Star-9 Months

I know this post is a few weeks overdue, but I was waiting for Star's 9 month checkup so I could put her weight and height in the post.  First, the appointment was rescheduled by the doctor's office and then, thanks to Hubby leaving for the farm with the girls' carseats still in his truck instead of the van where they're supposed to be, I was late for the rescheduled appointment and had to reschedule AGAIN.  Anyways, I finally got her to the doctor for her checkup!  

Age: 9 months

Weight and height: 15 pounds and 27 3/4" long.  The doctor is concerned since she's gained less than a pound in the last 3 months and dropped from the 17th percentile to 1.3% on the growth charts.  I'm starting to give her Pediasure everyday to help her put on some weight just like we did with Little Man when he was losing weight.  I'm really surprised that my best eater is my skinniest baby!  We knew that the older two didn't eat well and that was the reason for their slow weight gain/weight loss, but Star eats great and always has so I assumed that we wouldn't have any issues with her weight gain.  For comparison, at 9 months, Princess was 15 pounds, 12 ounces and 27 1/2" long and Little Man was 18 pounds, 4 ounces and 30" long.   

Wearing: Size 3 diapers and 3-6 / 6-9 month clothes.  A lot of the 3-6 month clothes are too small for her (lengthwise-if I could add an inch to the bottom of her pants and onesies, they'd fit great!) so I just need to get my act together and pack them up so I can give them to my sister for her baby girl.  I did bring the 6-9 month clothes home, but it turns out that there's isn't much there for summer clothes since Princess wore that size during the winter months.  Another excuse to go shopping for cute baby clothes, right?  :)     

Likes:  Following me around the house, eating, playing with the big kid toys instead of baby toys.  

Dislikes: Being left behind by her bigger siblings, especially when they go outside.

Eating habits:  Star eats about 6 ounces of formula and 4 ounces of baby food in the morning when she gets up.  Around 10:30, she takes another bottle followed by another 4 ounces of baby food.  1:30 is another bottle and then she has one more bottle and 4 ounces of baby food at 5:30.  She has a strong gag reflex so I've been taking the table foods slowly, but I do usually share my food with her and give her Gerber Puffs and yogurt melts to snack on.  Her favorite food is string cheese which I break up into small pieces.  She prefers table food to baby food, but until she learns to eat better without choking so much, the table food she gets is mostly for practice.  She looks hilarious when she eats because she chews so widely and exaggerated that food often falls out of her mouth. 


Sleeping habits:She sleeps from 7 pm to 7:30 am.  She's still taking 3 naps a day and sometimes 4 if her afternoon nap wasn't as long as it was supposed to be. 
 
Milestones/Accomplishments: She's crawling!!  You can see a video of when she just learned how to crawl here.

Miscellaneous: She has 2 top teeth now!  She's also starting to talk already (earlier than the older two kids did!).  She says "Mama" and "Dada" and uses them in the right context.  For instance, when Hubby walks into the room, she'll get excited and exclaim, "Dada!" or when she's in her crib crying to get out, she'll cry, "Mama, mama" until I come get her.  

Comparison pictures from 8 months to 9 months:

Are we done with pictures yet?  Because there are toys that need to be played with.

Her "Stinker" face

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A Miracle

I haven't written much about this because it's so frustrating for me and because so many people don't understand the seriousness of the issue, but Little Man is an impossible eater.  Or technically, a non-eater.  I wrote about his issues with breastfeeding here.  His eating hasn't improved since then.  Before his doctor recommended that I give him Pediasure every day, he was losing weight because he just wouldn't eat.  For a period of over 6 months, he would literally scream when I gave him a plate of food because he did not want it.  His doctor ran allergy tests, tests on his blood, etc, but couldn't find a reasons for Little Man's aversion to food.

When I try telling people about Little Man's eating problems, they often tell me that he's just a picky eater and he'll outgrow it eventually.  Princess is a picky eater.  I was a picky eater (still kind of am).  Little Man is not just a picky eater.  He simply does not care for eating, at all.  My mom told me that her dad was the same way when he was young.  He was super skinny as a child and refused any type of food until one day he ate Wheaties cereal at a friend's house and discovered he actually liked them.  After that, his mother always kept Wheaties in the house.  My grandpa still eats Wheaties almost every day.

It's been over 6 months since Little Man has willingly put a vegetable in his mouth besides potatoes (and he'll only eat those when we're at Grandma's house).  Fruit is iffy on most days too.  At almost every meal, I offer Little Man fruits and vegetables, but I usually end up throwing them away, along with most or all of his other food.

But yesterday...Little Man had spinach.  He gobbled it up and begged for more.  I almost cried at the miracle I'd just witnessed!  To be honest, there may have been some trickery involved though.  You see, the 8 month old I babysit eats baby food that comes in handy little pouches.  Little Man was sitting beside me while I fed the baby and actually asked for a bite.  I nearly fell off my chair and then I had an idea.  Twisting the cap off of a fresh pouch of pears and spinach, I handed the whole thing over to Little Man who eagerly sucked down the whole pouch and begged for more.    

