Thursday, January 28, 2010

Bait and Switch

I am kind of desperate to get my dissertation revisions done. Will's refusal to take a bottle has definitely complicated this process.

Today I took him back to the daycare and had them try to feed him again while I was still there. No luck. Every time Ms. V brought the bottle to his lips, he would squirrel his head away and look at something else in the room. It was so frustrating. After maybe 10 minutes I took him and tried the bottle. At first he did the same thing, but then he just opened his mouth and started drinking. I fed him about an ounce out of the bottle, and then we did the old bait and switch: I handed him to Ms. V and she finished feeding him. I have no idea why I had to be the one to get him started eating. I just wonder what is going on his little mind.

I left and went to the Champaign Library, which is nearby. I had an hour or so to work before I needed to pick him up again. It was great. I did some tedious reanalyzing of data that would have been so hard to do while taking care of Will.

I went back to pick Will up, and on the way home he fell asleep. I thought for sure he would wake up at any second, but he ended up sleeping in his carseat for almost 3 hours. I think going to daycare really takes a lot out of him. It just must be overwhelming to him or something. To see all those other babies and play with all those toys and to be without mama. I hope he isn't scared. When I got there to pick him up, he was crying, but as soon as he saw me walk in the room his face just lit up. And I'm sure my face lit up when I saw him too. I'd only been away from him a little over an hour, but it felt so good to hold him again.

At any rate, I was really glad when he finally woke up because by that point it had been almost 7 hours since he had nursed and I was extremely uncomfortable. I was also freaking out that this whole day care thing is going to make my milk supply go down. If I had known he was going to sleep that long, I would have pumped, but I kept thinking that he would wake up soon and be very hungry. I just don't want to end up skipping feedings and having milk supply issues.

Well, I guess I'd better go pump and try to get to bed. Will was so tired all day today that he favored sleeping instead of eating. He didn't nurse as much as he usually does, so that makes me wonder if he'll be hungry all night long!

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Lovie

I guess that a lot of kids have some sort of cherished toy or blankie, commonly referred to as a "lovie," that they need to clutch in order to fall asleep. Will has got a lot of toys and animals, many of which he finds very interesting, but none of which he needs to have for sleeping. The closest thing he's got is Blue Seahorse, a kind of funny looking stuffed animal that plays lullabies if you press its tummy. The first time he saw Blue Seahorse (when Gramma Nan and Grampa Rick gave it to him for Christmas), he opened his mouth as wide as he could and clamped down on Seahorse's nose. Seahorse is still very fascinating to him. Sometimes when he wakes up very early in the morning, I will put Seahorse in bed with him and he will fall back asleep while listening to the lullabies.

I have mixed feelings about lovies. I fear that if Will had a lovie, and that if it someday got misplaced or dirty when he was supposed to go to bed, that there would then be no sleeping. Most of the time I maintain that it is not too hard for me to get Will to sleep (getting him to stay asleep is another matter entirely), but I realized that it actually is kind of an ordeal. When I started taking him to daycare, they asked if there was anything special they should know, I realized that if I wrote down instructions for what I have to do to get him to take a nap, it would require pages and pages.

In a nutshell, here is "the routine": First, I feed him. He almost always falls asleep while he is eating. And as soon as I take him off, he almost always wakes up and cries. Very quickly, I swaddle him as tight as I can in two blankets (it has to be two blankets only because he is too big to be properly swaddled with just one). Then I hold him on his side--with his tummy next to my tummy, and his head in the crook of my left elbow. Then I sway back and forth, and-- here is the most important thing--I pat his back with each sway. The patting of the back is key. I don't know why. The swaddling is also key because it keeps his arms from flailing around. He does thrash around a lot and he still wakes up the instant his arms become unswaddled. I do have fears that I will still have to swaddle him by the time he is in kindergarden (and that I will still be nursing him at that point too), but I am trying to just take it one day at a time here. The swaddling blankets are therefore very important to this process, and unfortunately, although we have an entire closet stacked full of receiving blankets, they are too small to swaddle him in anymore and we are down to just 2 blankets that I can actually manage to swaddle him in. So if these 2 blankets get soiled, drooled upon, or otherwise dirty, the sleeping process becomes more difficult. I don't think these really qualify as "lovies" though, because he could care less about what blankets he's swaddled in. I just don't want to go out and buy any more blankets because it seems very wasteful considering that we already have at least 500 baby blankets in the house.

