Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Iron Baby Marathon

So, at Valerie's nine-month check-up, they pricked her toe and tested her iron levels. It was 9.8, which meant nothing to me, but apparently it's slightly on the low side. The doctor said she wanted it to be at least 11, and suggested that we give Valerie supplements. Knowing that constipation is a common side effect of iron supplements, and not wanting to further exacerbate a problem that Valerie was already dealing with, I asked the doctor if we could just make sure she gets more iron in her diet. She smiled knowingly, and warned me how difficult it is to correct an iron deficiency with diet, but said that she would let me try, since 9.8 is low, but not dangerously low. We made a follow-up appointment for six weeks later, and went home and read everything there is on the Internet about iron-rich diets.

(If you ever happen to be in this situation, I'll save you a bit of googling. Start here, for the basics. Then go here for a detailed drill-down of the nutritional content of every edible thing in the universe.)

The first thing that hit me when I was doing my reading was how many iron-rich foods are associated with the opposite of constipation. Dark leafy greens, beans and legumes, bran, PRUNE JUICE. Prune juice is high in iron? Did you hear that, pregnant women around the world whose iron supplements are causing you gastrointestinal distress? Dietary iron solves both problems at once! Constipation can also be a symptom of an iron deficiency, so it makes sense from a homeopathic perspective that iron supplements often cause constipation. Like cures like, and all that. If you need the iron, supplements may fix the problem, but if you don't need them, then they can cause the problem. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, read this.)

All the more resolved not to give my baby iron supplements, we set to work on making sure her diet was as iron-dense as possible. We gave her beef and turkey meat (dark meat is best). We gave her all kinds of boiled greens (she loved the kale!). We gave her lentils and beans. We continued to give her sweet potatoes and avocado and broccoli, which were already some of her favorite foods. Since we are doing baby-led weaning with her (a finger foods approach to introducing solid foods), we gave her these things straight up, cooked until tender when necessary, but not blended into rice cereal or anything, and not spooned into her mouth. It was up to her to choose from all of the lovely, ironful options and eat herself healthy. If you're a control freak, then I don't recommend this method. But if you can trust nature to do its thing, then it's great. The theory behind it is that babies will give their bodies what they need, so if they need iron, they will choose to eat foods with iron. And Valerie did. She didn't like everything we offered her, and one day she would eat a whole leaf of kale only to ignore it completely the next day and go for the sweet potato instead, but overall, she seemed to be doing a pretty good job at filling her belly with the right kinds of things.

Valerie chooses from an array of iron-rich foods

Today was her six-week hemoglobin check, which was probably in the appointment book as "prove to this crazy mom that she can't possibly feed her baby enough red meat to raise her iron levels and write her a prescription for iron supplements." And honestly, I wasn't even convinced that iron-loading Valerie's diet would have done the trick, and I was just hoping that her iron levels would have at least stayed the same, and not have gone down. I knew we had done our best, and I was happy to have discovered the many health benefits of prune juice if nothing else. The nurse took Valerie's blood, then went into the other room to check it. We could hear her exclamation of joy through the walls, and the doctor came in and told us that it had gone up to 12.2! Hooray for overachieving! I have to tell you, the best words in the world to hear your doctor say are, "Keep on doing what you're doing."



