All images Shot with my Tamron AF 28-75mm f/2.8 Lens lens and canon 430 ex II speedlite at these settings:
f3.2
SS 1/5oth (dragging the shutter)
ISO 200
Flash fired – more on this later!

The discovery of the puffs comes at an opportune time as he is refusing to eat solids and hasn’t been breastfeeding much either because, well,  remember how I said the tooth came through and he wasn’t bothered?  Do you also remember Jasper’s Law?  Yep, that tooth I thought was “through” was only really JUST coming to the surface last week.  This weekend it really broke through and poor Jasper is truly suffering.. he’s clingy, whiny, has no appetite and has been hitting himself in the mouth and pulling on his left ear ( the side where the tooth is.)

I’ve been giving him Motrin and even attempted orajel last night out of desperation.. what a joke that is! He thrusts his tonge out as soon as I try to get in there, so I basically succeed in numbing the tip of his tongue which he HATES.

I hope the worst is over, but this being his first tooth I have no idea when to expect the pain to subside.  I thought when it breaks through it is supposed to be some relief, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. Ah well, 1 tooth (almost) down, 19 more to go. Kill me now.

So aside from teething teething teething, the other (more fun) development is that Jasper has decided that cruising/standing while holding on is not nearly challenging enough. Nope, not for my little daredevil. A few days after starting to cruise and already he’s got to try and balance and stand on his own… (look ma, no hands!)

You can imagine how well THAT has been going! Every time I look away there’s a thud of Jasper falling on his butt, or worse his face.  Poor monkey :(

I guess I didn’t realize they progress so quickly from pulling up through cruising and right to trying to stand unassisted.  Does this mean he’ll be walking soon too or do they stand months before they try to take a first step? I suppose every kid is different, but I’d love to hear from you moms who have been there what the timeline was for your babes.

On an unrelated topic..

A few days ago I read a thread on Ilovephotography.com about using a speedlite and getting natural looking (i.e. “non flashy”) images and it was a total “aha” moment.

Basically the technique is called “dragging the shutter” (tutorial here) where you use your flash but set your shutterspeed low (below 1/60th) so that the slow shutter exposes the ambient room light up to the level of brightness of your subject.  You can use a low shutterspeed and not get motion blur because the flash essentially “freezes” the motion of the subject to some exent.

The suggested settings for this technique are f set around 4, shutterspped around 1/40th and ISO 200-400, though you need to play with the settings and also your flash powerto make sure you’r exposing correctly. The flash ideally should be bounced behind  you (I did it behind and up at a 45 degree angle) so that the light source behind you shows up as catchlights in the subjects eyes.

I was so excited to try it.. and even more so when it actually worked! Look at these images, they both use flash but have catchlights and not pinlights :

Both images shot with my Tamron AF 28-75mm f/2.8 Lens lens and canon 430 ex II speedlite at these settings:
f3.5/3.2
SS 1/5oth (dragging the shutter)
ISO 200

(The puffs images above were also taken with the speedlite.)

The other great thing about using flash is that it allows me to use my until-now-much-neglected Tamron zoom lens.. I didn’t realize how sharp and beautiful this lens is because I don’t have enough natural light to use it indoors,  but with the flash I do! All the images in this post were taken with the Tamron.

I’m really really excited about the possibilities using the speedlite opens up in terms of being able to use whichever lens and settings I want, not needing to worry so much about available light. The bottom line is that I highly recommend getting your hands on a speedlite if at all possible.

So that’s all you wanted to know and more about our weekend, I hope you all had a great one :)

PS, inside the puffs there is a coupon for buy one get one free happy baby frozen meals – a really great deal if you were considering trying them!

We had some friends over yesterday for a lovely BBQ that I will post about tomorrow, but today I have to fill you in on all the Jasper milestones that happend over the past few days..

Not only did he learn to stand up on his own last week, but he has now thankfully mastered the all important skill of getting down again! (This has cut down on the level of whining in our household  significantly.)

Also,  as the title of this post may have clued you in, we now have a cruiser!

He’s not exactly flying around the walls of baby jail, but he can get from one side to the other if he wants to (which you’ll see in one of the videos below).. and he’s quite comfortable up on his feet, even to the point of one handing it much of the time:

All images Shot with my CanonRebel  xsi, Sigma 30mm 1.4 lens and canon 430 ex II speedlite at these settings:
f3.2
SS 1/4oth (dragging the shutter)
ISO 100
Flash fired

As if that weren’t enough, he’s also started occasionally scooting/crawling with tummy off the ground!

I wasn’t sure that would ever happen because he’s lightning fast with the military crawling and even now I’m still not sure he won’t master walking before he ever text book crawls.

And, saving the biggest news for last, he finally, FINALLY cut a tooth!

Yep, sandwiched in between all these other huge milestones none of us ( including Jasper) seemed to have even noticed this momentous event.  I mean he did go a day or two where he just did NOT want to sleep, but he wasn’t extra cranky, he was just plain WIRED. Wired as in not even a little bit sleepy when naptime would come and go.. I have had to put him down 1 -1.5 hours after his normal bedtime the past few days!

I attribute that to his brain being on turbo the last week or two as a result of the developmental leaps and bounds taking place in that little body. Whatever the cause,  I hope the lack of fanfare surrounding his first tooth eruption bodes well for the next year + of teething we have ahead of us.

