Tag: parenting

The powder that Maxim is sucking off my finger seems to work. Yellow bits started to appear in his poo during the first day. More and more of yellow saturation comes in every day. Yellow is winning over green. These are good news.

Today I was turning some of my hair into grey. Seriously. I was trimming Maxim’s finger nails. It was done twice by his grandmother, so I was lucky. Today though I had to do it myself. For those of you not familiar with the procedure here is a short tour.

Firstly, imagine the sizes and fragility. A piece of paper is much thicker than Maxim’s nails. They are also very soft and small. A pair of tweezers needed to trim these nails looks like Godzilla’s jaws.

Secondly, I want to remind you that Maxim is not yet in control of his hands. He can barely guess that his hands are a part of him. He moves a lot without knowing so. He also has a bunch of reflexes which help him through the first days of his life. One of the reflexes is closing his hands into a fist when alert. The only way to have them stay still is wait until he falls asleep or really calms down during the second part of his feeding.

I was lucky with the first nine fingers. It took me about 5 minutes only to take care of them. The thumb of his left hand though was always trying to hide. Every time I was trying to open his hand he would go back to the alert mode and close the fist even stronger, putting his thumb under all other fingers. After about another 5 minutes of manouvering with Godzilla’s jaws around his tiny hand I finally managed to trim the thumb nail too.

During the procedure I was so concentrated and felt so much pressure that it made virtually all my muscles strain. But I am proud to report that no baby was hurt in the production of this post. Fortunately, this procedure needs to be done only about once a week.

Today we tried to feed some of that medicine to Maxim. It turned out to be a bit harder than we thought it would. The powder is not completely dissolving in water. It stays in the form of tiny particles, which don’t get through the bottle’s teat all that well. Instead, these particles gather together and close the flow throuth the teat. One has to shake the bottle every so often and than feed the mix again until the flow is closed, than repeat. Not much fun.

Getting the medicine in can be achieved by a number of tools from the “baby toolkit”, which we don’t own yet. Unfortunately. Buying one involves some time for investigation on the Internet and with other parents. And time we don’t have. Plus we really needed to feed Maxim the meds straight in and at that minute. So I let the engineering approach kick in…

As some of you might remember, one of my recent experiences with Maxim was him sucking my finger. This part worked, so I decided to use it. I washed my hands. Than I fed him some more from the bottle until it got stuck. Than I carefully disassembled the bottle, so that a whole bunch of those particles stayed in the bottle’s teat and wasn’t washed away. I put the whole bunch of semi-dissolved powder particles on my index finger and put it into Maxim’s mouth. He started sucking on to it. I knew that I had only about 10-20 seconds, so I used this time to assemble the bottle back and shake it a bit. The moment Maxim let my finger out I gave him the bottle. He sucked on to it too. When he spitted the teat out I inspected his mouth and made sure that all the medicine was gone. It worked.

He swallowed everything. He knew that I tricked him though, because he gave this “you my personal enemy for life now” look. I passed him on to his mother just to wash some of my guilt with her milk. I am so lucky he won’t remember this trickery…

Today we took Maxim for his 3-weeks pediatrician check. He was measured, tested, checked and looked into. He gained 300 grams since the last examination which was 9 days ago. He didn’t grow even one centimeter though.

It is also about time for Maxim’s hearing test, but dr.Simos is delaying it a bit, since there is still some water in Maxim’s right ear. This can trigger non-perfect results, so it is better to wait a bit until it disappears.

The biggest concern this time was Maxim’s poo color. During the last few days he is crapping with dark green substense more often than usual. As explained by dr.Simos, this is the sign of disbalance in the boy’s food processing department. There are all sorts of bacteria which are responsible for processing different elements, like water and fat. The green color of his poo shows that there are more of some bacteria than there should be and less of the other than there should be. This disbalance could have also caused his sleeping problems recently by the way. To solve the problem we were adviced to give him some medicine. The medicine is called Beneflora and is produced by good people of Ortis. Beneflora is a soluble powder which regulates digestion and “reinforces the body’s defenses”. The can with 125 grams of the substance should be enough for 10-15 days and costs about 3 CYP in any local farmacy.

We’ll try this thing and we’ll see if Maxim’s poo will change its color from the current dark green into a recommended yellowish. I’ll let you know of any changes.