A few tips and tricks for parents who might want to iron-load their babies' diets:
-Make sure you give your baby a mix of heme and non-heme iron, to increase absorption. Vitamin C also improves iron absorption, which you can get from all kinds of melon. Just cut finger-shaped strips of ripe melon for the baby to gnaw on.
-Edamame (soy beans) are soft enough to chew without teeth. I was able to get them from Trader Joe's pre-cooked and pre-peeled, and I would just give them to Valerie cold. (Pictured in the center of Valerie's tray in the above picture.)
-Roll anything slippery (like avocado or fruit) in wheat germ. It makes it easier to grip, and adds iron.
-Prune jello jigglers! It sounds silly, but this was one of Valerie's favorite iron-rich foods. Just sprinkle a packet of plain, unflavored gelatin on top of 1/2 cup of cold prune juice. Let it sit for one minute, then add 1/2 cup of boiling water and stir for a few minutes until completely dissolved. Add one tablespoon of blackstrap molasses (also high in iron!), then pour into a small rectangular dish (I used a Chinese take-out container) and refrigerate overnight. Cut into little rectangular cubes for the baby to enjoy! (Pictured on the right-hand side of the above picture.)
-Prune pancakes! Pancakes are a great finger food for babies, because they are soft and gummable, but firm enough to pick up. I prefer to make pancakes from scratch, but when I am feeling lazy, I use an "add water" mix. But I add prune juice instead of water! Valerie loved her prunecakes. Sometimes, I would mix some wheat germ or cooked greens into the batter, too, for added iron. (Pictured on the left-hand side of the above picture.)
-Big beans, like kidney beans, worked great on their own, but Valerie had a little more trouble picking up little things like lentils (which I really wanted to use, because they had the highest iron content). So, I made a yummy baked lentil dish (from the More With Less cookbook), then I mixed the lentils with some sushi rice to make little patties that she could pick up easily. I wish I had thought of rolling them in wheat germ, too, that would have been perfect.
-I never got around to trying this last one, but I will once my avocados ripen! Seaweed is very high in iron, and a friend of mine suggested making baby-sized California rolls with just avocado in the middle. What a great idea!
-Do you have any other ideas for iron-rich finger foods? Share them in the comments!


Sunday, June 07, 2009

Ten Months Old!

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Dear Valerie,

You are ten months old now! This month seems to have completely flown by. Maybe it's because it was such a busy, eventful month. Or maybe it's just because I took so long writing last month's birthday letter.

Unlike last month, this month was full of milestones. You cut your third tooth (May 16) and your fourth tooth (May 29). It's funny, because you have four teeth now, but none of them meet in the middle. Tooth number three came in on top, but off to one side, and tooth number four came in on the bottom, but off to the other side. It's not funny in a bad way, though. It's funny in a really unique, adorable way.

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You learned how to clap this month (May 26), and you take absolute delight in the attention you get when we clap for you, and you clap back to us. You've gotten quite efficient at crawling on your belly, and you'll even rock up onto your hands and knees and almost crawl a few times before dropping back to your belly and settling into the method you know works, for now. You've also learned to transition from a sitting position to a crawling position, and the combination of these things made it extremely difficult for me to get a birthday picture I was happy with this month. I would sit you up, with no toys nearby to detract from the photograph, and you would immediately drop to your belly and crawl away to a more interesting place. In order to distract you from crawling away, I would clap, and you would get excited enough about clapping to not crawl away, but then I couldn't get you to stop clapping and just smile for the camera. Oh well, I can't complain too much, when my photography problems are of such an adorable nature.

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You learned to sign this month, which is not only fun, but also opens up a whole new world of communication for us. You first did the sign for "milk" on May 16, and you have since also signed "all done" and "more". You bang on the table when you're thirsty, but I'm not willing to call that a "sign" even though I know what you mean, because I would much rather you find a way to communicate that particular need more gently. As soon as you started signing, I realized that I didn't know enough signs myself, and I felt bad for not introducing you to more signs before. We're trying to do more signs for you now, but you seem to have become impatient with us, and have started to make up your own signs. Once you figured out that you could talk with your hands, you started to "babble" with your fingers, wiggling them deliberately as if to say, "Is this a word? How about this?" One day, when you wanted me to turn on your mobile, you pointed at it, then made a little circle with your fingers, which I thought was pretty clever, especially since I had never signed "mobile" or "turn it on" to you before.

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You're also becoming increasingly verbal. You've been saying "dadadada" for a while, but you never seemed to directly associate the sounds with any particular person, it was just your newest sound to make for a while. But gradually, you started to use a string of da's to refer to your parents, and then, once you added "ma" to your vocabulary, you started to distinguish between the two, and use a string of da's for daddy, and a string of ma's for mommy. It's not exactly words yet, but person-specific sounds are pretty word-like in my books. Within the last week or so, you have also added "na" to your vocabulary, and just today, you distinctly said "Nana" when your Nana walked into the room. But that's technically a spoiler for next month's birthday letter, because you turned ten months old yesterday. Oops.

