Random MomBlog

Cale hasn’t had a green poop since two days after I quit eating dairy. Interesting! That makes allergic colitis sound likely. I had to research green poop, of course. The green poop generally means that the intestines are emptying faster than usual yellow. That could be excessive drool from teething (we’ve seen that recently) or an intestinal virus (hope not!). Green frothy points to foremilk/hindmilk imbalance, for instance if the baby nurses too frequently. Cale would, given the chance! Green could mean too much iron, which wouldn’t be hard with my diet.

Between the mucous and the return to yellow once I was dairy-free, I can agree with allergic colitis. I haven’t decided if I’m brave enough to try the other test: does green come back with dairy? It would make the experiment much more valid, but at the expense of a very sad baby. That’s a very high cost!

So I’ve been having a conversation about ADD, and Amy showed me a quick adult ADD screening quiz. (What’s funny here is that my web search turned up the longer quiz first, and I thought to myself, Gah, too long, where’s the short quiz?)

I mean, there’s childhood ADHD to explain why I couldn’t even walk calmly as a kid (too boring) and took 2 hours to fall asleep that usually changes into adult ADD (I thought I was calmer because I’m exhausted with children). I’m not sure there’s a difference between attention deficit and multi-tasking, except that the second is a real asset at work. I think I would write it off as modern life favors multi-tasking, except that I also have incredible focus at times. It’s really productive. And honestly, skittering from one topic to the next, even at work, generally isn’t all that productive. It’s kinda fun to whack-a-mole on my email, but at the end of the day … the more productive days are when I follow my checklist of what to do (or have focus). So while I haven’t internalized it, it sure does make personality sense.

I was once told there were two types of insomnia, sleep acquisition (can’t fall asleep) and sleep inhibition (can’t stay asleep). Luckily I usually only have one kind, can’t fall asleep. So I was asked how I fall asleep. I’ve listed before some of what works for me.

My friend Alison said she would take 0.5 mg of melatonin when she couldn’t fall asleep, followed by a second dose 30 minutes later if she still weren’t asleep, and that always worked for her. That never worked for me, so I gave her the rest of my bottle. Then I learned that melatonin is released when your eyelids don’t have any light on them, so I tried the eye shield, and that has worked well for me. As it turns out, the proper dose is 0.3 mg of melatonin instead. Melatonin is also effective for insomnia in ADHD children!

White noise is my other major aid along with an eye shield. However, I’ve also considered listening to an audiobook or podcast as I fall asleep. (Interesting note about working memory and falling asleep, sounds like it would also be effective for me.)

Other tactics … I try to switch off multi-tasking (thinking about everything) by concentrating on something, like the white noise, or my breathing if I have no congestion to distract me. If focus doesn’t work then I think about thinking about nothing until my mind is clear.

I like to do static stretches before bed and when I can’t sleep. It runs off some energy, and it aligns my body. Then I climb into bed, making sure that I’m super-comfy with no pain points, all symmetric joints aligned, and no twists.

Over the years, I’ve learned a few things about my food cravings. If I want salty food, I usually need protein. If I eat refined sugar, I just want more sugar (but I can turn that off with fruit, sweet but not refined). If I want chocolate, I’m stressed (or in the presence of really good chocolate). I’m not sure I believe all of it (but hey, it’s worth a try), but here’s a chart of what to eat for each craving. Some of these are ironic … if you crave soda then you need calcium, and that soda will likely impair your calcium absorption! Others make sense to me. For instance, craving chocolate is linked to B deficiency, probably the same B’s that are mal-absorbed under stress, completing the explanation of my rare chocolate cravings. I prefer the (hint of) scientific explanation for cravings, but since it’s a sales pitch, it stops short.

The other craving I get is when I’m late eating a meal, I often get The Hunger, where I want to eat for the rest of the day. It’s hard to fight The Hunger, and I’m gassy then too. (Like now. I thought that was a false alarm that I was hungry for lunch at 11:30 AM, but the after-effects indicate otherwise.)

I thought I’d try something simple first for the rough skin on the back of my arms and the back of my legs. I know that soap in the US is very drying because Americans expect lots of suds when they lather, and the sudsing agents are drying. (If your skin feels tight after washing, it got too dry.) Sell more suds, then sell more moisturizers, I suppose. I use a very small amount of moisturizing soap in the shower, not enough for suds but enough to feel the soap slide. However, I use an anti-acne soap on my back because that was the only section of my skin that didn’t improve when I switched to moisturizing soap many many years ago. For the past month, I’ve been very conscientious about not spreading excess anti-acne soap off my back. I’ve trained myself to spread soap thin, so I was putting that extra soap on the back of my arms. Guess what? My arms are so much smoother now! I can’t remember when my upper arms have had such smooth skin. And what a simple fix … I was ready to look at keratosis pilaris treatments, but this is effective and takes less time!

