Is Breast milk REALLY Best?

**NOTE**
I LOVE breastfeeding. I hope to nurse Tori until at least her first birthday. Just thought you should know that before reading this.

I hear that all the time. "Breast milk is best." Yeah, well, what if it makes your baby scream and cry and puke all day? Is it still best? I nursed Tori for 3 1/2 months exclusively. She fussed/cried/screamed and spit up all day every day. I tried changing my diet. No dairy. No chocolate. No caffeine. No vitamin C. No onions. No garlic. No difference. The doctor says "clearly, it's reflux. Let's medicate her." I try the horribly expensive medicine and it seems to help. Turns out, it was mostly just wishful thinking on my part. It seemed to help for a week or two, then we were back to non-stop screaming and barfing. After nearly 4 months of doing everything in my power to make my baby happy, I give up. I put her on formula. TA DA! It's like she's a brand new baby! I can put her down and let her play with toys. I can sit down while I hold her. I can have a phone conversation now that doesn't involve me putting her in her room and shutting the door so I can hear. I'm bitter. Formula is stupidly expensive and I make A TON of breast milk!! I have a minor breakdown in the pediatrician's office for her 4 month check up. She has been on formula for a whole week at this point and I am starting to like being her mother. He tells me to keep nursing. Breast milk is ALWAYS best. She's gaining weight and thriving, so I should keep nursing her. Eventually, she SHOULD stop crying. Sorry, Doc, not gonna happen. I'm going to pump to keep my milk production up and donate it to sick babies who need it. I'll give Tori formula for a month, then try nursing her again. If she starts in with the screaming and puking again, I'll pump for another month and try it again when she's 6 months old. After that, I'll probably give up. Pumping is a pain and right now I'm spending twice the amount of time because I have to pump and give bottles several times a day. I feel good about donating my milk to sick babies, so that cuts down on the "bitterness factor" a little. To put Tori to sleep tonight, I pumped myself empty and let her nurse herself to sleep. It was sad because I knew I was just a pacifier instead of the person providing the greatest nutrition she could get. This whole thing sucks. If anyone has any great advice, I could really use it because I've done everything I can think of. In the meantime, thank goodness for Enfamil. It sure is making my life better these days.

Family Reunion

We just spent a few days in Lincoln City, OR with Ben's family for a mini-family reunion. We had a nice time (though some would say the weather wasn't great) and Jim got some GREAT pictures. There were too many to just list here, so I made a slide show. I love getting new pictures of my kids! It took a lot of work to get pictures of Tori smiling, but we managed to get a few good ones. :-)

Good Times with Old Friends

We had the privilege of spending a few hours with some of our old friends from BYU on Saturday. The Carters live in California, but they were up here on a road trip. It works out well because our kids are the same gender and about the same ages! The menfolk played paintball for a few hours while the kids played and Nancy and I talked about babies and the joys of motherhood. :-) When the guys were sufficiently covered in splattered paint, we went to the park and had pizza and let the kids run around like crazy people. Tyler and Benjamin had a blast. Two days later he's still talking about his friend who likes all the same things that he likes. The girls played dress up and watched Cinderella. Tori was sort of a pain, but that's what she likes to do best. After seeing their angelic little baby, I got a little jealous (she actually lets her mom put her down without screaming!) but I love my little girl and wouldn't trade her for anything in the world. I just hope she grows out of this crying thing soon (of course if she grows much more, I won't be able to hold her!). Here's a couple of pictures of our fun at the park.


I'm always amazed at the upper body strength that kids have! Just hanging like that for a few seconds and my arms hurt!

Steven took a picture of himself and I thought it was funny.

Here's a few other pictures from the park. Check out Tori's cheeks. I am a little afraid she's going to get stretch marks if they don't stop growing soon!

My New Hobby

I have a new hobby! DIGITAL SCRAPBOOKING!! I realize I'm a little late on the scrapbooking train, but paper scrapbooking makes such a mess and it's so expensive and it just takes too much effort!! So, I've started using a free program called paint.net and getting stuff from free digital scrapbooking sites online. It's so much easier! Anyway, I thought I'd share some of my work with y'all.