Gerber 2nd Foods Organic Baby Food, Pear Spinach, 3.5-Ounce Pouches (Pack of 6)

I think I may have discovered Little Man's new snack.  I do intend to keep offering him vegetables and fruit in traditional form, but this is one way to get the vitamins and minerals he needs in the meantime.

Ketchup Is My New Best Friend

Eating. Should be simple, right? You put the food in your mouth, chew, swallow, and move on. It used to be that way. Until Princess.

First there was breastfeeding. That was an issue right from the start. I'd sit down with her to nurse her and it would end with her just as hungry as before, both of us crying, and milk everywhere.  It wasn't pretty. At first, I pumped with the hospital pump we rented. However, the first weekend after her birth was spent at my in-laws house. I'm naturally a very private person so nursing and pumping had to be done in a room with a door that shut tightly and no admittance to anyone besides my husband. As you know, newborns eat every 27 minutes or so, so I pretty much spent Princess's first months, hidden away from view and isolated from human contact. Anyways, at my in-laws, she absolutely wouldn't nurse, so I would valiantly try, sobbing, for half an hour before passing her off to eager relatives while I pumped her next meal. Wouldn't you know that the pump decided to make its presence known that weekend by squealing so loudly each time the "arm" pulled back that pigs half a mile away answered back. It was a traumatizing experience as I sat in the "good" living room alone with the door closed listening to everybody wonder what that horrible noise was in the next room. I returned the pump on Monday and swore never to pump again. Thankfully, my sister-in-law rescued me by giving me a handy little silicone nipple-like thingamajig that helps babies latch on. If it weren't for that, Princess would've been bottle fed from a week on.

We survived the early days (more like months) of breastfeeding and things were finally starting to go smoothly when we began transitioning to solid foods. Instead of just lifting my shirt and feeding her until she fell off, sated, I now had to figure out what to feed her and how much. I wrote feeding schedules for the first several months of that and passed them on to my sister (who babysits for me while I'm at work), my mother, my mother-in-law, the mailman, and anyone else who came in contact with Princess during a mealtime. Most of them rolled their eyes and tossed the schedule as soon as I was out of sight, but it was so complicated to me, that without the schedule taped to the kitchen table beside Princess's high chair, I was clueless as to what to feed her. Does she get fruit for this meal, or vegetables? Am I making enough cereal? Do I use juice or formula to mix up her cereal at this meal? Yes, I made it more complicated than it needed to be, but that's the way I am. If it's easy, I must be doing it wrong.

Every time I figured out what to feed her and how much, she would either have a growth spurt or be ready to start another type of food. Pureed meats took me a whole week and a half to figure out.

Fast forward to present day toddlerhood. Once I finally got her feeding herself solid foods, I thought I had it pretty easy. Yeah, right. She ate well for a few months, just to lull me into a sense of complacency. I didn't anticipate the way toddlers refuse to eat more than a breadcrumb one day and then gobble down the whole family dinner the next day. Or the way Princess couldn't get enough of sweet peas and ham yesterday, but tries to climb out of her high chair to escape eating the same thing today. I'm a waste not, want not kind of person, but since Princess started eating solid foods, I've thrown out enough food to fill my bathtub...twice. Since Princess is off-the-charts tiny, her pediatrician keeps telling me that I HAVE to get her to eat. I'm seriously considering dropping her off at the pediatrician's doorstep and saying, "Have fun." before leaving to eat a meal where no food is airborne, and no one leaves the table wearing most of their dinner in their hair.

Enter ketchup, my new hero. I remember chuckling at my 2 year old nephew a few years ago when he wouldn't eat anything without ketchup. I never thought that one day, I too would be relying on ketchup to convince my toddler to eat. Out of desperation one day, I squirted some ketchup on Princess's plate and showed her how to dip her food in it. To my surprise and slight dismay, it worked. It worked the next day and the next day and the next. However, her favorite way to eat it is like pudding, dipped up by the spoonful and headed straight for her mouth without the traditional carrier food. So, at a typical meal, she's eating it with her toddler spoon and in between bites, I'm shoveling as many carrots as I can into her mouth before she realizes she's eating them. I tried squirting the ketchup all over her food, but she will only accept it as long as it's in a mountainous mass not touching any of the food on her plate. The magic words to convince Princess to take a bite of food in my house are not, "Open up, please!" or "No dessert if you don't eat your vegetables." or "Eat your food or Mommy's going to have a coronary." Nope. The magic words are, "Look! There's ketchup on your cereal!" So to keep the peace for now, I'm going to keep telling myself that ketchup is made of tomatoes and therefore counts as a vegetable.

Unsolicited Advice:
Use a kitchen dish towel and a bag clip as a bib. It's bigger than the bibs sold in stores (which means more of your kid's clothes will be saved) and is completely washable.