Category: Rebecca

Steve and I took Rebecca to the pediatrician for her one year well baby check yesterday.  The only way it could have been worse would have been if the doctor said she was not healthy.  She screamed and cried the whole time!  Her behavior amazed me a little bit because every other time we’ve been to the doctor she has been happy as a clam right up to the moment she gets her shots.  Things were a little different than she is used to because Steve does not usually come with us and we started the appointment with a different nurse than usual, so maybe she was just thrown off a bit.  Anyway, more interestingly . . .

Rebecca weighs 19 pounds, 6 ounces (20th percentile), measures 30 inches in length (73rd percentile) and has a head circumference of 44 3/4 centimeters (36th percentile).  The fact that she is tall and skinny gives me hope that she might one day have a lucrative modeling career.  Daddy is just happy she is tall like him, rather than short like her mommy.

Her biggest milestone since her last doctor visit is that she walks.  Everywhere.  In fact, I would say she rarely crawls anywhere at all anymore.  She will even stand up to take just two steps only to sit down again immediately next to a different toy.  It seemed like she picked it up really fast.  She went from just a few steps to across the room in just a few days, and then to turning around and walking all around rooms in just another few days.  She still falls down plenty, and I imagine that will be the case for some time, but I am so proud of how much she has improved in such a short time.

In addition to walking, Rebecca is also eating some finger foods.  Cheerios and chunks of cheese are staples in her diet.  We’ve had more difficultly introducing other finger foods, but we’ll keep trying because we can’t send her off to college eating pureed squash.  We’re also introducing whole milk and trying to wean her from the bottle to a sippy cup.

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On Friday, I took Rebecca in for her 9 month well baby check.  She weighed in at 16 pounds, 14 1/2 ounces (20th percentile) and measured 27 1/2 inches (60th percentile).  So, still long and lean.

Rebecca has changed so much in the past three months.  Around the first of the year, she started crawling and now there is no stopping her.  She also pulls herself up and cruises on the furniture, and she can even stand up without support for what seems like and eternity but is probably really just a few seconds.  We added puffs and yogurt (among other things) to the list of foods she eats, and she can’t seem to get enough of either of them.  She loves music and it makes her so happy when one of her musical toys, or even her tone-deaf mom, bursts into song.  And let’s not forget her hair.  Rebecca has hair!  She gets bed head and everything.  So different from the tiny bald baby we brought home from the hospital.

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Our growing girl went to the pediatrician for her six month well-baby check-up last week.  She weighed in at 15 pounds, 1/2 ounce (30th percentile), and measured a long 26 1/2 inches (70-75th percentile!).  In other words, she is a lean, mean pooping machine.

Rebecca now sits without support, which thrills her.  I think she likes the new view of the world and how it enables her to play with her toys differently.  She also gets around pretty well using a combination of rolling and scooting maneuvers, and I can’t imagine it will be long before she starts crawling.

We introduced Rebecca to solid food a little over a month ago.  She is a pretty good eater.  Her favorite foods include apples, avocados, and butternut squash, but it seems like she will eat pretty much anything as long as there is enough fruit mixed in to make it sweet.

Finally, she is talking up a storm.  All incomprehensible baby gibberish, of course, but still totally adorable.  She comes by her chattiness naturally.

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Rebecca has a number of outfits with “stuff” on the butt.  She has a romper with a fish on the butt, a sleeper with a bee on the butt, pants with a heart on the butt . . . you get the idea.  These happen to be some of my favorite outfits, and I think they are totally adorable.

I’ve been browsing for baby clothes online lately since Rebecca will soon me moving up a clothing size, and today I found myself wondering at what age clothing manufacturers stop putting fun stuff on the rear end of kids’ clothes.  Well of course it dawned on me that they never do stop, not even for adult clothes!  It is not uncommon to see high school and college age girls wearing lounge pants or shorts with “Juicy” or “Pink” plastered across the butt.  This I find not so adorable.

