My baby has toxic spit

So what is Maya like as a baby?  She’s what my mom and I are calling a “Spirited” baby - she knows what she needs, and she’s not afraid to let you know that she is displeased with your efforts to satisfy those needs (read: she can raise the holy dead with her screaming).  She’s a baby who likes to be in motion (incredibly difficult when stuck inside your house due to the weather - really, MORE sub-zero temperatures this week???), so there is no sitting around and cuddling for her!  The only time I can sneak in cuddles are when she falls asleep while nursing (my cat was anti-cuddle at first, too - I trained it out of her by giving her treats every single time I picked her up and cuddled the crap out of her.  Would this work with a baby, I wonder?).  Since we can’t go outside to walk, we spend an inordinate amount of time bouncing on the yoga ball.  As long as I move around with her a lot and keep her on a strict Eat-Play-Sleep cycle, she has her good moments during the day, is fussy in the evenings, and otherwise sleeps pretty well, especially at night, waking only to feed and then falling back asleep (we are SO lucky for that last bit!!).

But mostly, we nurse - so what is her personality like as a nurser?  Frankly, she sucks (no pun intended).  There are no blissful nursing sessions where she gently takes milk and gazes at me with love.  Nursing generally goes one of two ways: 

1. She veritably attacks my boob with serious chomping action and incredibly strong suction (and a pretty crappy shallow-ish latch that looks *perfect* and super deep to the number of lactation consultants that we’ve seen but positively destroys my nipples - more on this below) and, when she’s really in a foul mood, spends the nursing session whining (yes, whining, while still attached!), yanking her head back (ouch), and squirming.  She generally also looks pissed off while doing this.  This type of session tends to happen in the late afternoon/early evening when my milk production is a little lower and the letdown is slower than her discerning tastes allow.
2. She falls asleep within 10 minutes and, like a ninja, slips without notice into a SUPER shallow latch - until she suddenly wakes up a bit and gives a great big suck that causes me to jump, cuss inside my head, and try to re-latch her.  I have about a 50% success rate with this re-latching, as she’s often so tired that she won’t open her mouth again.  This type of session tends to happen in the middle of the night when it’s dark and I’m tired, too.

Despite this, my boobs appear to make a ton of milk and she’s excellent at removing it, gaining weight like a champ.  Also, we are coming up on 5 weeks, which (according to my Breastfeeding Made Simple book) means that we are leaving the “acclimation period” (0-5 weeks) where breastfeeding is harder than bottle-feeding and entering the “reward period” (8+ weeks) where it’s going to rock.  I cannot wait!

From Breastfeeding Made Simple - I am ready for my reward period!!!

In the meantime, however, I am on a mission to fix my destroyed boobs - sorry for oversharing, but that’s how I roll - one nipple has such a deep crack (a full-on fissure) that it will never, ever be the same again.  I spend most of Maya’s napping hours not doing work, as I’d prefer to do, but rather Googling “ways to heal deeply cracked nipples while still nursing” (pumping is actually even more painful, so nursing it is for us).

Nipple healing is straight voodoo, my friends.  I have never seen so many different, crazy “solutions” espoused so vociferously by so many different people.  Everyone has The One Best Way™ that worked for them, and all of them require 1) purchasing a number of potions or devices, often in combination, 2) applying/using them in a specific order, and 3) some additional form of dancing/standing on your head/putting pins in dolls.  My favorite are these, silver nipple cups imported from fancy Italian silversmiths that are supposed to do wonders for promoting healing (I have not tried them).  You think I’m joking, but I’m not.

If it's recommended by Europeans....

So after much trial and error, we have deepened the latch enough to be tolerable and developed a voodoo protocol of our own.  It appears that the key to this protocol is...washing off the baby’s apparently toxic spit with saline after every single feeding.  God only knows what is in her spit - venom, maybe? - but I need it off my nipples.  The good news is that I had previously bought a bunch of needle-less syringes full of normal saline for use during fieldwork (they make great washes for skin injuries!), and now they are proving SO USEFUL!  Then, we put on Jack Newman’s all-purpose nipple ointment, and then lanolin.  With this protocol, or maybe just with the passage of time, things are finally looking up :)

The key to breastfeeding comfort: water, tea, and voodoo

The baby is currently pooping and fussing in her sleep and so I have to go - Cuddle Training, Day #20, commencing :)