First of 2013 - Travelling and Teeth

Good evening and happy new year!

I hope the festive period and new year was full of family, food and happiness for everyone.

It was our first 'family' Christmas, the three of us together and it was a very busy one. From the 23rd of Dec until the 31st, we travelled almost 600 miles, visited two different countries, two childhood homes and lots of family and friends. We were both so proud of IQ. She coped with all the changes amazingly and was very content for most of our time away. We returned yesterday feeling like we'd had a long holiday but the 10 days we were away flew by. It was great to see so many friends and family over the festive season and I think I ate my body weight in food.

I can do this by myself ya know...

All I want for Christmas are my two front (bottom) teeth!

Just before we left for our Christmas break we discovered IQ's first tooth, well, teeth in fact. The bottom two teeth were just about poking through the gums. I had discovered them by chance when letting her chomp on my finger - what a surprise! It was quite a sad discovery for me as I'd said that I would phase out breastfeeding once her teeth arrived. It seemed so sudden and unannounced that, while I was really happy that my little girl had reached this enormous milestone, I was upset because it called for an end to breastfeeding.

We've started to add in a bottle feed gradually, we started with an evening bottle before bed then after a few days we added another bottle at lunchtime. I wanted my supply to adjust to this lack fo demand without any sudden changes, so that my supply didn't go crazy and leave me feeling sore. So far we're on 3 or 4 bottles a day, ranging from 4oz to 7oz as we're still trying to figure out just how much our little milk monster needs. It's going much better than I had hoped and I'm starting to feel the pressure of being the only person to be able to feed IQ lift, giving daddy some much needed bonding time with her too.

Only comfortable on mummy

Growing Pains

While IQ's teeth took us by surprise, we had noticed some of the signs of teething - chomping, drooling, cutting naps short and general grumpiness. We thought we were doing really well, especially as she was teething during our holiday but I've got to hand it to her, she's been fab. It's only been in the last 2 days that she's been really miserable. The poor little thing has got all the nasty teething symptoms, chomping, drooling like a bulldog, short naps resulting in over tiredness  horrible bottle green poos leading to TERRIBLE nappy rash. It's no surprised that she's spent most of this evening crying and grizzling.

Schnuggles

It's so hard to see her feeling so miserable.

At one point she woke from a nap and came downstairs only to fall asleep in my arms a few minutes later. It was the only place she felt soothed and comforted (I'm in no way complaining about this, I LOVE it when she sleeps on me). After a nap in my arms and a quick bath we got her ready for bed. She was so tired she fell asleep so quickly and I'm hoping she'll have a good sleep. Poor little thing.

Teething is horrible business and I read recently that if adults had to go through the pain of teething, we'd be driven crazy by the pain... no surprise that our little ones have such a hard time of it!