baybeasts

Despite our lack of blogging mojo, we are all alive and well, even the chickens who have regularly been laying four eggs a day.

Loey was 2 months old a couple of days ago. We had a little chat about whether we would attempt the beautiful monthly letter that so many other bloggers manage for their children, but of course we will never manage to keep it up and then we will feel guilty and so we agreed to let that idea go.

That said, there are some lovely things about two months. Things seem (touch wood) to be settling down a bit. He has a regular bed time now, and he always sleeps in the same place at night, in the single bed pushed up next to ours (daytime sleeps vary between the bassinet and the sling), and despite some unsettled nights he seems to be sleeping quite well for the first half of the night. The second half is still pretty intense, but it is so lovely to all be sleeping in the same bed and getting a good 5-6 hours broken only by one feed that the rest of the night is manageable.

Typical new parent to put the sleep news first! What is more important and lovely is the way he is slowly coming more and more into the world. He was always a very alert and wakeful baby, but he is beginning to really interact with his world rather than watching it with wide eyes. He loves it when we sing - he smiles and chortles and moves his mouth and tongue as if he is trying to copy us. He often watches our faces intently - when we are speaking, or eating, and his favourite game is the tongue poking game:

He is also beginning to be aware that his hands belong to him - he reaches out to bat at toys, and holds onto toys and waves them about. Sometimes he will simply lie there and watch his hand open and close with a kind of mesmerised expression on his face.

As he gets bigger and more active we are starting to think about a wider range of activities for him than simply lying on the floor with toys - any suggestions are welcome! We’ve started to carry him about awake facing outwards in a sling, so that he can just tag along with whatever we are doing - eating dinner, hanging out the clothes etc. We’d love him to hang out in the bouncinette and watch us while we are doing stuff, but he’s not so keen on that, sadly.

In neck news, we took him to see a paediatrician a week ago (we’ll call him Dr Fantastico). He was the best health professional we have consulted about this yet. We both left his office with huge crushes on him, just because he was so amazing with Loey and lovely with us. An ultrasound has confirmed that the torticollis is definitely muscular only, and the lump is confined within the sterno-mastoid muscle. This is a relief, as torticollis can very rarely be caused by other, more scary things. Dr Fantastico reassured us that it is likely to resolve without active stretching by us, and encouraged us to keep up with the passive approach - encouraging Loey to look in all directions and placing him in lots of different positions throughout the day. He was lukewarm at best about osteopathy, but didn’t think it could hurt, so we are continuing on with that too (because we think it is helping). Best of all, he said ‘I want someone to own this, so I would like to see him again in two months’ - he is the first health professional to have actively taken responsibility for following up and I can’t tell you how grateful we are for that.

In Tootle news, there is very little to report, except that I am expanding rapidly and the due date is zooming down on us (only 5 and half weeks away). Tootle is growing and hiccuping and wriggling and giving me dreadful heartburn. Pregnancy really isn’t my cup of tea! I’ll be glad to have Tootle in the outside world, and as Loey settles a bit we are feeling a tad more optimistic about being able to manage another newborn.

We have 4 chickens. Because we chose a heritage backyard variety (Australorps) rather than a commercial laying variety, they lay 4-5 eggs a week when they are in peak condition. Ours are just warming up, because they are new layers, and also because it has been winter. So for us, a 4 egg day (when all of them have laid) is cause for excitement.

Yesterday was a 5 egg day. But it was no ordinary 5 eggs that we found:

Yes, Chook Pink has finally passed not one, but two eggs in one day. They are strange eggs though - it’s hard to tell from the photo, but the first egg (discovered first thing in the morning) has a porous, not-quite-right shell, and the last egg (discovered last thing at night) is almost perfectly spherical!

Hopefully she will lay an ordinary egg today, and we can officially say that she is fixed. Yay!

We went to a pediatric physiotherapist yesterday. She was quirky and lovely and reminded me of social workers from the 80s with her bright clothes and rat’s tail off the side. Seeing her was the best thing we could have done. She was able to look us in the eye and say it is just a muscular condition (sometimes torticollis can be caused by more sinister things like bone or nerve problems), that he doesn’t have it terribly acutely, that it is great that we picked it up so early, that he will be easier to work with because he does turn his head in both directions (I think because he is such an alert, interested baby and he doesn’t want to miss out on anything!), and that we can expect to see improvement in a matter of weeks once we start the exercises she gave us.
It was a huge relief.

So we’ve decided to let the osteo have her way with him for a few weeks, to release the nerves and get his body into a better alignment, and then we will start the active stretching of the neck muscle. In the meantime we will work on encouraging him to move his head in all different ways, by holding him and placing him in a range of different positions.

