Hootie Was Right

Last Wednesday night, Meg went to bed as she normally does: takes a milk bottle (8 oz, usually), goes to sleep within 15-20 min, and we are out of the room within 30 min.  She woke up around 10:30 and had more milk, and had to be rocked to sleep again.  If I remember correctly, she woke up again in the 1:00 hour and had to be rocked to sleep yet again.

3:30 am rolls around, and she won’t go back down.  She will fall asleep, but we can’t lay her back in the crib without her waking up.  We finally bring her to bed with us, causing me to stay in bed and skip an hour of work.  Brooke, luckily, was on spring break, so she didn’t have to be at work at 7:30 am.

Meg really hadn’t slept through the night but for a handful of times since last November when she had strep.  Sometimes, she’d wake up once per night, sometimes two.  This past week or so, it had gone up to 3 or 4 times a night.  Wednesday night was the last straw.  3:30 am until 6:00 am is simply ridiculous when you have a one-year-old that doesn’t have an ear infection, and whose teeth aren’t causing that much pain: she’d been given Orajel and a few doses of Tylenol throughout the night.

Granted, Meg has battled various sicknesses and multiple ear infections, and the teething has been an issue more recently.  But to our knowledge, nothing was physically wrong with her now.  She was just escalating the times she’d wake up in the middle of the night, and simply would not go back to sleep on her own.

Brooke did some research, posted a plea for help on Facebook, and went to the library on Friday to see what books she could find.  She settled on “The Happiest Toddler On The Block,” by Harvey Karp.  Mostly, we used the book for the sleeping portion, although I’m sure Brooke will read the rest of it for other interesting tidbits.

Basically, there were a few possibilities outlined in the book to try with your kid, and I will briefly summarize them here:

  1. Immediately when your child starts crying, go into their room, pick them up, soothe them until they stop crying, and then put them down again in the crib.  If the start crying again, pick them up and do it again.  And again and again.  This can take 20-50 times when you first try it, though it will decrease each time you do it.
  2. Let your child cry for 3 minutes, then open their door, look to make sure they haven’t thrown up or injured themselves, then say “I love you, it is time for you to go to sleep, goodnight,” and then close the door again.  As they will undoubtably continue crying, go back in 5 minutes and do it again, then go back in 10 minutes and do it again, and finally go back every 15 minutes thereafter until they go to sleep, constantly reminding you that you’re there, even though they can’t see you. This method could take up to 5 nights, with the third night being the worst.  The crying could last an hour, easily, especially for the first few nights.

We chose the second option, as the first one never seemed to work in the past (or any portion of the method).

As we really didn’t want to risk a repeat of Wednesday night, we went ahead and decided to start Friday night.  We went out to dinner at the Starlight Room (very good!), and got ice cream at Dairy Queen.  We had a very pleasant Friday night, in preparation for what was to come…

Meg went down by 7:30 just as she normally does, and then she woke up around 10:30.  Brooke was already in bed, and as it was Friday night and I was staying up gaming anyway, I took the first shift.  I did exactly as the book prescribed, and used the stopwatch on my phone to make sure I went in at 3 min, 5 min, 10 min, etc.  Brooke stayed in bed and listened, just in case Meg started doing something unhealthy (aside from screaming at the tip-toppest of her lungs).  She also gave me a few pointers, as I wasn’t being “soothing enough” the first two times I poked my head in… 😛

It was around midnight when she finally stopped.  I think it was 11:45, the last time I actually went into the room, but I stayed up later to make sure she didn’t cry for the next 20-30 min.

She was likely tired out after that ordeal that she didn’t wake up again until around 4:00 am.  Brooke got up that time and went in, but she only had to once.  Meg fell asleep after Brooke went in and went through the routine.

Meg slept until 7:00 then.  Not bad for the first night!

The second night, Meg woke up multiple times, but never cried up until the 3 min line, so we never poked our heads in.  Never got up.  Not bad for the second night.

And last night?

Not a peep.

Not one, aside from a little coughing here and there.

Yes, on the third night, Meg slept from 7:00 pm until 7:00 am.  No crying.

