes, I had reason to be concerned that she was only eating 15 ounces per day but he kind of dismissed her night wakings saying 'not all babies sleep through the night at this age' and that 'their personalities start to emerge now' and I didn't come away with any clear answers about what was going on, other than we should increase her meds a bit.
SO UNBELIEVABLY FRUSTRATING. The possible food allergy issue didn't cross my mind until 3 days after the appointment with the GI. And I was furious that he never even once mentioned it as a possibility, never said that maybe solid foods were causing her problems, never told me some of the possible effects to be on alert for. Once again, I had to figure this out entirely on my own (with lots of researching on the internet and discussions with my mom, who also wants to kill all the doctors.) So now, once again, I am trusting my mother's intuition because that was the ONLY THING that helped me fix her the first time. I'm taking her entirely off of solid foods for a good 2 weeks to let her system clear out, and then I am demanding a referral to a pediatric allergist who can hopefully help me figure out what she's possibly reacting to.
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| chomping on some Puffs, which gives her an attractive buck tooth appearance. |
Whew. So enough with the bad news. On with the good! She is crawling up a storm these days, and she has even mastered the 'cross crawl' which is a fairly advanced skill for her age. (Cross crawling is moving one arm and the leg on the opposite side, as opposed to crawling with one arm and leg on the same side.)
She likes to carry things in her mouth like a dog. Perhaps she picked this up from Winnie.
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| Winnie does it so why can't I? |
She is pulling up to a standing position all by herself on everything she can get her hands on. As I was flipping through the photos I'd just taken on my phone I looked down and she had pulled herself up so she could see too! She likes to sit on her knees a lot too, practicing her balance I suppose.
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| enjoying baby jail |
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| hello! |
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| getting good at balance |
Another interesting development: they say that by 9 or 10 months babies should be able to follow your finger and gaze at an object when you point at it. It's one of the earliest building blocks for language development...they need to learn how to show you what they want before they can name the object. And she is definitely following my pointing finger! Exciting!
She can imitate certain actions and sounds when we initiate. Daddy will sing a song and clap, and she'll bang her hand on her high chair. We'll say 'where's your tongue?' and stick out our tongues, and she'll stick out her tongue. She likes to grunt and growl, so we say 'what does the T-Rex do?' and make the growl, and she'll growl back.
Her favorite toy right now is the Tickle Monkey. He laughs and sings and she gets a kick out of him.
Hopefully we can get this fussing/crying/not eating/not sleeping business taken care of soon and we'll have our happy pain-free baby back soon!
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