Mama is now 35 pounds under her pre-pregnancy weight.  Some of you may be interested in her fitness plan so I will outline it for you.

For this plan, you will need a sixteen pound baby.  If you don’t have a sixteen pound baby, substitute a sixteen pound sack of potatoes.

First you can only sleep six hours a night.  Set an alarm to go off a couple of times during the night.  This is to mimic the fact that your potato sack is fussing.  Drag yourself out of bed and go to the room with the potato sack.  Hold it on your shoulder and march around the room while bouncing it for a few minutes, then go back to bed.

Now, for the whole day, carry your potato sack with you everywhere you go.  You can only put it down for a handful of 30 minute periods.  Your potato sack needs three naps that it can only take while you hold it.  To get your potato sack to sleep you will need to walk around the house while bouncing your potato sack up and down on your chest.  You need to do that for 15 to 30 minutes each time.  After your potato sack is asleep, you can sit in a rocking chair and rock with the potato sack on your shoulder, but your potato sack will try to wake up every 15 to 20 minutes, so you will need to stand and bounce it for a few minutes.  Your goal is for your potato sack to sleep for two hours each time, but this is very hard to achieve.

You can only eat food that you can prepare while holding your potato sack.  You can also never go anywhere except outside to get the mail (while carrying your potato sack) or out on the porch swing (also with your potato sack).

The small circle of people Daniel can cope with right now – Mama, Papa, Mimi and Poppy – can’t always take care of themselves, but they’ll do anything in the world for him. His grandparents have been here since the first, and because of that they imprinted themselves on his brains before the Zantac nightmare ever began. And that’s really fortunate because Daniel has started his next adventure: teething! I hear that some babies make it through that phase with absolutely no discomfort whatsoever, and we wish (and Daniel most of all!) that he fit that description. But, alas, alack, aherm and acrap, I must unbundle yet another sadness: he doesn’t, not one little bit, and Mama and I aren’t yet self-sufficient.

Here’s the scenario. Ready? OK:

1. Daniel’s lower gum had been bothering him like nuts all day
2. He hadn’t been able to sleep with the pain, and whenever he finally did pass out from exhaustion, he just woke up again with the next throb
3. Mama and Papa had been up with him all day massaging his mouth and keeping him comfortable
4. Mama, who currently gets her sleep during the day, finally had to conk out, leaving Papa with the unhappy little bag
5. And Papa had to get some work done because he hadn’t been able to get to it all weekend, and he figured he’d have to stay up into the wee to finish it
6. But Mama wouldn’t have any of that, and she called her folks for yet another favor

So Poppy, who’d already given s much time to his favorite boy in the whole world, showed up to sit…

…sick and with a 101.4° fever.

That’s true devotion.

>> Watch in high quality at YouTube

Today Daniel is two months old.  It’s hard to believe.  We didn’t get any pictures because we didn’t have a good day.

As Daniel gets older, the debilitating side effects of Zantac are becoming more and more obvious.  After a while you begin to wonder if the cure is worse than the disease.  So yesterday evening we decided to not give his Zantac dose and see a) if his reflux was still as severe as it was at three weeks and b) what the side effects truly are.

It became obvious that his reflux and acid were just as bad and cost him severe pain, so we put him back on it today. We were also able to determine that these are truly Zantac side effects:

• Insomnia – the most sleep that Daniel manages to get in a day is 8 hours, where he should be getting 16 hours. Once he did not have Zantac, he slept almost continuously (except for waking up with acid in his throat).
• Stomach cramps – these usually start about an hour after he eats and cause him severe pain.
• Anxiety – this causes him to need to be held most of the time, and to be impatient.
• Aggravation of colic – without Zantac, his colic period was just a few hours. With Zantac he is colicky all day.

The only drug alternative our pediatricians can offer also has undesireable side effects, and our specific pediatrician is out of the office right now. Papa has an appointment with her on the 7th. Even if we can find another drug, Daniel will have to overlap Zantac with it for two weeks, so he has at least three more weeks of misery ahead of him.

Just to recap his current issues:

• It’s almost impossible to take him out right now. He becomes really anxious for two days or more if overstimulated.
• He can’t handle big routine change-ups right now. Uncle Daniel and Aunt Alice, the wonderful people they are, offered to babysit today while we went out and had a proper sit-down meal together. We were all set to take them up on that, but around noon it became obvious that with his hyper-anxiety from our experiment it wasn’t going to work out today.
• Mama can’t go anywhere right now. She has to hold him most of the day, and is only sleeping when Mimi or Papa sit with him during the day. Her normal sleeping hours are 7:20am until 1pm. In order for Papa to go to church on Sunday, she has to split her sleeping shift. She gets even less effective sleep that way, though, and it’s only worked out once in the last 9 weeks.
• He needs to be handled more than is comfortable. He has to be kept upright for an hour after each bottle, and the only way to relieve his colic (and even then for only a minute or two) is to hold him and constantly change his position.
• His poor mama is at her limit. She’s not sleeping or eating well, and people are telling her she’s failing. They’ve never heard of a mother needing help for more than a week or two, or they’ve never experienced a baby with Daniel’s extensive problems.

It’s been a rough couple of months, but also a time of joy and wonder we could never have imagined before. Please keep us in your prayers, and by God’s grace we’ll make it through this!

I try to just post the happy times.  Because of that, it looks like we only have happy times.  Quite the contrary is true.  I actually grab the camera and snap pictures during any good times I can.