Obviously, we’ll see how this translates into Night #4.  We’re off to a good start, certainly.  Because we have started this, we are also being more cognizant of giving her a sippy cup to use throughout the day, for both milk and apple juice.  It was good that we started this on a weekend so we could monitor how much she was drinking.  Yesterday, she had 4 sippy cups-worth of fluids, so she was certainly getting enough out of it.  Since she isn’t drinking as much (or at all) during the night, she transferred most of her fluids to the daytime.  So long as this continues while she’s at daycare, we should be good to go.

I’m sure we’ll still have some bad nights ahead of us, as the teething hasn’t stopped and she will surely get another ear infection or two, but at least now we have a plan and solid footing for a workable sleep schedule: for the whole family.

“Let Her Cry,” indeed.

Meg’s Longies

Our wonderful friend, Melissa, sent me a link to some instructions about making your own wool diaper cover pants from an old sweater after we had talked about the merits of these kinds of diaper covers. I didn’t want to make the $40+ investment without knowing if I would even like the covers, so I made a few versions after a trip to Goodwill’s sweater racks. There are a bunch of instructions online about how to make your own, so I don’t need to recount my process, but even if they don’t work great (we’ve only used them over a regular diaper cover so far), they’re super cute!!!

Of Snow Days and Sickly Babies

Our first truly major snow is about to hit in the next few hours.  We’ve actually gotten a decent amount of snow, and snow from weeks ago is still on the ground, yet I don’t think that this much will have fallen in a single bout in this amount of time.  Originally, forecasters were calling for something like 20″ in some parts of Iowa, while we’d probably get closer to 15″ over a period of two days, however that estimate has been reduced.  Last night, we could have gotten up to 4″, but I’d be surprised if we even got 1″.  The problem last night, however, was drifting snow, leading to a near 4′ drift on our sidewalk (very fluffy though, so pretty easy to remove).  As of this posting, they’re forecasting more like 8-10″ for Cedar Rapids, and then 10″-12″ for Iowa City between 3:00 pm today and 9:00 am tomorrow.

Normally, this wouldn’t worry me at all.  My job tends to be flexible such that, if I was snowed in under 12″ of snow, I wouldn’t really have to go anywhere.  Unfortunately, I’m scheduled to teach to the Pharm.D. students tomorrow, so if the University doesn’t cancel classes, I’m still required to get in and there’s no way for me to notify the 100+ students in the class that I won’t be there.  Regardless, I’m thinking of various strategies for solving this problem, but I hope that the University goes ahead and cancels classes ahead of time (i.e. this afternoon!!) so I can sleep well without having to worry about tomorrow morning.  Missouri is getting hammered more than Iowa is and, yesterday, SLU and Wash U in St. Louis both preemptively canceled classes for today.

Aside from snow issues, Meg hasn’t been feeling well.  Really, she hasn’t been feeling well for the past few weeks, but it really started last weekend when she stopped eating as well as she had been and certainly stopped sleeping as well as she had been.  Naptime still happened, and gradually improved as the week drew on, but she still woke up multiple times during the night and would stay awake during that period, crying out any time you’d try to lay her down (and would still cry even after she’d been asleep in your arms…and when I say “asleep,” I mean “out”).

My Mom visited this past weekend and reminded us of the fact that my sister was prone to ear infections around this age, and ear infections that didn’t present with a fever.  Ear infections that seemed to flare up more at night, rather than during the day.  Suffice to say, Brooke took Meg into the doc yesterday and, indeed, Meg has infections in both ears.  She’ll be on antibiotics for 10 days or so and we’ll need to take Meg in again in a few weeks to confirm that the ear infections are cleared up, but hopefully this will set us on a better trend toward sleeping through the night!

Of course, unfortunately, this means that Meg will miss her last few weeks of water babies

Also, Meg has had a cough for months now.  We hadn’t paid much attention to it, thinking it was related to the fact that she goes to daycare and is exposed to any number of evil demon baby diseases.  She’d seen the doc a few times during that period and the doc agreed.  However, yesterday, the doc was a bit more concerned about it, as the coughing was a bit worse than normal.  She isn’t really sure what the cause is, but she prescribed albuterol treatments, which required us to pick up a nebulizer to actually administer the drug to Meg.  She’s supposed to get the treatments a few times a day, and they take around 10 minutes to allow the albuterol to “nebulize” into her lungs.  As long as you keep her entertained, she inhales most of the drug and you can definitely tell that her coughing gets more productive thereafter.  Hopefully that helps her, too!

