Gametes In Love

Thanx to my beer post, I got a lot of good suggestions for beer. Thank you for that!

I also got a recipe for cookies that incorporate several ingredients also known for boosting supply. I made them last week-end, but read the recipe incorrectly and didn’t make them right. They were very tasty, mind you — but all the important ingredients were there in part, so they weren’t fully potent.

So today, I made them the right way. Still taste yummy and I’m very pleased with myself.

Ta-da!!!

I changed the original recipe by adding nuts and white chocolates (in addition to the milk chocolate chips).

For those that care, here’s the recipe:

1 cup butter
1 cup sugar
1 cup brown sugar
4 tbsp water
2 tbsp flaxseed meal (no subs)
2 large eggs
1 tsp vanilla
2 cup flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
3 cup Thick cut oats
1 cup chocolate chips
1 cup white chocolate chips
1 cup chopped nuts
3 tbsp Brewers Yeast (no substitutions)

Preheat oven at 375.
Mix the flaxseed meal and water, set aside 3-5 minutes.
Cream butter and sugar.
Add eggs.
Stir flaxseed mix into butter mix and add vanilla.
Beat until well blended.
Sift dry ingredients, except oats and choc chips.
Add butter mix to dry ing.
Stir in the oats, nuts and the choc chips.
Drop on parchmant paper on baking sheet.
Bake 8-12 minutes.

After 5 months of eating off the mom G is ready for some variety in his diet. That’s right folks, solids are right around the corner and since I want to ease him into the experience we began “practicing”.

What does practicing for solids entail? Essentially me feeding plain breast milk to G out of a spoon and his little dish while he’s sitting in his high-chair. I wanted him to start associating his chair, the spoon and the colorful dishes we got him with food time, and I also wanted him to start food-time with something I guaranteed he’d eat. I really didn’t want to start the process with a food he might dislike and then associate our setup with something yucky coming.

It went well.

He got the hang of the spoon pretty quickly, although he needed to learn the hard way that a spoon won’t fit in the mouth if a hand is already in there (and vise-versa). He’s really into putting his fingers in his mouth right now, and couldn’t wait to follow each spoonful of milk with a little thumb chaser.

I had to learn (also the hard way) that feeding a baby is a little like racing a car through an obstacle course. You see, a colorful spoon is very interesting to a kid that likes to wave his arms about. You have to duck the spoon and get it back on track while arms are moving all about. Food flinging is not a sport I want to participate in right now (and to be honest, probably never).

Here are some pics of our eventful day:

Adorable, right? The little drool down his chin, just cracked me up. I was very impressed with how little spilled. We only did an ounce of milk and almost all of it went in his tummy.

We’ll keep at this milk-only routine for the next few weeks. President’s Day week-end will be our first experience with rice cerial. Ooooh! It will be so thin, it will flow like milk, but we’ll see how he takes to it.

I had hoped that we could wait to do solids as close to 6 months as possible, but the 3 day week-end feels like a convenient time to start and the kid is really starting to devour more than I can produce. I  send about 22oz of milk per day to day care with him and he’s apparently asking for more. Those 22oz require me to pump 6 times during the day, and wakeup at 2am on top of it, so I’m maxing out my capability here. We tried giving him formula to supplement anything over that and although it was acceptable to him on a few occasions in the past, he turns it down now. So… I’m trying not to rush to solids too much, but I’m starting to reach my limit of what I can provide to him personally.

Our plan of attack is that he’ll still do all of his meals at day care from a bottle. After school he’ll get his ‘momma-direct’ meal and then follow up with a solid. “New” solids we’ll introduce only week-end mornings. This way all his bowl & spoon eats will be with us until he starts having more than one meal a day be a solid one.

He’s growing up fast, huh?

There was a period of time when I believed that I wouldn’t be consuming any alcohol until Griffin was weaned. But as it turns out my consumption of beer is almost “prescribed”.

I, sadly, am not one of the lucky moms who produce a great deal of milk. G gets what he needs for his weight group and nothing more. I’ve tried Fenugreek supplements, the teas, the oatmeal, the extra pumping, but I gotta tell you out of all of the above what’s worked (surprisingly so) has been beer. Yeah, no joke. Beer!

Beer is supposed to help with breast milk production.  More specifically, if you want to get nerdy, the polysaccharides in barley stimulate prolactin.

Yet I don’t like beer. Tequila, wine, cocktails… yummy… but beer? No thanx! It has a bitter taste, that I just don’t enjoy.

Still, I was out with some colleagues for lunch yesterday and everyone ordered a beer, so I figured… “Sure, why not? I’ll give the “old-wives tale” a shot!” I drank half of my “lunch beer” (yes, that’s how it was ordered) and at my next pump — immediate response. Nothing miraculous, mind you, but enough for me to be able to tell. I repeated the experiment at dinner with another half a glass, and again I had some good results.

I’m surprised! I never thought I’d be finding myself consuming alcohol in the name of my child, yet here I am.

I’m not getting drunk here, to be clear, but it looks like I’ll be integrating half a pint of beer to my diet once in awhile.

Now the trick is finding out what beer I tolerate. I feel so immature really because I don’t know what to order. I just don’t really know what’s out there. Tonight at dinner, due to the lack of “menu” of beers, I ordered one based on the highlighed sign at the window of the restaurant. I got lucky, it was fine (Sierra Nevada Pale Ale if you’re curious), but I gotta study up on my beers. So, if there’s anything a beer-novice should try, give me your recommendations.