He’s been so adorable lately (apart from wanting to feed 1.5 to 2 hourly between midnight and 6am). He really turned it on for the physio - she was there stretching his neck and moving it in all manner of strange ways and he just smiled and chortled for her! And last night our midwife came for a visit (all is well with tootle) and again he was full of joy and laughter, even though it was the classic arsenic hour time of 6.30pm. Mind you, she is one of his favourite people, and she does know exactly how to talk to babies.

So we’re feeling a lot better. Now we just have to work on getting more than an hour’s sleep at a stretch…

I made marmalade!

It has four kinds of citrus - grapefruit, tangelo, orange and lemon. And it used up every single skerrick of sugar in the house.

But somehow we still have a bazillion grapefruit left. So next up is grapefruit and ginger marmalade…yum!

What with worrying about Loey’s neck, and him deciding that he’d like to feed every one and a half hours overnight, it’s been a pretty stressful couple of days. As if worrying about small son through extreme tiredness wasn’t hard enough, the other morning one of our girls got sick. I let them out as usual - I thought it was a bit strange that only three came out, but just assumed that the fourth must have been laying. About an hour later I happened to look out the laundry window, to see an alarming bundle of black feathers plonked in the middle of their run. I raced out, thinking we had a dead chook for sure, but as I approached she lurched to her feet, staggered a few steps, and then collapsed again.

Great. Sick chook.

I put her in a box and called the fellow that we bought them from. After laughing at me a bit because he was sure that we’d been giving them names and overfeeding them, he said he thought it was probably a stuck egg (because of the overfeeding), but if it wasn’t it was something horrible and deadly. I stuck my well gloved finger up her bum but couldn’t feel anything egg-like.

Great. Really sick chook.

So I rang the animal hospital, who luckily had an appointment with their bird vet available that very morning. They would only make an appointment if I provided a name for the chicken, which made me laugh after being teased only a few minutes earlier for naming them. They don’t have names, because I can’t tell them apart, so we said just call her Chook. We then pissed ourselves when at the hospital they called out ‘Chook Pink to room 6, Chook Pink to room 6.’

The bird vet turned out to be a total spunk, and lovely to boot. We had assumed that either she’d be able to get the stuck egg out, or Chook would get the chop (’be euthanased’ in the delicate phrase of the vet). But it turns out that it’s very difficult to diagnose a chicken without cutting it open, and it wasn’t clear what was wrong - it could still have been a stuck egg, only stuck pretty early in the process which is why I couldn’t feel it; or it could have been something deadly. (And she was pretty overweight, so all our girls are now on a strict diet.) So, for the cost of two replacement chickens, Chook got to spend the night in the hospital being tube fed fluids and generally cared for much more carefully than we ever do. The next day spunky chicken vet called and said that Chook was walking again and feeling much better, so it probably was a stuck egg after all, and we could come and pick her up that day.

So Chook is now segregated from the others so that we can monitor her output - she is basically in solitary until she proves that she is working again by pooing regularly and laying an egg. She’s definitely brighter than she was, making loads of noise and poo and generally trying to tell us something, though whether it’s that she’s happy to be home or pissed off about being in solitary I can’t tell.

Loey update for those who made it this far: we took him to the osteopath on Monday night. It was a bit anti-climactic - we’d been expecting to be given a series of exercises or something, stuff that we can DO about it, but she just said we’re actually doing the right things already (lots of tummy and back time, encouraging him to look in different directions), and that she wanted about 3-4 weeks to work on releasing the nerve that controls the muscle that is shortened, before we attempted manually stretching the muscle itself. So we’ve given her 4 weeks to prove that her way will make a difference, and then we’re going for the more conventional care of a physiotherapist, who will treat with physical therapy and stretching. We felt hopeful that after Monday he did seem a bit less tense in the neck, maybe a smidgen straighter, but it’s so hard to tell - we’ll take a photo a week to monitor any changes. It’s frustrating to realise that this is going to be a really slow process…

In the midst of all the madness, I still remembered to take my 32 week photo.

A few weeks ago, Owlie over at Enough Grows posted about the fright she had when Piggywig went missing for a little while, and she posted this quote:

Making a decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.
Elizabeth Stone

Our hearts got a serious out of body experience on Friday.

For a while now, bean has been worried about Loey’s head, that he was turning it more in one direction than the other. I have been, not dismissive, exactly, but not terribly worried either - he was still turning it in both directions, and we had an osteopath appointment (just for a general post-birth check-up) lined up for a few weeks time so I figured she would fix any small issues there might be. So I kept talking bean down, encouraging her not to worry about it too much.