Now I  wonder, at what point does butt adornment go from totally adorable to totally skanky?  Does a child wake up one morning, say, on the first day of pre-school, and suddenly these things are no longer acceptable?  Or is there some sort of gradual continuum where the stuff is really cute on babies and toddlers, somewhat amusing on grammar school kids, questionable on junior high and high school students, inappropriate on people over the age of 18, and really gross on anyone over 40?

I really don’t know the answer.  For now, I think as long as Rebecca wears a diaper that gives her a big puffy butt, I can safely put her in clothes with pictures on the rear end.

*Juicy butt picture from andrewapeterson.com/2009/08/hairy-butt-logo-pants/.

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Rebecca will be graduating to a larger size cloth diaper pretty soon, and her new diapers arrived today, so I thought it might be a good time to write about why cloth diapers have been a good choice for us.  Three main factors influenced the decision to go with cloth:

1. Cost:  Disposable diapers are expensive.  Here is an article where the author did a cost comparison of disposables versus gDiapers.  I think gDiapers are one of the more expensive cloth options, so if you were to go with a less expensive system the difference would be even more dramatic.  Use your cloth diapers on more than one child and you are talking major, major savings.
2. Environmental Impact:  If you do a little research, you will find that some people think disposables are more harmful to the environment because they contribute millions of pounds of waste to landfills, while some people think cloth are more harmful because of the water and energy required to launder them.  Who knows?  I lean towards disposable being more harmful, but explaining my reasoning behind that would be a whole post in itself, so let’s just leave it at that.
3. Early Toilet Training:  As far as I know there are no studies finding this conclusively, but some people say that cloth diapers help kids potty train sooner because the child can feel when he or she is wet.  With disposables, you can’t.  As a result, the kids have more incentive to use the potty to avoid that uncomfortable wet feeling.  Makes sense to me.

I did initially have some concerns that cloth diapering would be very inconvenient.  We certainly do use disposable diapers from time to time.  For example, Rebecca was pretty tiny when she was born, so the cloth diapers weren’t exactly a great fit.  We used premie and newborn disposables for about the first six weeks until she grew into her cloth diapers.  Even then, we continued to use disposables overnight.  Initially, when she was a newborn, she pooped in every diaper, and we didn’t want to be rinsing poopy diapers in the middle of the night.  Now she does not seem to poop at night, so it’s more because the disposables are pretty reliable in not leaking #1 during the night (when she doesn’t wake up and get changed anyway).  We also use disposables when we go places so we don’t have to tote dirty cloth diapers around with us until we get home.  In addition, the disposables are a little bit more compact for travel than the cloth diapering paraphernalia.

Occasional disposable use aside, I have not found the cloth diapers to be all that inconvenient for day-to-day use.  Tossing a soaked cloth diaper in a diaper pail isn’t really different from tossing a disposable in the trash.  The one exception would be poopy diapers, which have to be rinsed.  This takes a bit more time and if you are not careful can lead to . . . accidents.  But, now that I’ve had some practice, it does not take too long and I rarely have . . . accidents . . . anymore.  Plus, Rebecca only poops once, maybe twice a day now, so rinsing diapers is no big deal.

In the few months we’ve been using cloth, I’ve also noticed two other benefits:

1. No Diaper Rash:  As I mentioned, Rebecca was in disposables for about six weeks.  During that time, she got some pretty wicked diaper rash.  We tried everything to clear it up.  We changed her constantly to keep her as dry as possible.  We lubed her up liberally with rash cream or ointment.  We regularly let her hang out diaperless on a waterproof pad to air out her little butt.  Even her doctor said we were doing all the right stuff; sometimes diaper rash just is.  Well, the speed at which it cleared up when we switched to cloth was amazing, and we haven’t seen a trace of the rash since.
2. Better Containment of Super Poops:  In the cloth, we have had one instance of feces escaping the confines of the diaper (which I wrote about here).  With disposables . . . I haven’t kept count but it has definitely been more than that, even though we don’t use them very often.  So even though it may seem like a hassle to rinse poopy cloth diapers, it’s better than having to change a whole poopy outfit.