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This month was very full on the external events front as well. We had our first Mother's Day together, and your gift to me was that you let me take a very, very long nap. And honestly, I don't think I could have appreciated any other gift as much as that. We took our first trip to the shore together, but it was too windy to do much on the actual beach, other than run our fingers through the sand for a few minutes before heading back indoors. We'll take more trips to the shore, though, I promise. Jeremy's cousin got married this month, and you loved dancing with me in the sling at the reception, and you didn't complain too much when we didn't get home until after midnight. We have a pool membership for the summer at the pool where Nana and PopPop and the great-cousins all go, and we took our first trip to the pool this month, as well. It was incredibly warm on Memorial Day weekend, and once I figured out that I had to let you get wet really, really gradually, you ended up absolutely loving the pool, and staying in the water with me for over an hour.

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We went on our first family camping trip, to a forest in Virginia where we stayed in a cabin and Mommy and Daddy played role-playing games all weekend. You had a great time at Camp Nerdly. You were surprisingly content to hang out and play with your toys while I played games with my friends, and you managed to win over many gamers who had been wary of the prospect of having a baby on the camping trip. And just this past week, we had two sets of houseguests, and you absolutely loved all the attention. You especially loved having a temporary big sister and little brother. You and Leo, who is seven months old, would sit on the floor together, and hold hands, or trade toys, or roll over on top of each other, and just generally show friendship in a way that only babies can. It was a great visit, and I was sad to see our friends leave. At least you'll get to see my Uncle Keith and Aunt Sharon again in a few weeks when then stop back in on their way home.

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Honestly, though, I think the thing that changed the most this month was me. I finally went shopping and bought clothes that fit me, the way my body is right now, rather than how it used to be, or how it might hopefully be again someday. I love being your mommy, but I haven't loved every change that has happened to me over the past 18 months or so, and it was a big step for me to finally say, okay, this is who I am right now, and I am going to be content in this skin. One day this month, I was sorting laundry, and as I was making piles to put away, I noticed that I was thinking, "Okay, this is Valerie's pile, and this is Mummy's pile, and this is Daddy's pile." And it dawned on me that I was thinking of myself, in my own head, in the third person, as "Mummy". (Or Mommy, or Mama. On this occasion, however, my Canadian childhood was definitely poking through with "Mummy." It sounds better when I say it than when I type it, though.) They say that you are truly bilingual when you start to count in your head in your second language, and I think the same logic applies here. My life changed completely the day I had you, but now my identity has followed suit as well. I haven't stopped being Jule Ann, but I am now wholeheartedly "Mummy".

Love,
Mummy

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Monday, June 01, 2009

This is why I'm a bad blogger

This is my Memorial Day weekend, in point form, to demonstrate part of why I am terrible at blogging.

-Thursday morning, work at 5
-Thursday afternoon/evening, spend time with Jer's parents and grandparents (who are visiting from out of town), dinner at Ruby Tuesday's
-Friday morning, work at 5
-Friday afternoon, necessary nap
-Friday evening, Jer's cousin's wedding, 90 minutes away. Home after midnight.
-Saturday morning, sleep in a little bit
-Saturday afternoon, picnic in the park, volleyball
-Saturday evening, dinner with Jer's parents and grandparents
-Sunday morning, church, get there early to drum with the worship team
-Sunday afternoon, necessary nap
-Sunday night, go out for a coworker's birthday, home after 2
-Monday morning, work at 5:30
-Monday afternoon, family barbecue
-Monday evening, gaming until well after midnight
-Tuesday, no work, collapse into a quivering mass of recovery.

It sure was fun, though, but who has time to blog in the midst of all that? On the upside Jer has finally finished the massive computer project that he was working on that was preventing me from uploading and editing photos and videos. So, I can finally post pictures again! On the downside, I now have 60 minutes of video clips and 3.5 gigs of photos to sort through. I may find time next month. Maybe.