Then, on Thursday, bean took Loey to her work for a visit. Two things happened: one of the midwives there commented on how he always has his head tilted to one side; and bean asked one of the obstetricians what might cause a baby to have a high deflexed head in labour, and he replied that it could be something horrible like a goitre or a sternomastoid tumour (a what? you ask).

In the slow time that is baby time, it was Friday evening before we talked about these things. First of all we had a scan through the 500 odd photos we’ve taken since Loey was born (ah the curse of the digital camera), and noticed that he has indeed been holding his head tilted to one side pretty much since he was born. We were a bit gobsmacked that we’d never noticed.

A bit later, bean decided to have a feel in his neck, to see if there were any scary lumps.

There was.

Our hearts left our bodies and lurched through the floor.

On his left side, there was (and still is) a hard lump, a bit like an olive, midway between his ear and his shoulder. A frenetic half hour of phone calls later, we managed to squeeze in to see our local GP immediately (who stayed late to see us). She had a feel in his neck, looked us in the eye and told us not to worry, it’s nothing too terrible - his neck is in spasm, and the lump is a big knot in his neck muscle. Apparently it is quite common in babies, and will just take a bit of physio and/or osteo treatment to fix, with stretching exercises.

In that moment we felt the sweetest of relief - I think we had both been fearing the terrible c word, and it was wonderful to hear that his life was safe, and so were our hearts.

Later, when we got home, we consulted Dr Google, as one does, and discovered that his condition is called Congenital Torticollis, which just means a twisted neck present from birth, and that it often presents with a lump, called, you guessed it, a sternomastoid tumour. It is almost always fixable by non-surgical means - physical therapy and stretching. And it is also commonly associated with the kind of labour that bean had (we never ended up posting the birth story - we’ll get to that soon). If it’s diagnosed early, the outcomes are very good. If it’s not, it can lead to all sorts of problems, but let’s not think about that, because we got onto it early.

Saturday morning I rang the osteopath’s office and left a rather frantic message - to my utter astonishment and relief they rang back within half an hour offering us an appointment with the best osteopath in the clinic at 5pm Monday (it normally takes three months to get an appointment with her). We are so relieved.

But these days in between have been hard. I feel gutted that I didn’t take bean’s concerns about his head seriously. And when we look back at the photos, his little head tilted to one side - we thought it was so cute, and now we feel appalled that we didn’t notice that it wasn’t just a coy quirk, but a constant condition. And we won’t really feel relaxed until we’ve seen the osteo and have the exercises and more reassurance that if we follow them to the letter (which we will) that he will be fine.

Our poor hearts. We’re picking them up and cramming them back inside but they have got so big with love for him that they don’t fit anymore.

- his milky breath and sticky cheeks after a feed
- his little head poking out of the hug a bub sling with its whorl of dark hair
- his six weeks old chatting - the grunts and noisy little sighs, quiet hoots and more determined ‘nga!’s
- his big alert baby eyes boring into ours
- the laying down of his head on our chests as he submits to sleep
- the funny scrunched up, squinty eyed face he makes as he launches onto the breast for a feed
- the appreciative eh, eh, eh noises he makes as he feeds - sometimes wild eyed, like a mad scientist
- random smiles at the breast, his toys, at the poster of River Tam (Serenity) in the toilet, and occasionally at us
- the mild sweet smell of his dirty nappy
- the cheesy smell that emanates from his neck creases
- his little hand clutching onto our finger when he is sucking it (in lieu of a dummy)
- the feel of his tongue against our finger - especially the little fluttery movement as he is dropping off to sleep
- his hair just like his donor’s: business at the front, party at the back
- the way he curls up like a little bug when we take him into the shower
- the slightly stunned look on his face after he has been swaddled: all head and funny little pupa body like a caterpillar
- the tired stare with the slightly furrowed brow
- the way his hand squishes his mouth to one side when he is sleeping on his tummy
- the little triangle of hair on his lower back, just above his bum
- the faceplant into the chest when he really wants to get to sleep
- the sleep sucking against the chest as he is waking up
- the cutest sneezes in the entire universe
- the superman stretch when he wakes up
- the little sigh as he is falling asleep
- the little shapes he makes with his mouth - pursed fish lips, tight little ‘o’ when he is about to fart or poo, comically downturned when he is upset
- the wide eyed look on his face as he stares at his toys and favourite pictures (especially C. Scott the cow and the postcard of Elmer and friends and the flip-a-face book - hot pink and black and white are his favourites)