Meg turns 11 months this Saturday, which is a pretty crazy thing to consider.  She’s obviously come a long way in that period, and as have we.  While she’s still developing nicely, we’re still waiting on more teeth to come in (she has 1, solitary, lonely tooth…) and we’re waiting on her mobility to increase (she can scoot around and move from one side of the room to the other, but it isn’t really “crawling,” per se…).  We’re anxious to see if this, the 11th month of her life, is when all the other teeth come in and whether she starts to take her first steps.

It would certainly be nice for her to be able to chew on her birthday cake in a little over a month.  🙂

Water Babies

We started Water Babies last week at a city pool in Cedar Rapids. Meg was trying to put her face into the bathtub water, so I figured it was time for us to figure out how to do that without either of us freaking out. So far, she’s loving watching the other kids in the pool and splashing, but does not appreciate going under water or floating on her back. I’m sure we’ll have lots of swim lessons in our future and this is a fun start!

Over The River and Through The Woods…

Needless to say, this year marked quite a few changes for us.  The birth of Meg and our move to Iowa have complicated Christmas travels to a greater degree than they used to be.  Way back when, we would go to Hannibal/Louisiana for Christmas Eve and then rush back to Columbia/Lohman for Christmas lunch with the Plochberger side of the family.  As my grandmother passed away earlier this year, we will no longer be getting together for Christmas Day in the same way that we have in the past, likely doing something like a traditional “Family Reunion” once a year at some other time.  Therefore, we won’t have to rush back so quickly Christmas Day.  That part is a bit easier.  It’s the rest of it where things get interesting.

This year presents other issues.  Firstly, my buddy Andy S. got married earlier this year.  We were unable to attend any of the festivities, largely because Brooke was quite pregnant, so I didn’t really want to be out of town for an extended period.  He and his wife, Rachel, are hitting Columbia (and our mutual friend, Brett), but only for the week prior to Christmas Day.  Therefore, here’s how this is going to work:

  1. Meg and I will drive down to Columbia on the 21st so we can see some folks prior to Christmas  (~5 hr drive)
  2. Meg and I will drive to Hannibal on the 23rd; Brooke and Edie will meet us there (~2 hr drive)
  3. We spend Christmas Eve in Hannibal/Louisiana, get up Christmas morning, open presents at the Baumann house, and then head off to Columbia (~2 hr drive)
  4. We stay in Columbia through Monday and return to Iowa by way of Hannibal, picking up Brooke’s car (~5 hr drive)

So yeah, it’s gonna get kinda crazy…at least, crazier than it’s been in previous years.  It’s a good thing that we have a larger vehicle now so we can carry stuff with us between locations, but it’ll be nice having two cars in Missouri so we can load them both up to get everything back up to Iowa.

This brings us to another issue:  space.  As in, we have very little.  Meg, for all of the 17 lbs that she weighs, comes with metric tons of stuff.  As in, multiple bags of clothes, blankets, a baby cage (read: “pack ‘n play”), and toys.  And we still have Edie to take along, too.  And presents for 3 people for the ride home (but presents for 9 people on the way there).  We’re probably going to have to pick up a car-top carrier before we even consider going on vacation next summer.

Related to all of this, we probably won’t travel much in January/February, for a few reasons.  One, we live in Iowa.  Iowa is cold.  Really, really cold.  The 3″ of snow that fell today will probably still be here in March.  So yeah, we’ll probably stay bundled up and keep as warm as possible, without going anywhere besides work.  The other reason (the real reason…) is that Meg hasn’t been traveling well recently.  It just seems like we go places and she gets off whatever sleeping schedule we finally settled her into, then it takes at least a week to get her back to something semi-normal.  She also tends to get sick, in some fashion, shortly thereafter.  I’m sure a lot of this is related to the teething (that she’s finally showing some progress in!), but the constant traveling can’t help.  It just seems like we make some progress at getting her to a normal routine, and then it’s dashed within a weekend!  We have gone to Columbia, Hannibal and St. Louis a few times over the last few months.  She generally does fine in the car, and is great for most of the day, but overnight…eeeeeeesh…

So yeah, that’s this year’s plan.  Weather/sickness depending, as usual.  We’re just going to make a concerted effort to get through it all mostly unscathed, survive winter, and make it to Meg’s first birthday.  Mark your calendars for March 5th!

