Post-Partum Hair Loss

Confession #8

The post-partum hair loss is getting out of hand. So much hair! on the floor! in my hand! in the comb! It's weaving itself into wall-to-wall carpeting on the bathroom floor.

My hair is shoulder-length, and styled with long layers. This means that not all my hair is the same length; it's a shaping thing I guess. Anyway, the longest layers, the hair that reaches to my shoulders, is getting pretty thin as a result of all this hair loss. It hangs in thin patches and is starting to resemble a mullet.

Hair loss supposedly peaks around the 4 month mark, so this month will see the worst of it, and it will get better starting in October. I'm holding off on a haircut until the end of the month, but it's... well, it's kind of sad. My hair's shorter than I'm used to in the first place, so I don't have a lot of options for updo's. A pair of french braids looks really cute, but I can't do that for work. Anyway, whine, bitch, moan, my hair, my hair, is everywhere; here baby, there Mama, everywhere, Daddy Daddy.

Oh right, I have a blog...

Belle's down for a nap, so I thought I'd check in on you poor neglected readers.

It's been very busy for us the past few weeks: I started work again and Belle's begun day care, so we're adjusting to new rhythms and schedules. Also, we bought a car!!!!
We are the proud owners of a 2006 Subaru Outback in dual-tone Atlantic Blue (w/silver). It's an automatic transmission, and it's a basic model; the only option-thingy it has is heated seats which, if you could choose one, that's a good one to choose. Now, I said we're 'owners', but I didn't say 'drivers', because we haven't yet had the car seat base installed and checked out at the local police station. It's a sticky situation, because they only do inspections on Tuesdays, which is one of the days when I go to work and D takes care of Belle. But D is confident he can install the base properly on his own (since he did it for the other two cars before getting a thumbs-up from the police), enough to drive over there with Belle this Tuesday.

I've also had to go shopping for some work clothing for my post-partum figure. You may recall that I had a HUGE pregnancy belly - well, that doesn't go away all at once. A deflated belly creates a new figure, one that requires differently-cut clothing. And I have to be careful about it, because I still have numbness on my lower abdomen. This should wear off in another 6 months or so, but in the meantime, I have to take that lack of feeling into consideration. For example, if a normal person's belly is hanging out of their clothes, the tiny hairs and nerve endings on the skin will alert them to the exposure, because you feel drafts, etc. Not so for the numb! I could walk around all day with a saggy gut hanging out and never realize it. This is why I am still enamoured of my pregnancy camisoles - they cover everything. But I'm too small now for my preggers pants, so I must shop a bit.

Speaking of shopping, have you SEEN the adorableness available at Gymboree?? OMG, SQUIRRELS! And hedgehogs and bunnies and tiny gnomes! I have $17 in store credit and a 20% off coupon that expires in two weeks, and I'm trying to decide how to wield them to Belle's best advantage.

Day care is going ok for Belle, but not great. I call to check in one her twice a day, while I'm pumping at work, and one day she spent the whole morning fussing, and another day she had loose stools (which they'd send her home for if she wasn't fully breastfed) and a minor fever (99.3). But she's had some okay days too, so I think it's going to work out. Yesterday, she cried when Daddy left, both times. (He stopped by in the afternoon because they called me at 2pm to tell me that she'd been refusing to eat all day since her 9am feeding.)

She's still sleeping like a champ, which is so very very lucky for us, and totally undeserved for me, because I was a terrible sleeper as a baby. She has mastered rolling over from her back to her belly, as long as she rolls to the left. I wonder if this means she'll be right-handed. Handedness is interesting to me because I'm a lefty and D's a righty and I'm so curious which way Belle will go. She also has figured out the leg movements for crawling, but she hasn't figured out that her arms need to help out, or that it would be easier if she lifted her belly off the floor. The result of her legs-only pushing is that she kind of pushes over onto her head. It's cute. It's also only a matter of time before she figures it out and starts crawling. Yikes!

She still isn't very interested in toys at all. Hands are for observing and sticking in her mouth, not for reaching or grabbing. If a toy gets in her hand's way, then it might be contemplated with a bit of interest, but as a minor obstacle only.

