Formula: goes in a lot easier than it comes out

The Ninja took his first trip to the witch doctor last week. Keeping with the Things Seattle People Do theme, it is also required that everyone have at least one alternative healer on staff. This alternative healer can be in the form of a naturopath or masseuse (beginner Seattleite), acupuncturist (you're getting there), or reiki master or rolfer (head of the class; come pick up your Subaru Outback). Since Finn is only five months old, we're still in the beginner stages and have only gone so far as to engage a naturopath to complement his regular doctor.

I buy into the tenets of naturopathy. It seems like common sense medicine; treat the system and not the symptom. If your tires keep going flat, rather than returning over and over again to get them patched, it probably would be smarter to stop driving through the Broken Glass & Nails Factory. I'm not a big picture man, though, and I've got a real hankering for indulging myself. It just so happens that the Broken Glass & Nails factory has the best pale ale in town, so I'm back at the tire repair shop often.

With this working against me and with Kitty's tendency to allergy, it probably makes sense that we get the kid into the alternative healer community ASAP. At this point, we're focused mostly on environmental allergens - specifically food. Kitty is allergic to everything in the "Delicious" food group, which includes dairy. Since we are now on formula for most of our feeding, and since most formulas include dairy, we wanted to get him checked out.

Not all formulas contain dairy. For the first few months, we splurged on super-hypo-allergenic formulas, but those run $25/can or ~$300/month and smell like a seeping septic tank. That's no good. We went to a soy-based formula, but that resulted in some weird green diapers. We then figured we'd go with the dairy, which worked relatively well. It didn't smell like raw sewage and was affordable, which were pretty much our only two criteria at the time. But he threw it up a lot and started waking up every half-hour during the night. The throwing up I can handle, the waking up I cannot. We finally found a nice organic, lactose-free formula that was only half the price of the hypo-allergenic stuff and that actually tasted OK and didn't result in any additional vomiting.

In fact, it didn't result in any waste removal for a good 3-4 days leading up to Labor Day weekend. We headed back up to the cabin for the weekend, so it was in the beautiful scenery of Mount Baker that I feel that we truly became parents. On Saturday morning, the little guy's poop chute was 3 cm dilated with 4 days worth of backed up and dried out poop and it was not moving. We tried sweet talking it, spraying water on it, chipping off pieces of it and squeezing his hips to pop it out, but nothing worked. Needless to say that he was not pleased with the situation. All of his crying and struggling to push eventually tired him out and he fell asleep with his little concrete turtle still poking its head out. While he slept, I ran down to the country store to score some chamomile tea and prepared for the worst.

An enema. With chamomile tea. Apparently, it's soothing no matter which end you put it in.

We brewed the tea, we prepared the room (lots of plastic) and we repurposed his favorite nasal bulb syringe (won't be putting that one back in them nose holes any more). When he finally woke up, we geared up and got ready for battle, but something was wrong. He was smiling. A quick check of his drawers confirmed that he had passed the Diaper Rock of Gibraltar in his sleep. Crisis averted. But needless to say, he was back on the dairy. I'd rather get thrown up on every half hour 24-hours a day than deal with that again.

So while we await the final verdict from the naturopath, we're hedging our bets and alternating his bottles between dairy and lactose-free. Hopefully, the nappie boulder was just a result of our having rushed his system into taking a new formula and is not indicative of something else.

In the meantime, here's a pic of the boy chowing down on some sure-to-be-constipating rice cereal in his super fancy, Swedish high chair. I'd hate to have to put it in hock just so we could keep him in formula that tastes like toilet water.

Armistice

The War on Breastfeeding is finally over. It was a long war -- 5 months -- and there were many casualties, nearly all of them financial. In the end, we didn't so much lose the war as we simply agreed to stop fighting it. As I'm sure you can all guess, this was not a decision arrived at lightly by Hurricane Kitty, but luckily it doesn't mean the end of the breast pump. The only thing that she likes more than playing with her son is sitting in dark closets for 20 minutes at a time with a large vacuum attached to her chest while the people outside stare at the door and wonder what in God's name is going on in there.

I'm sure it would be tougher to let that go.

But now that it is over, we must direct our attention elsewhere. We must focus on the tools that we now must use to grow our boy up healthy and strong. I'm speaking, of course, of super fancy high-tech baby bottles and ridiculously expensive imported small-batch artisanal formulas.