D.B.D.

A few years back, I was at home for Christmas break and had a gathering, of sorts, with some folks from High School to attend.  We happened to have family friends staying with us, who had two young children.  One of those kids, apparently, had some kind of sickness, ’cause that very night, I came down with one of the worst viral infections in recent memory…and it only lasted a few hours, enough time for me to miss the party.  Figures.

Since then, I’ve been particularly wary of babies and the diseases they carry.  Sure, babies are cute, but they’re breeding grounds for a variety of viral and bacterial infections, especially when they go to day care and are exposed to a wealth of things that the other kids are exposed to.  The immune systems of babies are heavily taxed during the first few months to years, as they are being exposed to all kinds of things that they’ve never seen before, let alone the fact that their immune systems aren’t even fully operational yet.  My sister had quite a few ear infections during this period, largely because she was teething and her body simply couldn’t handle all the stress (and Meg has no teeth yet…).  So yeah, it seems like whatever you get from them hasn’t been knocked down in the least, so you end up getting something even worse than you would have had you contracted it from someone older.  (I have no scientific basis for this assertion…just observation…)

I typically refer to these as “Demon Baby Diseases.”  Not necessarily because they come from “Demon Babies,” but because they’re so bad, they surely must be borne of some evil not known of this Earth.  They’re bad.  Truly bad.

In general, my immune system is pretty spectacular and I don’t tend to get sick.  Sure, I’ll get a cold once a year and usually have a non-productive cough for a few weeks in the dead of winter, but aside from that, I don’t get viral or bacterial infections.  I’ve always found this somewhat remarkable, and it probably has something to do with genetics, as to my knowledge, my Dad doesn’t really come down with much of anything, either.  Brooke, on the other hand, is a bit more likely to come down with things.  Granted, I usually work in somewhat sterile environments, so we’re all pretty attuned to the idea of keeping things clean.  Brooke, however, deals with many other individuals in different environments, so she’s hit from all sides with a variety of different things.

So why do I write this now?  Well, we had a nice weekend up here in Iowa sans Meg, as we shipped her off to hang out with Brooke’s parents for the weekend.  By all accounts, the weekend went well: Brooke and I went out to dinner Friday night and went to a winery on Saturday, and Mark and Diana very much enjoyed having their grandbaby with them, and Meg was good the whole time.  But when we got home Sunday, Meg wasn’t feeling well.  She felt warm when we picked her up in Hannibal, but she slept most of the way back home.  She was acting mostly fine, but still felt warm right before bedtime.  But bedtime didn’t go so well.  Really, it didn’t “go” at all.  Brooke and I probably got 4 hours of sleep that night, as we traded off with a crying baby, which is, thankfully, not something we typically have to do.

Long story short, Brooke was home with her Monday and Meg didn’t get much better.  We traded off every two hours over Monday night, and I took off work Tuesday and took her in to the doctor, as her fever hadn’t subsided.  Turned out it was strep.  Eeeeeesh.

The doc got her on amoxicillin and, shockingly, by Tuesday night, Meg was already feeling better.  She wasn’t 100% or anything, but she was able to sleep (which, for a kid that had only slept a few hours over a period of 2 days, was much needed…you know…’cause they’re supposed to sleep something like 14 hours a day or something…).  I stayed home with her again yesterday and she was acting like her normal self, although she was a bit “clingier” than usual.  Last night, again, she slept relatively well.

So I’m back at work and Meg’s going to daycare again today.  Generally, things are back to normal…but now Brooke thinks she may be coming down with something.  Probably not strep, but still something.  And, most likely, a direct result of a near complete lack of sleep over those few days.  Thankfully, so far, I’m unaffected, but I’m ever vigilant.  Always watching for the next Demon Baby Disease.

How We Wash Our Diapers


I think that just about everyone who uses cloth diapers has their own “secret” to clean, fresh diapers, but since we know a few new parents who are getting ready to delve into the world of cloth diapering, I thought I’d share my washing routine in case it might help!