So that’s my two cents as to why I think cloth diapering was a good choice for us.  It’s not for everyone, but it’s really not as much of a pain as you might initially think.  What was difficult was choosing a cloth diapering system, which took me hours and hours of research to see what all the options were.  But that would be a whole different post.

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Rebecca and I went to the pediatrician yesterday for her 4 month well baby check.  She weighs 13 pounds, 5 ounces (50th percentile), and is 24 inches long (40th percentile).  In other words, she is not a peanut anymore.  She’s meeting all of her milestones, like rolling from tummy to back, laughing, and pressing down with her feet when you hold her in a standing position.  In the next couple of months, we should be looking for her to roll from back to tummy, to sit up without assistance, and to move objects from hand to hand.

The only disappointment from the visit — and it as nothing to do with Rebecca’s health, thank goodness — is that the doctor said no solid food yet.  This surprised me because Rebecca has more than doubled her birth weight, and is in the age window when you can typically start solids.  What’s more, she seems to enjoy sitting in her high chair at the table with us, and I think solids would be a much more fun and interactive experience than just the bottle.  It’s only a few more weeks to wait, though, and it will come soon enough.  I’m sure one day I will end up on my hands and knees wiping pureed peas off the floor and longing for the days of bottles only.

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Warning: this post is about some of the unpleasant things that come out of babies’ little bottoms, so if you have a weak stomach, you might want to skip it.

Every once in a while, Rebecca produces some waste that really makes me regret the decision to cloth diaper.  Yesterday was one of those days.

A bit of background: the poor thing is going through some digestive changes.  She has some sensitivities that cause her to have a lot of gas and spitting up, so she experiences some discomfort in that regard fairly often.  Thank God for gas drops, recommended by her doctor as well as one of Steve’s co-workers!  On top of that, her digestive system has developed enough that her food is staying in her intestines longer.  This is a good thing, because it means she is able to absorb more nutrients.  It also means she won’t be pooping in every single diaper, but maybe once a day or even less.  So she is getting used to a change in the consistency of her poop.  Rather than just squirts of liquid, it’s got some substance to it.

Yesterday afternoon, she was fussy.  I knew she hadn’t pooped in a while, two days, in fact, but I kept seeing her “poop face” and nothing but little farts resulted.  I became concerned that she was constipated, perhaps as a result of the gas drops we have been giving her.  I planned to put her down for a nap, then call her doctor.  Suddenly, she started to scream.  I thought she was probably tired so I’d change her and continue with my plan to put her down to nap.

When I opened her diaper, I saw the most massive amount of poop this tiny little girl has ever produced.  It completely filled her prefold, leaked all around and into the diaper wrap, and squished out onto her clothes.  No wonder the girl was crying!  All afternoon she’d been trying to poop, and it finally comes out in one explosive rush.

I got her all cleaned up and put her in her crib while I rinsed the diaper, which took for-ev-er.  I am not a fan of rinsing poopy diapers in general, but when that much poop is involved, it is really the pits.  I had to employ the diaper sprayer and dunk and flush multiple times to get the stuff rinsed out.  By the time I was done, I was beat.  And I had poop on my clothes.  She was still crying too.  I decided that we would nap together.  She conked out quick and slept for OVER FOUR HOURS.  She NEVER naps even close to that long.  So I guess that big poop really did tire her out.

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Today, I took Rebecca to the pediatrician for her 6 week well baby check-up.  She is healthy and growing!  She weighed in at 8 pounds 10 ounces, a gain of more than 2 pounds since she was born, and is now 21 inches long.

Rebecca is just now starting to give us social smiles from time to time.  She sure did smile for the doctor today.  Not so much for the nurse that administered her immunizations . . .

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