Catching Up

Okay, just to warn you, this is going to be a whole bunch of unrelated stuff, but I thought they were all blog worthy so I'm just going to do it all at once. Every time I sit down to put something on here, my mind goes blank and I can't remember what I was going to do. I blame it on sleep deprivation. So, random thing numero uno:

My mom brought a frog over for the kids. This is unusual because my mom is DEATHLY afraid of frogs. She is (I'm not making this up) afraid that they will jump on her face and suck her brains out. Yeah. Enough said. So she had Sara (my brand new sister-in-law) catch this frog that she found outside and she brought it in a tupperware over to my house. What am I supposed to do with a frog? I have no where to keep it! She also brought some flowers from the reception, so we decided to let the frog "sleep" in the flowers while the kids ate their lunch. Sure enough, the frog disappeared. My mom was supposed to babysit that night and I was afraid that the frog would jump on her and she'd never come over again. When we got home, she hadn't seen the frog, but Sara found it hopping around the toy room. We put him outside and haven't seen him since. Here's some pictures. I caught the kids on video tormenting my mom with the frog, but it's too big to put on here, so just imagine Nicole chasing my mom around the living room with a tiny, harmless frog in her little hand. Pretty funny, I know.

Random event numero dos:
My brother got married!!! I know, this should probably go at the beginning of the post and it certainly could have a whole post all to itself, but this is the best I can do for now. David and Sara got married July 5 in St. Louis, MO. I flew back there for the wedding when Ben and the kids were in Utah. They had a reception that night in St. Louis and then had another one here on Saturday. It was a perfect night and everything was beautiful. I took my camera to get lots of good pictures, but I only ended up taking one picture. Do you want to see it?

Yes, that's right. The dessert table. I think I had 4 or 5 slices of cake. It was so good and the pieces were quite skinny, so it was easier to justify it at the time. Anyway, we all love Sara to death and we are soooo glad she's part of the family now. Here's a picture I took of the happy couple last night. Maybe I'll get some of the wedding pictures someday and you can see how beautiful she looked in her dress. The kids love her to death, despite the "I don't care" looks on their faces here:

This leads us to...
Random event numero tres:
Ben is playing in a city league lacrosse team in Hillsboro. Yeah, if you're thinking, "wow, that's a long way to go to play lacrosse for one hour" you'd be right. But he loves it so I guess it's worth it. I went to one of his games last night (my mom kept the baby, thanks!) and he looked great! We were sitting too far away to get any good action shots of him playing (didn't want the super hard lacrosse balls to fly in our direction) but here's a shot of him just before the game started.

Yes, he's grinning like an idiot because he's so excited to play. He played in high school and college and even coached high school lacrosse in Utah. I'm glad he gets a chance to play every once in a while, but it's a very violent sport and he always gets hurt (there's blood all over the sheets from some sort of injury at last night's game) so I hope he doesn't play too much.

Finally, to finish it off...
pictures of Tori:
She's starting to "look like a real person" in the words of my brother. I thought she looked pretty cute :-)

Our Day at the Park

We went to the park today for playgoup. It was a little chilly, but that's what jackets are for! Tori actually did pretty well (which means I still had to hold and bounce her, but she didn't scream the whole time). Tyler played with Tanner (his favorite friend) in the dirt and Nicole seemed pretty bitter about the whole thing. She played by herself most of the time. It was a little out of character for my little social butterfly, but she seemed to want some alone time, so whatever. Then I noticed that she was with some of the other kids a little ways off. When they all came back, everyone had these purple stains on their hands! It turns out they were playing in some berry bushes. Nicole said she put one in her mouth but it was too sour, so she "spitted" it out. I was glad. Hopefully, they were just blueberries and nothing harmful. Anyway, here's come pictures from our trip to the park today.

A trip down memory lane

So I found this on Janelle's blog and thought it looked pretty fun! Humor me okay?! I'm curious if you remember things that I don't.

Here are the directions:

1. As a comment on this post, leave one memory that you and I had together. It doesn't matter if you knew me a little or a lot, anything you remember!

2. Next, re-post these instructions on your blog and see how many people leave a memory about you. It's actually pretty funny to see the responses. If you leave a memory about me, I'll assume you're playing the game and I'll come to your blog and leave one about you.