When the Ninja was in his final stages of arrival, Kitty and I got in an argument on the depressing drive to Hell on Earth. Kitty was explaining about how, when we introduce the bottle, we would need to have several kinds available to ensure that we had one that Finn would take. I pondered that thought for about 3 seconds before declaring it "full of crap." "There are no differences between baby bottles," I exclaimed with absolutely zero knowledge on the subject. "It's just a jar with a nipple, why do we have to buy more than one kind?"

First off, I'm an idiot. Secondly, I had not yet learned about BPA and how it is guaranteed to kill your child within 30-seconds of it entering the house. Kitty knew both of those things already and we left Babies R Us seventeen hours later with two bottles: BPA-free Born Free and BPA-filled Dr. Brown's. Of course, Finn hated the Born Free. Turns out, this was OK because I loved the Dr. Brown's. There are so many parts! It's like you're putting together a model car 6 times a day! Unfortunately, there was the BPA.

I don't know how much you guys know about Seattle, but there are two things residents here excel at: looking down their noses at you and passive agression. I was afraid that if I were out in public, feeding Finn from a bottle with BPA, that legions of Seattleites would pedal their recumbent bicycles over, stop right next to us, and discuss with one another the risk that I was posing to my child while watching out of the corners of their eyes to make sure I could hear them. That on its own wouldn't bother me, but I'd be worried that they'd spill their half-caff non-fat triple grande lattes on the boy and I'm afraid their North Face jackets wouldn't clean that up very well.

So I did what I do best. I searched for the most expensive bottle I could find. With the BPA scare in full effect, BPA-free plastics and glass bottles are all the rage. I couldn't find a Dr. Brown's BPA-free bottle at the time, so I began my hunt for the Dr. Brown glass bottle. I probably would have had an easier time finding Nessie. These things were sold out all over the interwebs. Amazon.com had them for $50 a pop, when list price is only $15. If I was going to pull this off, I would have to rely on the most important skill that I learned in college.

Those of you that misspent your youth and young adulthood in the same way that I did are likely very good at this too. I'm speaking, of course, of scoring tickets to sold out shows. I can count on 1/2 of one hand how many concerts that I've been shut out of. Working the phones, while filling out my mail-order and simultaneously hitting refresh on my browser used to be old hat. The problem here is that unlike on-sale dates for concerts, none of the baby bottle sites would tell you when the bottles were coming back in stock. You had to wait for an email and jump right on them. I was 15 minutes late on the first email and 7 minutes late on the second and stock was sold out before I got there. It wasn't until the seventh email that I hit paydirt.

I've now succeeded in doing this twice, since I had forgotten that I had to buy bottles for daycare too. I had to give them my first score, because I certainly didn't want to look like a bad parent feeding my kid BPA.

I won't get into the formula bit here, since my fingers are bleeding from typing, but here's what my bottle setup looks like now. Pretty sweet, huh? Let me know if any of you want to come over and put some of these bad boys together. It's a good time.

5 Months Young

Happy Birthday Finn! You better enjoy these month birthdays while they last, because once you pass the year mark, you only get 1 per year and that's if you're lucky. Are you feeling lucky? Daddy usually steals the Aries show and now I have 2 of you I need to fete. Woe is me.

Here's Finn dwarfing his newborn girlfriend Layla. He's like, "Check me out baby, I'm HUGE, my feet were twice that size at birth!"

....and here is Finn's 5 month head shot. We think he is drooling at a 6 month level. Check out his "Blue Steel". How about next month we stop getting up at 5:00 AM every morning, huh?

Like father, not at all like son

The Ninja has fought the dreaded Coxsackie and has emerged victorious. In fact, watching Finn cruise his way through hand, foot & mouth disease, something became very apparent. My son is way tougher than I am. Even though his hands, feet and face were covered in angry little "beauty spots," he was for the most part still happy, smiling and laying waste to his bottles and porridge.

If I stub my toe, I complain about it for at least a day and a half. Loudly.

But I'm a wuss. Luckily the boy didn't catch that from me. He's apparently caught his mom's grit. This is clearly great news, as I don't think the house could have handled another crying baby. I've got that role nailed.

In other "baby disease" news, Scott & Jena hosted a "get my new baby as sick as possible, please" party this past weekend in honor of their new arrival, Layla. They called it an Open House, but I think my name is more on target. The entire gang and their ever expanding brood showed up. This was both sweet and sad. Sweet because it's always nice to meet a new baby. Sad because this is my social life now. We no longer discuss how we're going to score tickets to Phish in Vegas. We now discuss formula and whether you get a price break if you buy a case.


