To survive on about 20 minutes of sleep a night apparently! Survive being the key word. Not function, not speak coherently, not be dressed in a matching outfit…just….survive. But at least we are surviving. I figured this would be the hardest part – getting used to this whole, lack of schedule, being dictated by a wriggling little 6 and a half pound ball of demands, not really having a rhyme or reason to life thing – especially after having a pretty portable and self sufficient 3 and 5 year old. We are adjusting pretty well though. Ben is on his second week gone, and we did it all by ourselves this week just fine. Even in SPITE of Kaylen suddenly turning into this TOTALLY crazy baby.
I have no idea what happened, but starting right after she turned a week old, she has started going downhill. Getting fussier by the day, harder to feed, sleeping less and less with each day and night that passes…I started to suspect she might have reflux, but then worried that the Ped would just try to put me off, saying, oh, she’s colicky, she’ll grow out of it. Kealey was colicky. i know colic. I can deal with colic. This was getting CRAZY. i mean, top of her lungs SCREAMING in pain, almost to the point of passing out, every time she ate, and then for an hour or so afterwards. And that’s AFTER i spent 20 minutes trying to get her to latch on. Then the only thing that would calm her back down after that hour of screaming was more nursing. So we had our 2 week checkup yesterday and the FIRST thing out the ped’s mouth when i tell her how 
kaylen’s been acting is – “sounds like a refluxer!” So we started meds last nite and maybe its just the placebo effect, but I got more than an hour of sleep (three whole hours!), so for now, the meds are working! Sometimes just knowing what the problem is, or at least having your mommy instinct validated, makes such a huge difference. I can attack this now with all I have, to fix her, to stop the pain, or at least make it more bearable for her.
She hasn’t really smiled or interacted with us much, cause she spends basically every waking minute in bad pain – so hopefully now that we can help control the pain for her, she’ll start to perk up. today already she seems to be really studying our faces more, which is an exciting thing – just that the medicine seems to be helping, and my small changes are already making a difference. Well, not so small to me…as part of helping Kaylen lessen her refluxing episodes, we have to find her trigger foods. Which means my new diet consists of……
Chicken
Brown Rice
Water
And yes that’s pretty much it. Some iceberg lettuce every once in a while for variety if i’m feeling real daring…but otherwise yeah. Eliminating EVERYTHING. And then SLOWLY adding it back in once we have her stabilized on her medication dosage. Now i am not normally one of those lucky lucky women who lose weight while breastfeeding. No no, my body doesn’t use its current fat stores to produce milk. It wants NEW fat to make milk from. Lucky me…
although, the drastic drop of 15 lbs i usually see once I wean my babies is nice! But anyways – if i STILL don’t lose weight cutting out all this crap i normally eat, i will be HIGHLY upset!!! Seriously though, if it helps make Kay-kay happier, it will be worth it. And i am quite sure I need to cut out a lot of the stuff I currently indulge in anyways, for my own health. But MAN just the thought of it is hard. I know this is horrible, but I have one of the XL $.89 cent cokes from McD’s almost every day. They make me happy! i LOVE mcD’s coke. It has its own special flavor. And come on – i can get one with the spare change in my ashtray!!! But I have a sneaking suspicion that the coke is one of the things making kaylen feel bad. So ….farewell sweet coke. i hope to see you again very very very soon. I really don’t understand this though, I mean, Kaylen was GROWN on McD’s cokes. Its got to be like, 78% of her DNA I swear. So how can she be allergic to that which once sustained her???
Well….we’ll give this the old college try. it can’t make things any worse surely…and it can only help continue to improve things I am sure.
In other news – I got a BUNCH of pics and LO’s printed at Costco today. That always makes me happy, to see my digi layouts live and in person and slip them into those album pages to flip through with my own two hands. The pics I printed are for a few hybrid projects i am wanting to get done soon. If i can ever see straight again, or if i ever get more sleep, neither of which seems like it will happen anytime in the near future.
MAN there is so much cute digi-stuff out there lately! My paypal is all abuzz and my hard drive is groaning to keep up! I have to do an EHD dump/dvd burn like YESTERDAY. TWO 80 gig hard drives, and i still get low disk space errors…ridiculous….
uh oh. I jinxed myself. Baby’s awake now – gotta run! more to come later!