When I finally started to get serious about mandating daytime naps, I began to do this sleep routine procedure for a morning nap, for an afternoon nap, and again at night. Even if he is screaming at the top of his lungs when we begin, I can generally have him to sleep in about 2-5 minutes. There have been some exceptional circumstances when it took upwards of 15 minutes, or other times when I was just too freaking exhausted to do all this and it does not end well. But for the most part it works. Sometimes, I have even been able to lay him down while he is still awake and he falls asleep on his own (so long as his dang arms don't get out and rile him up). But other times (like today!), I can easily get him to sleep doing "the routine," but as soon as I lay him down he wakes up cries!

At any rate, I realized something. I am his lovie!

I think that's okay though. I don't mind!

I know I am probably jinxing myself by posting this here, but last night Will slept for 11.5 hours straight. For the first time ever. He typically goes to bed between 7 and 8, and lately he's been waking up 2-3 times in the night. Then last night, the 11.5 hour sleep came completely out of the blue. And I actually got 9 hours of sleep myself! It was AMAZING. I felt like a new woman. I haven't slept that long since before I got pregnant (what with my frequent waking up to puke or pee). I know this 11.5 hour sleep was probably a fluke, but I can't help but hope.

Monday, January 25, 2010

No substitutes

We attempted to do the daycare thing today, and Will refused to take a bottle from them. Again! Grrr. Just when I thought we had this worked out.

This whole thing was supposed to allow me to have more time to revise my dissertation, but so far it has ended up causing me more stress and having to do more work (like pumping every night, to make sure he has enough milk for a bottle he won't take).

Will had gotten up and eaten around 5 this morning, and then he went back to sleep until 8:30. It was great because I got some extra sleep (to make up for the fact that his snoring and intermittent waking kept me up half the night!), but it did put us a bit behind schedule. He had soiled himself, so I had to give him a bath, and then I fed him, and was trying to get both of us ready to go. We ended up heading out the door at about 9:35. It takes about 15 minutes to get to the daycare, plus a few minutes to get him settled in and chat with the nursery staff, and then another 15 minutes back home. I finally got to work on my dissertation around 10:15. Then I had to leave again at 11:40-ish so I could get there and collect him on time. In the end, I got about an hour and a half to work on my dissertation, during which I missed him so badly that I could barely focus.

When I got to the daycare to pick him up and they told me he would not eat, my heart sank. His refusal to eat/take a bottle when he is away from me is not a step in the right direction. If he truly wasn't hungry during that time, sure, it would be fine. But he is hungry, and he gets frustrated and furious. The boy just accepts no substitutes.

He just had this sort of shell-shocked, wide-eyed look of terror all the way home, and as soon as I got him inside, he threw his head back and wailed like a banshee. His poor sweet little face was all red and covered in tears and snot. The bottle they had attempted to feed him was still warm; I heated it up a little bit more and thought we'd give it a try... just to see what happened. I put the bottle to his lips, and he clamped on, sucking it down without even so much as a moment of hesitation. The little stinker!

As soon as he drained the bottle (all 5 ounces), he started looking around for more. So I put him on the boob and he sucked ravenously, grabbing onto my neck with his free hand just to make sure I didn't get away. When he finished that side, he moved straight onto the other and finished that one too. Such hunger!

Got to go pump, so we can try to do this all over again.

Saturday, January 23, 2010

And another thing

I forgot to mention in my last post what a milestone it was for me-- not necessarily Will-- to let someone else feed him. In the whole 5+ months of his life, nobody but me or Rob has ever fed him, and he's never had a drop of anything other than my breastmilk. I think some of my nervousness about taking him to daycare was that somebody else was going to feed him for the first time ever. Even though it would still be my milk, it would be somebody else giving it to him. That was a big deal for me. I don't know if this whole thing was so hard for me because of all the difficulties we've had breastfeeding, or if this is hard for other mothers too.

As it turned out, I was really glad that Will finally took the bottle in daycare on Thursday. The stress of him not eating for 5 hours on Tuesday while I was away from him far outweighed any nervousness I had about someone at daycare feeding him. Only afterwards I realized we'd gotten across another hurdle.