We keep our dirty diapers in a plain trash can with a lid that came from Target for under $10, so everything wet or soiled, including flannel wipes and, when I was still breastfeeding, flannel nursing pads, goes in there. When Meg was only eating breastmilk, the poopy diapers also went in as is. Now that she’s eating solids and the poop wouldn’t break down in the washer, we just dump what can be dumped into the toilet and throw those diapers into an ice cream bucket that’s on the stairs to the basement where the washer and dryer are so we can grab them on the way down with the rest of the diapers.

Generally, we wash diapers and covers every 2-3 days during the evening after Meg is in bed. Our normal routine is that I “Prewash” everything on cold first, then soak everything in warm water with a couple of coffee scoops of baking soda. I used to take out the covers and soak just the diapers in hot water, but decided that was using too much energy for not a lot of difference in cleanliness, so recently switched to a warm water soak. I let the diapers soak for about an hour, then wash on warm with an extra rinse cycle. I just use Tide Free and Clear detergent and a couple of capfuls of vinegar in the fabric softener dispenser of the washer. I’m usually not a name brand snob at all, but since we have well water, I think the Tide really does do a much better job than other brands of baby-friendly detergent, although when Aldi has their brand of dye and perfume free detergent, I use that, but they only have it every once in awhile. By this point in the routine, I go to bed and Andy handles pulling out the diaper covers to air dry and putting the diapers in the dryer on the highest heat setting. By the time we get up in the morning, the diapers in the dryer are finished and the covers are dry enough to either put away or pack in Meg’s day care bag.

We do have a couple of all-in-one diapers that Andy just puts in the dryer and they seem to still be holding up ok, but I’m not sure how they would continue to wash if we only dried them in the dryer and only used those?

I’ve bleached all of our white prefolds maybe twice in the last 7 months, but hung prefolds and handmade fitteds outside on a really sunny day to be sun bleached every once in awhile. I had plans to hang everything out on the clothesline for as long as possible, and while I did hang out clothes all summer, the diapers didn’t make it out that often, especially since I started working, just because the dryer is so much faster and can be done overnight. As always, feel free to ask either of us any questions about cloth diapering, because we think we’re pretty good at it and it’s working out so well for us, we think anyone can handle it!

New Developments

In recent weeks, Meg has gotten quite a bit better about sitting up.  This, I’m told, is typical of most babies in their 6th month of life, so I guess it shouldn’t be all that surprising.  The crazy thing is just how quickly she seems to be developing!  Within the past few weeks, she has started getting much more “tactile” in her interactions.  She still doesn’t quite understand that her hands are, necessarily, “controllable” by her brain, but she has realized she has them and that she can pick things up with them.

"What can I do with this?"

The most interesting part to me, however, is how she has started to grab my face and grab Edie.  She takes such an interest in touching my face, almost as if she didn’t quite realize that I was alive, or that I was “real,” for the past few months.  As if she now has a different sense of me, or of people in general.  Maybe as if she treated all the people around her much like people on a TV screen: they’re there, but they aren’t really “there,” if that makes any sense.

Meg has always paid close attention to Edie, watching her walk through the house and so on, but now she can actually reach out and touch her.  Thankfully, Edie is just fine with this.  Meg reaches out and will hold onto Edie’s skin (more than the hair).  Meg just stares at Edie, possibly wondering if she’ll move or run off.

"I'm very proud of all my toys!"

Regardless, it’s been fun over the past few weeks watching her.  It’s just cool to watch someone learn things for the first time, things that we adults tend to take for granted.  Not even relatively simple things like “walking” or “sitting,” but just the realization that people exist and that you can actually interact with them, rather than watch them.

The Meaning of Efficiency

One of my favorite video game genres is the “Real Time Strategy” game, or “RTS.”  In such a game, you generate resources in order to build units that the allow you to conquer the other player.  Starcraft II is, perhaps, the most recent example of such a game, and one I’ve been playing a great deal of recently, however the Age of Empires series is, perhaps, best-suited for explaining more clearly.  In an RTS like Age of Empires, you start the game with a few units (Villagers) that harvests resources for you, like wood, food, stone and gold.  These four resources help you to produce other Villagers, but also Military units.  When you’re starting out in the Dark Ages, you primarily need food and wood for “Clubmen,” but as you advance toward “Swordsmen,” you need more diverse resources like gold.

