My Mom Asks Moxie

As I'm typing this morning, snow is falling outside. J decided to work from home today, due to the snow tying up traffic along his commute route, which means that I got to brush my teeth before 9 AM! Yay!

Yesterday was rough. After going to bed late (J at 11, me at 1), Evie woke us up for a 3 AM feeding for the first time in who knows how long. (Yes, I am aware that I have no basis to complain here, I'm just stating facts.) Then she got me up for the day at 6 AM and refused to nap anywhere but in my arms. She's been bad about this...as a newborn she happily napped in her Boppy, but after a few weeks it no longer worked and she would wake up right after we put her in it. Then she seemed to like napping in her moses basket in the family room, but now refuses to stay asleep in there for longer than 5 minutes. For the past few weeks I've had success transitioning her from my arms to her swing for a nap, but in the past 3 days she's rejecting that as well. Argh! I would start putting her in her crib, but that doesn't work because her nursery is the "lightest" room in the house and it wakes her up. The computer room is much darker during the day because it faces west, so she sleeps better in here, if I can figure out a new baby apparatus that she'll tolerate. Any suggestions? She likes sleeping in my chair:

But she's started working on rolling over in the past few days, so this is not a safe option unless I'm right there monitoring her (i.e. no laundry, dishes, taking Phoebe out to poop...)

Yesterday, I repeat, was rough. She refused to be set down anywhere, until I finally got her sleeping in her swing for a few minutes around 10:45 AM. As she slept, I quickly took the opportunity to heat up my lunch and chat with my mom on the phone. Evie woke up to find me doing three things she hates: eating, talking on the phone and NOT HOLDING HER. She started crying hysterically. It had only been two hours since she'd eaten at 9 AM (she's been on a 3 hour schedule pretty happily for the past several weeks), so I tried to comfort her with a diaper change (which she generally loves) and some rocking and singing. Meanwhile I'd hung up with my mom and my lunch was only 1/5 eaten and sat on the counter getting cold. She just kept crying, more and more hysterically, with big gulping sobs and tears streaming down her face. Nothing worked! Her diaper was dry, I was holding her, I tried pacifiers, rocking, bouncing, patting, jiggling...argh! Finally at 11:30 I gave up and decided she must be having a growth spurt and actually be hungry, so I set her down in her swing to wail like a siren while I went into the kitchen to make her bottle. I came back in, picked her up and sat down at the computer to read blogs while I fed her (I know, everyone says I'm supposed to talk to her and sing to her while I feed her, but she has always ignored people who are feeding her, preferring to stare off into space as she sucks). I pulled up Bloglines and noticed that Ask Moxie had a new post up.

Please be patient as I now go off on a tangent...

Evie's had this t-shirt for a few weeks. Moxie has had some big stuff going on in her life and I wanted to support her by buying a couple of things from her cafepress.com store, because I love her blog so much (the other shirt I bought is the "Rock Me" one shown in this post). I've been waiting for the right post to show off her new t-shirt, and this is it.

...tangent is over.

Anyhow, the post yesterday was about teething, something that I thought I didn't need to think about for another couple of months. Boy, was I wrong. As I read the post and the comments that followed (Ask Moxie is one of those blogs where the comments are as good as or better than the original post), I was struck that Evie is experiencing almost every symptom:

• drooling (past 10 days or so, before that everything that came out of her mouth was white)
• eating hands (she's been doing this more persistently lately)
• rash when she poops (and a never-seen-since-hospital 2 poops in a row yesterday)
• sleep interruption (well, how about sleep pickiness?)
• eye boogers
• inconsolable screaming

So, yesterday I quickly washed up all of Evie's teething toys and popped them into the refrigerator. The verdict: likes the Super Soothie, kinda; still prefers her regular Soothies; sorta likes the Sassy Teething Butterfly; maybe likes her water-filled teething ring.; still thinks her hands taste better. On order: RaZberry Teether, Vibrating Teether and Sophie, based on recommendations from Moxie's commenters.

She doesn't have red gums yet, but a few commenters on Moxie's post said their babies had teeth by 4 months, and the pain starts way before teeth appear. BUT other commenters said their babies started showing teething signs at 3 or 4 months and didn't have any teeth until later than average (6 months is average for first tooth). So we could be dealing with this new Evie for months and months and months. Great. Are any of Evie's contemporaries (Declan, Payton, Snippet) showing any of the same symptoms, by any chance? Am I just imagining this? I can attribute everything but the drooling to other causes, if I think about it. OK, let me ask you this, Ashley, Diana and Deanna, when you lift your son high in the air over your head and wiggle him to make him smile (everyone does that, right?*) does he drip drool onto the floor, your hair and onto your face? Evie does, every single time. She's still spitting up, but now it is more watery and soaks through her bibs, getting the neck of her shirt wet. Almost every time I change her shirt now it has a wet neck. And I'm constantly wiping drool off of her chin. She loves that, you can imagine.

*but only in the hour before she eats, because otherwise it would be spit up on the floor, in the hair, etc.

Thanks, Moxie, for helping explain my Rough Monday.