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Small victory

A large part of me wanted to never take William to daycare again, after his refusal to take a bottle from them and his 5-hour fast on Tuesday. But I decided that the longer I waited the more freaked out I would be about ever leaving him again. So after he got up and ate this morning, I decided to head over there.

To my surprise, everyone was still nice and happy to see me when I walked in. I'd been kind of afraid that William had cried/screamed the entire time he was there on Tuesday and that they would all run and hide the next time we showed our faces. But they assured me he had not cried too much on Tuesday, he'd just refused the bottle even though it was obvious he was very hungry.

I asked them if they had any tips or advice on what we should do to get him to take a bottle from them. They told me we could try right then, while I was still there, and we'd see if we could find something that would work. So, I handed my baby and a bottle of breastmilk to Ms. V, and she sat with him in a rocking chair and tried to get him to eat. He did the same thing he had done on Tuesday, apparently. No crying, just moving his head out of the way and absolutely refusing the bottle. My heart sank. How would I ever be able to leave him for more than a couple of hours if he wouldn't take a bottle? It was kind of ironic: I fought so hard to be able to breastfeed, and now that we'd managed to pull it off, the boy would accept no substitutes!

Ms. V was so patient. I suggested that maybe the bottle wasn't warm enough, and she agreed that it might help if we heated it up some more. So she warmed up the bottle and tried again. This time, she sat Will up in her lap, facing outward. She thought that maybe holding him in a more "cradled" position, like when he breastfeeds, was confusing to him because it made him expect a boob instead of a bottle. This time, with warm milk and facing outward, she got the bottle nipple in his mouth and he did not fuss. He took a tentative swig. He must have thought it tasted pretty good, so he took another. And another! He slurped it down! Everyone cheered, the nursery staff as much as I did.

I hadn't intended on leaving him for long today at the nursery; I basically just wanted to see if we could resolve the bottle issue. I only had about an hour left before pick up time (the nursery closes at noon), so not enough time to go home/to campus and get any work done on revising my dissertation. So what did I do? I left and ran 4 miles :)

When I came back to pick him up, he was sleeping in a swing, and they said he had been such a good and sweet baby the whole time. They said they were really proud of him for taking the bottle today, and so was I! He woke up when I loaded him up to take him home, but he fell asleep again in the car and stayed asleep long enough for me to shower when we got home. He was pretty good for the rest of the day and even took another nap this afternoon, which allowed me to do some revisions on my dissertation. Maybe I'll write a post someday about how sick of my dissertation I am and how I no longer accept Professor Pablo as my cloth mother after reading his ridiculously extensive comments and suggestions. Or maybe I can sum it up by just saying this: I would like to put my dissertation in a box and throw the box into the sea and then hurl the sea into outerspace.

Despite the dozen or so job applications I've got out there, I would have to say I am not currently pursuing a career in academia. Maybe I'll wait until Will is in school and then become a doula. Got to go, floors to scrub and laundry to fold and milk to pump. Thanks for reading.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Continuing bottle saga

Today I went to speak about monkeys at my friend Mrs. G's school. This is the third year in a row she has been kind enough to invite me to talk to her classes. But it's the first year I've had William. He went to his part-time day care all morning. I wasn't sure how much milk he would drink while I was away from him, so I just packed a bunch of it for them to give him.

As it turns out, he didn't drink any. We had a repeat of his total refusal to drink from a bottle. I thought we'd solved the problem by getting the right size nipples, but maybe something else is going on. Obviously, I wasn't there while he was at the daycare, so I don't know exactly how they tried to feed him or exactly how he reacted. All I know is that he went from about 8am to 1pm without any milk. When I found out he hadn't eaten while he was there, I about flipped out. Normally he wants to eat every 2 hours unless he's sleeping. The weird thing was, he wasn't even fussing when I got to him. He was just looking around, with very wide eyes, like he was completely overwhelmed. Maybe after months of just being with mama, the daycare is too much for him. As soon as I got to him, I fed him, and even though it had been 5 hours since his last meal, he didn't really seem all that interested. And for once in his life, he wasn't crying... he just seemed... speechless.

After he ate and we were at home, I waited a little while and then decided to see what would happen if I tried to give him a bottle. I heated up about 2 ounces and put the bottle to his lips. Without pausing, he slurped the whole thing down and then looked at me like, "You got any more?"