Milk Run

Last night, the power went out in half of our apartment. D tried resetting the circuit, but it didn't work. The half without electricity: the living room, tv room, and kitchen. We called the landlord and left a voice mail. We tried turning a bunch of stuff of and re-resetting the circuits. We called the landlord again. Nothing.
I was already getting ready for bed when D said, "What should we do about the milk in the freezer?"
Shit.
Shitshitshitshitshit.
I had two months' worth of frozen breastmilk stored in there. It would almost certainly thaw overnight. What to do, what to do?

Well, since half of our apartment still had electricity, we considered running an extension cord and plugging in the fridge to an outlet with some juice. We rejected this notion, because we feared it would overload the only circuit left, and we needed that one for the air conditioner.

We had to find another freezer.

So I called my friends Max* & Shut_In_w/Cats, to see if we could borrow a little freezer space for our baby's frozen food. He said to come right over. We packed up three full converted-tissue-boxes worth of milk into an empty diaper bag, and I ran to the car, and hastened to their abode, where Max cleared a whole freezer shelf for me.

Our friends are our heroes!! Our power's back, but we're not going to ask to retrieve the milk until we've had power for at least 24 hours.
Ferrying frozen breastmilk is one of the odder local errands I've had to run.

*Max? Really? When did we come up with that pseudonym? I think it's short for Max Power, right?

Brita Filter Plastics

I called Brita the other day to find out about the plastics they use in their water filtration systems, and I posted what I found out over in the comment section at ZRecs.

Here's what I wrote:

I called the company, and Brita lids and filters are made from #4, polypropylene, which most sources consider safe.The containers themselves are made of a #7 called "SAN": styrene acrylonitrile. The Brita lady I spoke with specifically promised that there is no BPA in any of their plastic.

Unremarkable = Perfection

Yesterday was the kind of Saturday I'd been looking forward to for ages. Beautiful weather, no plans, just us. Before Belle, this kind of day generally went somewhat wasted: we might get out on some kind of trip, but ultimately it felt to me like we just weren't fulfilling the potential of the day.

Now, with a baby, the potential of a day is very different. Instead of feeling like there's so much I should get done, I felt like everything we do accomplish is a victory, and everything we do is layered with a kind of significance, because we're doing it with Belle as well. Mostly, we had a quiet day at home. Our big outing was to take Belle on a little 1-mile hike in the Baby Bjorn, and once we had gotten her to sleep at night, we tried cooking a new recipe for dinner.

Sure, we didn't hike Mt. Monadnock or camp out overnight or throw a party, but it was perfect to me the way it was. This is precisely the kind of day I was looking forward to having once we became parents, and I have not been disappointed.

Losing my cool about spit-up

(Reprinted from an email to my new-mom group)

I have a question that I never thought to ask in class, but after yet another debacle this morning, I would love some advice about what to do to contain/control Belle's spit-ups after a feeding. It seems like no matter how clever I think I'm being, or how big a cloth I use to cover her, me, and the area in-between, she always ends up getting spit-up on my back, in my bra, in my lap, down my side, down her front and past her bib, or on the chair. Sometimes she'll spit up while leaning on my shoulder, sometimes when she's held sitting or standing facing me. I hate the idea of having to run to the kitchen after every breast just so the spit-up can land on the linoleum; does anyone have any suggestions? I had a particularly bad time of it this morning, with spit-up so copious my husband had to take her so I could strip and shower. It's not that there's so much volume, it's just that it ends up covering so much surface area!

Plastic Paranoia the Third

I guess there have finally been enough official studies about the problems with BPA in plastic, because even the folks who write the Baby Bargains book are putting BPA bottles on their shit list. (For those readers who don't have kids, Baby Bargains is THE go-to book for reviews and recommendations on baby gear. I think many people would consider it an essential reference for setting up their baby registries and their baby's rooms.)
Here's a link to the blog post over at the Baby Bargains blog. I didn't know they HAD a blog, but you can be sure I added it to my RSS collection. The bottom of the article has links to the Z Recommends article I've mentioned before. Since this plastics issue has become so mainstream, I think I may finally mention it to the women in my new moms group. Our class is over, so it's going to be an email. Oh, well. I have questions for them about spit-up containment techniques anyway.