Blogger, AF, and prune juice

I have no idea what's up with Blogger. I can't access the dashboard unless I access via draft.blogger.com, and I can't post comments to other bloggers' posts - not all, just some. It's annoying, very, very annoying.

It's funny I should write about not missing AF in my last post because she's back. I can't tell you how surprised I was to see spotting yesterday given we just had a week's worth of 10 type mucus ending three days before. Fascinating.

I'm also surprised at how disappointed I am to see her. I don't exactly know why. It's almost as if I'm losing the last connection to my pregnancy. I miss being pregnant - not so much the discomforts, but the belly, the baby in the belly, and the knowledge of the baby in the belly. I miss having . . . no, knowing there's a little life growing inside of me. I didn't always feel her, but I always knew she was there. She was a part of me. Now it's just me. My little girl is on the outside, creating her own life and having her own experiences. I love having her here (life with her is amazing), but I miss having her there. It was something unique and special made even more so with the knowledge that I will never have that experience again. And now AF has arrived to put an end of all physical traces of that experience. A bittersweet end.

But time marches on. AF is here but so is baby girl, growing and thriving. I'm incredibly lucky.

Speaking of baby girl, we had our first bout with constipation, and by "we", I mean "she". The poor girl. I noticed a soiled - not messy - diaper on Friday just before bed. I noticed but didn't take note. A l l l o o o o o o n g night followed. I lost track of how many times she woke up. I'm pretty sure it was every hour or two until 4:38 AM when she woke up for good. I fed her, changed her, and noticed another soiled diaper. Curious. And something clicked. I checked out constipation in our baby book and found, sure enough, one of the signs is soiled diapers between BMs. Great.

I could see Kate straining a couple of times that morning with no luck. She'd grunt, her clenched fist shaking with the effort, and cry. I thought maybe a warm bath would help - it certainly does the trick when she's not constipated. That gives you an idea how of bad she was. I hate cleaning floaters out of the tub. We had some success - enough to make her marginally more pleasant - but not enough.

After another check in the baby book and a call to the pediatrician, we tried a course of prune juice and pears. The pediatrician recommended 1/2 an ounce each of prune juice and water until she produced a stool. Kathleen refused it but she didn't mind the prune juice mixed into her next formula bottle. We had success within a half an hour. She was still producing something the consistency of mashed, room temperature chocolate, but it was progress. Next came the pears. Mmmm, mmmm, good. We added a teaspoon of juice to her remaining bottles for the rest of the day. The happy result: everything was back to normal the next morning. Happy baby, happy mom.