So I just don't get it! I'm going to be really worried about ever taking him to the daycare or leaving him with anybody for more than a couple of hours in case this happens again. My poor little sweetheart. I just held him and hugged him and kissed him and kept feeding him all afternoon. What must have been going on in his little mind that made him not want to eat at daycare? I hope he didn't think I'd left him and I wasn't coming back. It must have all been very overwhelming to him. Poor sweet William!

Hoping we can get this figured out.

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Nipple confusion

I've heard of this thing called "nipple confusion" -- wherein breastfed babies who are given a bottle then get confused and will not breastfeed again. I was a little worried about this, but luckily in our case, when we had to give Will bottles of pumped breastmilk during the first several weeks of his life, he had no problem going between the two. Well, the first time we tried to give him a bottle (during which my heart was breaking, even though it was my own milk in there), he seemed confused and furious (he was always furious back then though, and sometimes still is now too). Once he realized milk was coming out of it, he closed his eyes and sucked it down.

Gradually, I was able to stop giving him pumped milk and just breastfeed him. We gave him a bottle on Halloween so that I could have some booze at Pablo's party, and then I don't think he had another bottle until my dissertation defense in December, when I was away from him for several hours. Everything was fine. Then last weekend, I set out to do an 8-mile training run, with the intention of Rob giving him a bottle of pumped milk. All hell broke loose, and he completely refused it. He just cried for the entire time I was gone. I thought maybe it was a fluke, and I tried to give him a bottle a few days later. Same thing. It was awful.

I consulted some of my mom friends, who had a lot of suggestions. Somebody suggested getting a different nipple size for the bottle he was drinking out of. I was vaguely aware that bottle nipples come in different sizes, but I hadn't thought too much about it. We were using some Dr. Brown's bottles that somebody had given me at the baby shower, and I was just using the nipple that came with it. There was nothing on the box or in the lengthy instruction booklet (yes, an instruction booklet with a bottle) about different nipple sizes and when you should be using which size. It just said that the bottle came with a Level One nipple. So I looked online and saw that there are actually 6 different nipple sizes that go with Dr. Brown's. Level 1 is for newborns-- age 0 to 3 months. No wonder he didn't want it! I went to the store and found some Level 2 nipples, which is for 3 to 6 months. I actually went to 3 different stores looking for the other sizes, just in case he was ready for a Level 3 (afterall, he is already wearing 6 to 9 month clothes!) or even a Level 4, which is supposed to be for "more aggressive feeders." If ever there were 2 words that could describe Will, aggressive feeder would be it. I never found any of the other sizes besides Level 1 and Level 2, so I was hoping that the Level 2 worked.

And it did! We got home from the shopping excursion and I got the new nipples cleaned and ready to go, and Will took a bottle with no problems whatsoever! I was so relieved. It will make marathon training and dissertation revising so much easier if he will take a bottle of pumped milk. I don't really know what the difference between the Level 1 and Level 2 nipples is, but whatever it is, Will knew. I guess it turned out that I had nipple confusion and not him.

At any rate, it is a good thing that he will take a bottle again. I have lined up a part time day care for him so that I can do the stuff I need, such as revise my dissertation. I did a trial run on Friday-- just left him there for an hour. And I have to say that I hated it. Nothing against the day care itself or the people who work there. They seemed really nice and everything, it was just a really awful feeling to hand my baby over to somebody else and then walk out the door. When I came back an hour later, Will was still being held. They said he hadn't cried at all. Which sounds about right. There were lots of people to hold him and walk about, so he hadn't had a chance to get bored and fussy. My friends who have done this before assured me that it get easier. I hope so.

One other thing. Will rolled over for the first time on Thursday evening! I was really excited about this, because he is 5 months old now and all the baby books say he should have been doing it by 4 months. For a long time, he has been really, really close to rolling over. In fact, even just hours after he was born he would roll onto his side. In the past couple of weeks he's been side rolling more and more frequently, and even doing a 3/4 roll a few times. Well on Thursday night, I had him down on the floor for "tummy time." I got beside him and was holding a dragon toy that our little friend Annika gave him. He was looking at me and looking at that dragon and then all of a sudden he just flipped onto his back! I was ecstatic. Before he even knew what happened I picked him up and was hugging and kissing him. He had this expression on his face like, what is all the fuss about? Since then he has shown no interest in wanting to roll over again!

