On the poop deck

(Warning: discussion of gastrointestinal function ahead.)

"I don't need 'positories any more!" Maia said brightly yesterday. Then she took a wipe and tried to stuff it up her ducky's butt.

We went to Seattle last week. While we had a good time overall, travel didn't agree with Maia's digestive system. There were no poops for the first two days, and when she was straining but getting nothing out, we decided to use suppositories, which we've used for her once before. They were highly effective then, but she was ambivalent about them--she knew they worked, but she didn't like how they went in, which I really can't blame her for--and refused these. Of course, being two, her refusal didn't mean as much as she might have wished. We administered several of them, as well as tons of fruit and juice and gummy fiber pills (Chloë also had a couple since they tasted yummy, she said, but since she didn't need any of that sort of help and we're the ones who wipe her butt, she went off them), and eventually a vegetable laxative pill.

She didn't do terribly well the remainder of the trip, but it wasn't so bad we wanted to take her to a doctor. She did start crossing her legs when she was straining, presumably because it hurt--she mentioned this a couple of times when I was changing her, so I took extra care cleaning her, and when I forgot once told me, "Wipe gentwy!" We discouraged the leg-crossing, and by a couple days after we got back, she had gotten back to normal consistency and frequency. She got milk today for the first time in a week.

We're not sure how much each remedy helped, but I'm fairly confident that getting back to her normal schedule was a part of it. Funny how travel can affect something like digestion and excretion. She didn't have this problem our last trip out, admittedly. But it certainly wasn't the change in diet, since Mom and Dad pushed fruit and vegetables even more than we do.

On clothes

It's a household of girls, we're interested in clothes, right? Maia doesn't care much yet, except that she seemed to violently object to my pajamas this morning. She's had very little spit-up so far, but she made up for it today in one huge vomit that got her left side, my right side, and one of the rocker's arms. She seemed quite happy both before and after, but I was less than pleased, especially since it meant hopping into the shower when I was supposed to leave in ten minutes. This is why I don't put on my work clothes until just before I leave in the morning.

Chloë, on the other hand, gets ever more opinionated about her clothes. Her Big Sister shirt (but the one without the stain on it; oh, no, we can't wear a shirt with a stain on it--which is an extremely unfortunate attitude in a toddler, especially one whose favorite dinner is pasta) and her bee shirt are her favorites, and she'll ask after them for days after they've been worn and put in the wash. I've been trying to get her in dresses once in a while, and she'll sometimes allow me to put them on her, but then she insists on getting out of them again. Mom recently sent a couple with sparkly bits on them, and since Chloë adores "parky" on her clothes, we may have better success with those.

And as for me: Hooray, I'm wearing jeans for the first time in nearly a year! Well, I had maternity jeans, but that's not the same. These are the stretchy ones and they're tighter than usual, but still: I can wear jeans for Casual Friday again!

You may think it's funny, but it's not

Nobody told me about the boogers. The diapers, yes, and the milk, and the sleep deprivation and the crying, but not the boogers. I admit it could be worse. But Chloë is quite a snotty girl at the moment (recovering from a cold), and quite a willful one as well--approach her nose with a cloth or a Kleenex and she moves her head to the side. She used to like the bulb, but she avoids that now too. Try to keep her still and she shakes her entire body violently back and forth and screams. This just gets the boogers smeared across her face, and sometimes my shirt and hand, so lately I've given up. But that means that she gets crusty formations around her nostrils. Which means that when I can (mostly when we're nursing), I get to pull hard booger nuggets out of her nose. I'm telling you, the glamour of this job just doesn't fade.