Just (use less) soap. So simple.

I was looking for the most common food intolerances since Cale seems not to like something I’m eating. (This morning after breakfast, he was screaming and arching his back while nursing. Classic signs of baby gas.) I found CBS News on Food Allergy versus Food Intolerance, and it had just what I wanted to know, with plenty of additional background information.

A food allergy occurs when your body’s immune system mistakenly thinks that a harmless substance (meaning whatever food you happen to be eating) is harmful. In response, the body creates antibodies to that food. The next time you eat that food, the body releases massive amounts of chemicals and histamines to protect you. These chemicals trigger allergic reactions, typically in the respiratory system or gastrointestinal tract.

An intolerance is typically when your digestive system has trouble processing foods that you’ve ingested. Other parts of your body (such as the respiratory system) may not be affected.

Someone who is allergic to a substance, such as food, will typically react to it in a very short time, whereas someone with an intolerance can react hours later. This is an important thing to keep in mind, because symptoms of allergies and intolerances can be very similar. They include trouble breathing, hives, vomiting, diarrhea and cramping.

There is evidence to suggest that if a parent or a sibling has an allergy, you are more likely to have one. There is also evidence to suggest if that one of these close relatives has a condition such as asthma or eczema, you are more likely to have a food allergy.

Common Food Allergies:

* Dairy
* Eggs
* Wheat
* Soy
* Peanuts
* Tree Nuts
* Fish

These are the most common foods to cause allergic reactions. That said, people can be allergic to almost anything. There are certain allergies (such as milk) that often start and finish in childhood. The nut and fish allergies are more likely to extend into adulthood.

Common Food Intolerances:

* Dairy
* Wheat
* Peanuts
* Tree Nuts

Again, you can have an intolerance to almost any food (just like you could have an allergy to any food), but these are the most common.

Interestingly, eggs, soy, and fish are likely allergens, but are otherwise generally tolerated. Hmm.

Anyway, I can easily track dairy, wheat, peanuts, and tree nuts against how Cale reacts to a feeding. This morning, I had just had dairy and wheat (cereal). In the previous 24 hours, I also had tomatoes and peppers (in the nightshade Solanaceae family with potatoes) with garlic and onion (in the Allium family). We’ll see how the food tracking goes!

I would have thought it would be easier to look up how much a bottle-fed baby needs to eat! What I found was a rule of thumb, baby’s weight in pounds times 2.5 for number of ounces to drink, and this table, with average number of feedings and ounces per feeding.

(Babies start solid food at 4 to 6 months, so they eat less liquid after 7 months.)

Assuming “avoid it” didn’t work for you, this is a good reference on when to go to the doctor and what to do if you get food poisoning. Wikipedia is another reasonable reference too. (Daddy still feels unwell from Tuesday’s bout. I had to do some research.)

As if I needed more reasons not to drink caffeine, it has a half-life in full-term newborns of around 95 hours, infants 80 hours! (The range is 65 to 130 hours.) Yowzah! The peak transfer to breastmilk is 1 to 2 hours later. Half-life indicates a decay pattern that starts with a large initial peak, then tapers off slowly. The half-life is the time to purge half of that caffeine, but there’s still a long tail on the curve: after two half-lives, 25% of the original caffeine still remains.

So this afternoon when it was so hot and I was walking back to my office past the old-fashioned convenience store, I got the caffeine-free Pepsi (less acid than Coke). I don’t know why this baby is awake at 11 PM, but at least I know it’s not because I should have skipped caffeine.

Here I was, thinking I was doing well to reduce my insomnia to half an hour (or less!), but this study says I should keep working on it.
First,

they found that poor sleep is associated with greater psychological distress and higher levels of biomarkers associated with increased risk of type 2 diabetes and heart disease. They also found that these associations are stronger in women than in men.

Since I do have some issues with blood sugar, the mention of diabetes caught my eye.

“Interestingly, it appears that it’s not so much the overall poor sleep quality that was associated with greater risk, but rather the length of time it takes a person to fall asleep that takes the highest toll. Women who reported taking a half hour or more to fall asleep showed the worst risk profile.

OK, I’ll stay in sleep school a while longer!