A million things to do, that's all for now.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Dear William (5 months)

Blue and green

Dear William,

Today you are 5 months old. I can hardly believe it. The time has gone by so quickly. It seems like it was just yesterday that you were born. You were this tiny, furious, man-- squirming and crying in my arms. The moment I first saw you, it felt like I'd known you for my whole life.

It has been so hard, William. Nothing could have prepared me for how hard it would be. You poor sweet thing, you just cried and cried all the time. Your dad and I didn't know why. All we wanted was for you to be happy. We just kept loving you with all our hearts and doing the best we could until one day you smiled and then one day you laughed and little by little you have been smiling and laughing more and crying less. We're still working on that though.

I want you to know that I think you're the greatest thing in this world, and I look forward to every day that we have together.

Love always,

Mama

Saturday, January 9, 2010

Series of escalating fails

This was a day when kind of a lot of things went wrong.

The first thing was a major diaper leakage that happened overnight. Will slept from about 8pm to 5am, which was great, but when he woke up crying early this morning, he was soaking wet. He was wearing a Bum Genius, which are these supposedly leakproof cloth diapers. I don't know if my child is a super heavy wetter or what, but these diapers leak overnight for us about 75% of the time. Even when I use an extra doubler. The back of his jammies was wet up to the shoulders, and the blankets he'd been swaddled in were damp too. So by the time I'd changed his diaper, cleaned him up, and changed his jammies, he was wide awake and very much riled up. He ate and I reswaddled him in clean blankets and he went back to sleep. The next thing I knew it was 8:30 and I was feeling pretty well-rested. Will was awake, squirming around and making little noises, and when I got him out of his pack and play, he was wet again! After only 3 hours! With a doubler in his Bum Genius! I was soooooo aggravated. The poor dear was soaking this time-- his jammies, the 2 blankets I'd swaddled him in, and even the sheet of his pack and play was wet. I resume my search for the perfect cloth diaper.

The next thing that went wrong happened a couple of hours later, when I left to go grocery shopping and do some other errands. I got stuck in a snow drift at the end of our driveway. Now, I don't want to piss anyone off, but our driveway may have been shoveled in a very half-ass fashion. Plus, after the snowplows went through, they left behind a big pile of snow at the end of the driveway. I naively didn't consider these things as I left to go shopping, because I was more concerned about the very limited time frame I had to get everything done and get back before Will would want to eat again. So there I was, half in the drive, half in the street, and unable to go either forward or back. Rob and two neighborly guys had to push me out of the drift. I was mortified.

Running errands took me twice as long as I'd hoped, partially because everybody runs errands on Saturday mornings, and also because there is so much snow everywhere. When I finally got home, got everything put away, fed Will, and ate something, it was 3pm. And I still had to do an 8-mile training run--my first "long run" for marathon #9, the Illinois Marathon.

It was like planning a military operation to get ready to do this thing. Not only did I have to get myself ready, but I also had to line up everything for Will. It was going to be the first time I would be running long enough that Rob would have to give him a bottle of pumped milk. I had decided to use some frozen milk that was left over from the stash I had stored for my dissertation defense. This was going to be a major first. The few times we've ever given Will a bottle, it has been fresh milk. But I just didn't have time to pump for this, so I decided we'd dip into the frozen stash. I got everything ready-- had the milk thawing in the refrigerator, gave Rob written and verbal instructions, put on some mittens, and headed out the door.

It was cold. Somewhere in the range of 2 degrees Fahrenheit with wind chills well below zero. In my haste to get ready, I had not dressed warmly enough. It was going to be a long 8 miles.

As it turned out, I only made it about 6.5. My hands were so cold and painful I started wondering if it was possible that I had gotten frostbite. In the end, I decided it would be better to call it quits at 6.5 and avoid sustaining any lasting damage to my body, rather than push myself to go farther and get really messed up.