These games are generally part of a larger game mechanic called “resource management.”  Basically, you begin a given game with a finite amount of resources and you choose how to spend those resources.  Some of them should go to more resource-generating (e.g. investments), while other resources should go toward the ultimate goal of the game.  It’s up to the player to decide to what degree they go in either direction.  If you want to win quickly, then you pour more resources into building military units so you can take out the other player.  If you want to “tech up” to a more stable position, but take longer doing it, you pour those resources into investments.

As I said, I’ve always liked this kind of game.  But I’ve never been terribly good at it in real life.

Brooke and I have never made huge amount of money, but the move to Iowa cost us a great deal.  Brooke was unemployed for the first 3 months of living here, and she’s still only been able to get work part-time (but that’s going to steadily increase).  That combined with the fact that we have a baby now means that our collective (limited) resources have been directed in other avenues than what we are used to.  Child care alone is a ridiculous, but necessary, cost.  Therefore, we’ve been doing our best to maximize our available resources as best as possible.  With various payments that one has to car loans, student loans, life/auto insurance, etc., that only leaves a relatively small percentage of cash that you can adjust for whatever purpose is required.

A few summers ago, we started with helping limit our energy costs by getting a single-room A/C unit for our bedroom.  That helped save us $100 in a single summer, paying for the A/C unit itself.  We’ve been using it in our house in Iowa now, helping to limit the excess cost of cooling a much larger space than we were dealing with in St. Louis by only cooling our bedroom(s) at night, as opposed to having our central A/C running too heavily.  Thankfully, Iowa summers are substantially cooler than St. Louis summers, and the house is in the shade enough that it rarely heats up to a significant degree.  We’re already talking about ways to limit the amount of propane we’ll use in the relatively harsh Iowa winters, trying to defend against the northwest wind by insulating specific windows.  We’ll probably spend more time upstairs, as the heat will collect there.  We’ll probably try keeping the house cooler than we had it in St. Louis, as well.

We’re also trying to limit travel to some extent.  When we can take Brooke’s Scion xA on longer trips, we’ll take it (37 mpg), but when we need a larger vehicle, we’ll have to use the Sportage (27 mpg).  I’m driving the Sportage to and from work every day and, on those trips, I’m doing my best to stay around 65 mph, as an engine runs most efficiently within that range.  Doing so, I’ve been able to help limit my gas costs to a reasonable degree.  I’ve also started getting up earlier, getting to work around 7:00 am and leaving around 4:00 pm, thereby allowing me to miss the traffic that frequently causes me to speed around people.

Brooke has done an excellent job over the summer growing vegetables and canning them for later months.  We’ve been able to save a pretty decent amount of money on food already, but those savings will continue on into the winter months.  So far, Brooke hasn’t had to buy much solid food for Meg, either, as the carrots and squash she’s been eating were grown in our garden.  Brooke froze down more of it so she can make more in the next few weeks.  As Brooke already posted about the cloth diapers, we’ve already saved a pretty large amount of money over disposables.  Otherwise, we still shop at Aldi, as always, but are making a more concerted effort to limit the “extras” (although, Brooke has already demanded that her ice cream allotment not be limited).

Our entertainment costs have dropped dramatically, as we don’t have cable anymore and our internet connection is fast enough that we can Netflix or stream everything we want.  I’ve seen one movie in theaters this summer and have decreased the number of games I’ve purchased, as well.  We also aren’t going out to eat as often, partially because we have to hold Meg and would rather have her in a high chair or something (which she isn’t…quite…ready…for…).

We’re still looking for improvements, but I think this is a helpful, albeit stressful, experience.  As in RTS games, if you build up your resource-generating units early on, you get a strong economy that can then provide you with better military units later in the game, allowing you to conquer and win.  It takes keen resource management to do this, as you have to be very, very efficient with the military units you do build early in the game, while instead putting those resources into things that can help you later on.

Let’s hope we learn something now, so that we’re prepared for later stages of the game.