I caught a few of these new developments on camera, namely the getting down, NON miliatry crawling/scooting and also cruising towards a very specific object:

But if you have only a minute or two and want to see something guaranteed to put a smile on your face, watch this video of what he does when he reaches his goal in the first video:

Hope you all had a wonderful long weekend… Happy Start of Summer!

Have you seen my appetite?

Yesterday our lactation consultant came for a visit.

I mentioned last week that Jasper had been eating very little compared to normal and he was in acute discomfort,  so I figured it was just teething… The thing is that the teething monster disappeared this past weekend as quickly and mysteriously as he appeared – but still no tooth!

So now we are on week three of loss of appetite, no active teething and my supply is adjusting down to his decreased needs. Which would be ok I guess, except I still need to pump which is becoming very difficult. (Where I normally used to pump about 2.5 oz from one breast I am now lucky to get 2 – 2.5 oz  from both!)

When I say loss of appetite I’m talking about him taking about 1-3 ounces of his bottles at daycare when his normal intake is about 5 to 5.5 oz.

I really wanted to know how much he was getting from me when he nurses, which is one of the reasons I had the LC come because she does a before and after nursing weight check so we know exactly what he took in.

With our L.C. Julie in the room, Jasper was really distractable – he wanted to check her out and flirt rather than stay on the breast so he popped on and off and nursed for maybe 3 minutes. But then again, that is fairly normal behavior for him at this point.  In that time he took in 2.4 oz, a fairly big drop from his normal intake.

Julie said that loss of appetite is normal while teething (some babies even go on nursing strikes!) as is distractability at his age, but that we would need to plot his growth to know if it is a concern at this point. Clearly he is thriving (he is 18 lbs 1 oz) and not withering away, but my feeling is he’s living off previously accumulated chub!

Julie didn’t have her growth chart with her to plot his data points and of course I am too impatient to wait for her to email it to me so I found this great website babygrowthchart.org where you can enter your baby’s height, weight and the date they were recorded and it outputs the height and weight percentiles for you and plots them on a chart.

Here is Jasper’s:

His weight is the shorter green line in the middle and the yellowish/whitish line in the middle is the 50th percentile. You can see how he started out above (at 68th% ) when born, and then hugs the 50% for a while, briefly going above it in December (56th%) and since then has steadily declined until now when he is at the 38th%.

Clearly his lack of appetite is causing a corresponding dip in his weight gain.  Interestingly though he has shot up in height from the 20th% when born to the 70th% now!  That at least is a relief.

Has anyone experienced a prolonged lack of appetite during teething (i.e. more than just the few days or week before the tooth comes in)? Do you all think I should make an appointment with the pediatrician? If not, how long do I let this go on before wondering if there something else wrong? Or is this nothing to be concerned about at all?

All images hot with my Digital Rebel
Sigma 30mm 1.4 lens at these settings:
F 2.5
Shutter speed 1/80th
ISO 200.
Backdrop: upholstery weight fabric on clearance from Joannes.

View the whole set here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/45102966@N00/sets/72157616101780692/

Taking the images above were the only bright spot of an otherwise hellish weekend.

I don’t know what rock  I’ve been living under, but I had NO idea that cutting teeth would be this awful.

I now have a theory that new parents live in denial about the challenging stages that lie ahead every bit as much as we get amnesia about the ones that have passed… what else can explain the fact that I wasn’t terrified of teething? And I truly believe it’s better that way.

Because let me tell you, had I even had the slightest idea it would be this bad I would have been up every night worrying about it since he started drooling and putting everything in his mouth that wasn’t nailed down.

So this has been our last 3 days:

Me: Here Jasper, maybe your favorite toy the piano will cheer you up..

Jasper: eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh

Me: OK, how about the new cell phone toy..

Jasper: eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh

Me: Hmm, not feelign the toys huh? How bout some milk?

Jasper: eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh

Me: Ok, you’re not hungry…put these cold teething toys from the refrigerator in your mouth..

Jasper (turning his head away): eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh

You get the picture.

It’s been one constant whine. I seriously have not been able to put him down!

In desperation I called one of my girlfriends Tracy, mother of a 1 year old.

Me: “You didn’t tell me I should put him up for adoption before his first tooth started to come in”

Tracy: “Uh huh, It’s like where did my sweet baby go and who is this asshole that’s now in her place?”

Poor Jasper, I feel absolutely horrible for him, as hard as this is for me I know it’s ten times harder on him. It’s just then I’ve been alone at home with him for three days straight and I’m seriously about to lose my mind. I actually counted the minutes until every nap and bedtime and will never be happier to drop him off at daycare this morning.

I can’t believe I’m saying that! I must be the word’s worst mommy!

The worst part is that NOTHING I’m doing seems to be helping. He doesn’t like the mesh feeder, he doesn’t like the cold toys, he doesn’t  like the teething tablets, he HATES oragel. Tylenol didn’t seem to have any effect. The only thing that seems to offer any sort of relief is Motrin. And I use the word “relief” loosely, as in there was a 15 minute period where he only whined for about 2/3 the time instead of the entire time.

I take that back. Maybe the real worst part is that I can’t even really see what’s going on in there.  Every time I try to look he sticks his tongue out and/or does a raspberry in protest. I did see the blood blisters back on Wednesday, but haven’t seen them since and he won’t let me in there to get a good look. It’s very frustrating to not know if we’re even making progress towards the magic moment of break through!

So please, give me your failsafe teething remedies, I’ll try anything!

Yours in desperation.

PS, If you haven’t already, go enter the Dano giveaway this morning because I’ll be choosing and anouncing the winner this afternoon!