Here's a pic of Finn and his newly enlarged baby harem. I like his odds. Unfortunately, he's staring at Layla a little too transparently.

Finn, that's not good game. We'll need to work on that.

Worst. Ninjas. Ever.

Only in New Jersey:

Two “modern day Ninjas” calling themselves Shinobi Warriors on a quest to rid the area of drug users and drug dealers have been put out of business by police.

Tadieusz Tertkiewicz, 20 (left), and Jesse Trojaniak, 19

Officer before dawn yesterday approached a car parked in the left lane of Route 46 east and found two Clifton men dressed in black claiming to be Ninjas.

The men were wearing tactical vests and armed with knives in sheaths at their waists along with Ninja throwing knives, Chinese throwing stars, four-pointed tacks, swords, bows and arrows and nunchucks, said Detective Capt. Robert Rowan.

Jesse Trojaniak, 19, and Tadieusz Tertkiewicz, 20, told police they were “modern day Ninjas” also called Shinobi Warriors on their way to deliver warning letters to known drug dealers and drug users to stop their “impure” activities.

I'm pretty sure that Finn could have done a better job at ninja-ing than these guys, and he's four months old. Letters are for wussies. Ninjas don't write letters, they flip out and kill people. Everyone knows that.

Here's a pic of the real Ninja taking out a suspected milk dealer. She doesn't stand a chance.

Coxsackie

Life in the Parker house (a.k.a. Mudville) has been kind of dull lately, since we appear to be in between milestones. The boy is still rolling over (yawn), grabbing his feet (booooring) and laughing (I wonder if Quantum Leap is on?). So it was with great relief that we learned yesterday that Finn has hand, foot & mouth disease, which we shall refer to as Coxsackie. Why Coxsackie? Three reasons:

1. It sounds dirty. In a bathroom humor kind of way. And I like that.
2. Someone else already stole the other angle that I would have used to make the funny. I hate that.
3. Plus, it's actually the name of the virus that causes hand, foot & mouth. Look it up. What are you waiting for? A link?
   

Anyway, as far as Coxsackie (now you say it) goes, it looks like we've got a mild case. His sores must not be bothering him too much, since he still has plenty of energy to shatter everything his idiot parents leave within his reach. We're keeping him doped up on Tylenol drops to manage the fussiness, so it's been relatively easy so far¹. Of course, he is throwing up on me like I'm an IHOP waitress working the night shift in a college town.

Waiter. I mean IHOP waiter.

The plus side is that I was already planning on working from home yesterday, to help out our wonderful daycare providers who have just adopted an adorable little girl named Layla. This then gave me the opportunity to spare the rest of the daycare from the dreaded Coxsackie and to have the time to take Finn to the doctor.

Informed that he was not going to die from his affliction, he spent the day answering my emails with the poor grammar and clipped sentence structure befitting a true captain of industry. Since I couldn't get any good pictures of the boy's little happy-spots, due to poor lighting and an excess of vomit, here's a picture of him helping me work.

He looks real sick, doesn't he? Faker.


In other news, the Ninja got weighed again at the doctor and he had gained an astonishing 1 lb. in 10 days, thanks I suppose to the rice mush. 1 lb. in 10 days. We better get fatso on a diet ASAP.

_____________

¹ Jinx.

Ninjas of the Caribbean

Anyone who knows anything about Ninjas knows that they really don't like pirates. So it was with great trepidation that we agreed to go out on Rob & Holly's new boat last weekend, not entirely sure that Finn wouldn't ruin the day by picking a fight with one of the Seafair Pirates on Lake Washington.

Luck was with us and we didn't sight a single Jolly Roger. We did, however, sight a hilarious little boy in a life vest. Doesn't he look pleased with the situation? Notice the convenient handle. That was really the selling point for the vest. That and the ducky.


We were initially concerned about bringing the boy out on the water, but we saw a video that totally erased any fear we had. We didn't get to test out his new techniques, but that's probably a good thing. We'll save those moves for the next pool party we're invited to. That trick will make us the hit of the party for sure. Push. Splash. Awesome.

Any day on the water is a good day. It was overcast (because it is Seattle, after all), but that just meant we had the whole lake to ourselves and we didn't have to worry about frying our little albino sailor. Finn didn't look entirely comfortable in the life jacket, but that might have been Uncle Rob's driving.

We'll have to try again next weekend just to make sure.