Little Daniel has a hard time.  Life is not easy for him at all.  Here are the issues:

• Reflux – we treat the reflux with Zantac.  Zantac has quite a few drawbacks, but other treatments have even worse side effects.  Daniel can’t handle a lot of additives that are in medications. The Zantac doesn’t get rid of the reflux, that just makes what comes up not burn and hurt.  He still gets choked.  He could still get fluid in his lungs if we don’t take care with how we feed and handle him.  To try to minimize these symptoms as much as possible we do the following:
  • Change his diaper before feeding.  That way he is only on his back with an empty stomach.  If he has a leak or blowout at other times, we have to carefully change him keeping him from laying flat on his back.  That can be quite the workout.
  • Feed him in a slightly elevated position and keep him from eating too fast.  He can still sometimes choke and we sit him up to help him recover.
  • Keep him upright for 20 to 30 minutes after he eats.  This gives the milk time to move on from the stomach.
  • Tummy sleeping – this is a big faux pas today with the whole Back to Sleep campaign.  Tummy sleeping helps keep his milk down and also keeps him from getting choked on spit up.
  • Feeding less, and more often.  Most babies his age have started sleeping a stretch at night or have extended times between feedings.  Bigger feedings increase reflux, so he does better eating less but more times a day.  He eats every three hours.
• Colic – the great infant mystery.  There are lots of theories as to what causes colic, and I suppose it could be diffent causes in different babies.  Daniel begins to get fussy in the afternoon, but it increases to absolute misery between midnight and 3:30 a.m.  Even if he can remain somewhat calm at night, he can’t sleep, and is therefore very sleep deprived.  Zantac can cause anxiety and headaches, so we don’t know if that is making colic even worse.
• Gas – Daniel has suffered with gas from the beginning.  Zantac slows down his digestive system, so it makes the gas worse and makes it hard for Daniel to pass the gas.  Sometimes Daniel screams with pain.
• Sleep – because of colic and Zantac side effects, Daniel has a hard time sleeping.  He sleeps the best in the morning with it becoming more and more difficult the further he gets into his colic hours.  He looks tired almost all of the time.  There are so many pitures I haven’t posted because he looks so tired.

All this takes it’s toll on Mama.  Daniel has so much pain and discomfort it breaks my heart and is very hard to bear.  In addition to his already rigorous schedule, since he can’t nurse, I have to pump in between his feedings.  I spend nearly all my time dealing with things regarding his feeding.  I’m either pumping, feeding him, keeping him elevated after feeding, or cleaning his bottles.  During a majority of the day, I’m trying to do all these things while holding him because he’s either fussing, screaming or tired and can’t sleep.

One of the few things keeping me alive is that my mom comes over on the week days and takes care of Daniel from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. so that I can get a little sleep and get a couple of things done.  Papa gives me this nap on the weekends.  This is the only sleep I get.  The rest of the time is pretty intense with a sad/pained infant and the stress of keeping up with pumping and feeding.

Sorry to be a downer, but I thought you needed the rest of the story.

After much effort and frustration, it became apparent that Daniel was most likely not going to nurse.  So a couple of weeks ago, we just decided to get realistic about it and just deal with it.  Up to this point we had been using a special bottle that is supposed to work more like nursing so that he wouldn’t forget how to (not that he ever really learned to in the first place).  We thought that this bottle might be contributing to his gas problems because he seemed to take a lot of air with it.  Once we started getting realistic about the nursing issue, we decided to switch to Dr. Brown’s Natural Flow bottles.  It was an amazing difference.  Daniel still gets gas, but not nearly to the magnitude as before.  I have learned to love Dr. Brown.

Here is Daniel having some of Mama’s finest in his Dr. Brown bottle.

We’ve taken the phones out of the bedroom, so PLEASE don’t be afraid to call and schedule visits, etc. You won’t disturb us. If we don’t answer the phone, it just means we’re busy taking care of some very basic needs. Just keep calling until you get hold of us. Leaving voicemail is fine, too, but we’re not really remembering to check that much.

I apologize that we’re seeming a little withdrawn right now. We have stuff going on – just keep after us and we’ll get it worked out!

Thanks, guys. Still much love. Don’t be frustrated with us.

I wanted to let everybody know that everything is going pretty well, all things considered:

• We’re home! 
• Daniel is very healthy
• Mama’s blood pressure is good
• We’re slowly figuring all this out
• We’re completely in love with the little guy

But:

• We’re going through the new parent “freak out” stage
• We’re having to really adjust to everything 
• We’re completely exhausted

We’re NOT trying to be antisocial – it’s just sort of working out to be that way right now. Give me (Papa) a quick call on the mobile phone any time for updates and questions about visits, etc. I’m going to try to post some more pictures of the little fella soon. We’re just trying to get the sleep thing figured out at the moment.

God has really blessed us, not just with such a perfect little boy, but also with all the friends and family that have expressed so much love for our little clan. We appreciate everything very, very much, but just ask for a little understanding if we’re not able to show that gratitude very well right now! I did want everyone to know how grateful we were, and that we really will get around to making a formal declaration of the same eventually. 🙂

Thank you! We love you! And we love our little boy. 🙂

This is my healthy boy in utero at 19 weeks. His name is Daniel Evan, and if all goes as currently expected he should be here on May 7, 2008.

His blog is extremely late in coming, I know, but there were lots of things to take care of before we could start posting pictures of him here.

Also, I do realize that this is a mighty skimpy introductory post, but I’ve actually added a few entries on my alter-ego’s blog (in which I refer to him as Carter Mills). You can read those here.