It was good that I came home when I did. Will had been crying the entire time I was gone, and he had flat-out refused the bottle of milk I had left for him. Rob said he would put the bottle in Will's mouth, but he was crying so hard he wouldn't suck and he wouldn't drink. I felt terrible. There I'd been, unconcerned about the time it was taking me to run because I knew that Will had milk to drink while I was gone. But he wouldn't take it! This is an entirely new thing. He's never taken a pacifier or gotten the hang of sucking his thumb, but he's always taken a bottle when we've given it to him. When he was very tiny, I gave him pumped milk from a bottle all the time. The very first time we tried this, he seemed confused and frustrated, but once he realized that milk was coming out, he sucked ravenously. In the past 2-1/2 months or so, he has only had a bottle of pumped milk a couple of times. It's like he's forgotten how to drink from a bottle? Or maybe it was something about the milk having been frozen? Did it taste different or had it somehow gone bad? Or maybe the nipple on the bottle isn't the right size for him anymore? I just don't know. The whole thing is really disconcerting to me because I have finally arranged some part time day care for him so that I can work on my dissertation revisions. Now I am freaking out that if he won't take a bottle, there is no way I will be able to leave him and work. Not to mention, it will be pretty difficult to train for and run a marathon if he won't take a bottle. I'm kind of hoping it was just a fluke, but I just don't know.

Aside from the several hours he apparently spent screaming today, Will was very sweet and cute. When I finally got home from my run and fed him, he held onto me like I was going out of style. I wonder what tonight is going to bring. Because he refused the bottle, he ended up eating fewer times today than normal. Maybe he'll be really hungry and wake up frequently tonight, I don't know. I guess I should go and try to get some rest while I can.

Thanks for reading.

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

The things you remember

They say that time heals all wounds, and although I have mainly forgotten the pain of labor, there are other things that I have not forgotten. I had a pretty severe case of nausea and vomiting throughout my whole pregnancy (and even for a while afterwards). My midwife used the term "hyperemesis gravidarum" (HG) and she prescribed me anti-nausea medication that, in the end, only barely took the edge off. But I'm not so sure that I would go as far as calling what I had HG. It was bad nausea and vomiting, but what I went through wasn't nearly as bad as all-out HG. I've read some stories written by women who have suffered HG, and what they write chills me to the bone. I think what I had falls somewhere between the lines of severe morning sickness and very mild HG. Regardless, it sucked.

My sister had HG during her pregnancy. She was so sick, I don't know how she got through it. She was pregnant when I was doing my dissertation fieldwork on Ometepe-- a fairly remote volcanic island in Lake Nicaragua. At that time, I could only relate to her experience through the motion-sickness induced nausea I felt whenever we took the boat to the mainland. I thought of her, and how awful it must be, throughout our epic trip to the mainland on a day that was windier than it had first seemed. The excursion involved a nearly 3 hour bus ride to the port city of Moyogalpa, an hour and a half boat ride across choppy Lake Nicaragua, a 15 minute taxi ride to Rivas (where we got our supplies), and then doing the whole thing in reverse to get back home again. The boat ride back across the lake was brutal. I puked, I moaned, I clenched my fists, I survived only by intense meditation and the power of yoga breathing. I thought, it can't be like this for my sister, can it? No one could survive feeling like this all the time.

Well, it was like that. I took medication that made the nausea just tolerable enough that I somewhat retained the will to live, but it did not make life enjoyable in the least. It didn't go away right after Will was born either. Even now, almost 5 months out, there are still so many things that make me feel sick.

During the latter half of my pregnancy, I had a dentist appointment. I was more than a little nervous about going, for fear I'd puke on them while they were working on my teeth, but I was even more afraid to not go-- who knew what kind of awful state my teeth would be in from all that puking. As I entered the office and began to hesitantly explain my situation to the dental hygienist, I was surprised that she knew all about this condition. The receptionist at the practice had suffered from hyperemesis gravidarum during her pregnancy, and everyone in the office knew how horrible it could be. "You should talk to her," the hygienist told me. "She was so sick. She lost 20 pounds and couldn't work for months. Her daughter is 6 years old now, and she doesn't ever want to have any more children." I did talk to her on my way out, and I could see how haunted she still was.

There are things you remember and things you forget. I am surprised that I've already forgotten how bad labor was, despite the fact that while I was experiencing it, I considered it to be excruciating. I am nowhere near forgetting hyperemesis. And judging from the few women I've talked to who have had HG, you never do. Rob (who I think might still be traumatized from witnessing Will's birth), was surprised when I told him I would rather go through birth again than experience hyperemesis. As SL's wife pointed out, the pain of labor isn't enough to make you not want to have more babies. I'm pretty sure that hyperemesis is. If I ever forget about it, I think it will be a long time from now. At the moment, I haven't even stopped having flashbacks.

Thanks for reading.