Still here

and passing my time with the usual ... obsessing. About all sorts of unrelated things. But any wisdom or advice would be much appreciated.

1. The fusspot's crib. I love it. It is a hand-carved wood crib that was a gift from friends after their children were done with it. Love, love, love it. It's been in continuous use for 10 years (4 children, the oldest of whom is 10) without a problem ... but then of course it's ten years old. We did have it inspected about 2 months ago and it looked good, but recently I've been reading this awful news articles about 'banning all drop-side cribs' and horror stories (not what anyone should be reading, I know) and I've been lying awake at night worrying about it. For the record, the fusspot is less than 10 feet from our bed in her crib, and she has made zero attempt to scale said crib. So yesterday I went by our super-ritzy baby store and the manager offered to send someone over in the evening to retro-fit it into a non-drop side crib. Here's what I don't get: once it is no-longer drop side unless we also chop off the legs (losing all of our storage and the current resting place of our changing pad and diapers), I can't get the fusspot in without standing on a step-stool. Safe or not? And what about if we used this crib for a smaller baby in the future? I can quasi-drop the fusspot into the crib once I'm up high enough (for the record I am the exact height of an average American woman) but what would I do with a 6 month? Or a sleep 10 month old if we wanted to use the crib for some reason?

2. Food. Saw the midwife this week and she yet again impressed upon me that blood sugars matter from day one. We'll do our sugar test next time I see her (in 4 or so weeks), but regardless I am to watch my carb intake. And hence the biggest problem in my life: I have become obsessed/anxious about food to the point where I can't really eat. I skipped dinner the last two nights because it was just too stressful. So here was my resolution from last time: I would gain more weight so that I don't have a (full-term and otherwise healthy) underweight baby with all of her ribs showing. The reality: I'm terrified of killing this baby, and so I've been avoiding all simple carbs. I also remember having huge issues with the fusspot with not wanting to cook in the first trimester, and that was prior to any insulin issues being raised. So combine the no-cooking (thanks to total aversion to the kitchen, the heat, and a fussy toddler in the evenings) with the need to avoid carbs and you get ... hard boiled eggs, string cheese, peanut butter, occasional low-fat dairy ... It's just a really sad list. And needless to say, I'm hungry. And that is not good. So any food suggestions would be much appreciated. I am not really eating meat at the moment, so looking for low-carb vegetarian options of all sorts. Also trying to avoid artificial sweeteners so that knocks out most standard diabetes-friendly fare.

3. Chemicals. I finally picked up "Having Faith" which is an engaging account by a biologist of her experience with pregnancy and breastfeeding. It deals with infertility quite nicely I think, and despite advocating very strongly for breastfeeding, etc. (really a bit daftly I must add. ZERO recognition that thinks don't always work out despite the best intentions or that some people have real jobs), the main point of the book is that a number of biological factors (such as an fetus's fat ratio, etc.) contribute to ensure that babies in utero receive a shockingly high quantity of the chemicals built up in their mother's bodies. Some of the examples are really terrifying: women in 19th C. industrial plants working with lead reporting feeling 'much better' when they got pregnant because the placenta was actually clearing their body of lead and putting it straight into the baby. Similarly (and despite advocating clearly for breastfeeding), the book provides statistics on the amount of dangerous chemicals in a newborn's body the day after his mother's milk comes in. It talks about how all of the life-long accumulated residue of environmental toxins are transferred directly to the baby. Discussions of how dioxin leaked into grain for chickens and poisoned an entire cohort of babies in Europe when their mothers ate eggs. So yeah, chemicals. Not much to do at this point except consider giving up all fish for the next decade (lots of discussion of why fish are so much more toxic than meat) and, you know, worry about it. Even before reading the book, I had decided to give up nail polish this go-round, but then I found rather decent dangerous-chemical-free nailpolish at Sephora. It's $9 a bottle and despite the fact that my friend asked whether it wasn't basically "just finger paint" seems to work fine. So far, so good. Our bath products are all Whole Foods organic (mainly because they are cheap), and I'm way too lazy for perfume/make-up/etc. We use 7th Generation cleaning products (although I'm skeptical of how well they work given that we don't clean all that often ...) or JD does the cleaning. We don't have the option to move (we live above a major through-street for trucks and 4 floors above a bar so we both hear trucks all day and night and smell cigarette smoke in the apartment), so I can't imagine much else proactive to do at this point, but any suggestions welcome.

4. The good news: the midwife was entirely pro-breastfeeding and even said it was fine for me to pump when I go away for work. Seriously folks. Pump. She said we'd reconsider in the 3rd trimester if there's any sign of pre-term labor, but for now we're cleared to cuddle and feed as much as we want.

So one thing that mothers of breastfeeding toddlers always here, is the same 'horror story' repeated by other people about someone's cousin's friend's kid who -gasp- asked to breastfeed. And sometimes it's worse: sometimes the kid says things like "other side" or "I won't let anyone see." And over and over again you hear the trope that breastfeeding is fine as long as the kid can't talk. And all I can think is how lovely it would be if the fusspot could ask for the breast. Lovely. Of course, as we all know, she's a bit speech delayed so she can't yet. But it is with the greatest of pride that I inform you that when asked whether she'd "Like some boo.bies now?" the fusspot can finally respond "Yeah." And it is so nice.

Last week (in the heat, I must add), I had been wondering whether I'm still breastfeeding either as a type of in-your-face-I-can-do-this or as a my-body-sucks-but-at-least-the-artificially-enlarged-breasts-work. Needless to say, neither is a charming justification for a time and calorie-consuming process. But when I was reading "Having Faith" there was one little line about how breastmilk can kill 3 specific types of bacteria in the gut on contact. I.e. it's not that the milk contains the mother's antibodies which are passed to the baby, but rather that the milk directly kills this bacteria. And I literally jumped out of bed and started googling. And I was astounded.

During the great gas-baby-of-May debacle, my GI doctor told me he was 99% sure that I'd caught it from the fusspot. Said bacteria (gi.ar.di.a), for the record, is spread by direct fecal contact, meaning that I could have caught it at any of 5-6 diaper changes I did every day. And only one of us was playing on the train floors (they have squat toilets so everyone's shoes have made some type of fecal contact on the train), crawling around shop floors, sitting by the side of the road having a snack, etc. But because the fusspot was symptom-free (which babies tend to be), the pediatrician did not want to test her. But I insisted. And we tested her multiple times, it always showing negative. And I thought it totally improbable that the adult who was washing her hands with alcohol every time she ate, being careful what she touched, etc. would get sick when the baby crawling around the floor in Delhi would be fine. Except, see, breastmilk kills gi.ar.dia. On contact. In multiple studies of African babies and exposure in S. America and even U.S. babies. I wish I'd known because I would have seriously considered drinking it myself or giving it to the two other children with us (both breastfed for years, but weaned because they were on Project 3.0). And also, I picked up said infection last time we visited Ch.ina, so in case that's still in the plans for this fall, I have every intention of continuing to breastfeed through that trip.

So there you have it, we start with my trivial obsessing and end with the miraculous powers of breastmilk. And now I'm off to nap, as I do every day between 1 and 2 pm.