I mentioned in my last post (Does My Baby Get Enough Iron?) that I have been worrying about my 9-month-old’s iron nutrition. Iron deficiency can cause lasting delays and deficits in cognitive and behavioral development, and I don’t want to go there.
First, let’s consider if your baby is actually at risk for iron deficiency, because why fret about something that isn’t a problem? You have enough to worry about.
I have been lucky enough to have a great experience with breastfeeding my baby. As someone with a nutrition background, this has been a relief and a comfort to me. For the first few months of her life, I didn’t have to worry about what or how much to feed my baby. I didn’t have to fret about nutrition labels and ingredient lists on formula packages. I just nursed my child until she pushed away from the breast to tell me she was done. If she needed more, I produced more. It was as beautiful and magical as it sounds, and it was the perfect food for my baby – something science, our pediatrician, and all the hyper-mamas in town could agree on. (I write this with a hint of sarcasm, because as wonderful as breastfeeding is, I think formula is probably just fine, too.)
I thought I should take a moment to update the blogosphere on who I am and what I am doing here. I started this blog last June when I was a pregnant postdoc, working in a lab at a major research university, where I was studying the effects of gestational diabetes on the fetus. After a couple of posts, the blog fell by the wayside for about a year. I got busy with trying to get as much work done as possible before the baby was born and with trying to get enough sleep, which has been a losing battle ever since. Once BabyC arrived, my world of course forever changed. I muddled through the first few months of being a mama, alternating (minute-to-minute) from being overwhelmingly happy to overwhelmingly tired to being generally overwhelmed.
Today was one of those days when I felt a little bit adrift and alone as a stay-at-home mom. Maybe it was the heat. Maybe it was the fact that BabyC, although she is super cute 95% of the time, spent the other 5% of the time practicing her high-pitched scream. Maybe it was the food poisoning that had me up puking all Tuesday night and in bed with a fever and achiness all day Wednesday. Today is Thursday, and I should be all better, right? Lucky me that I don’t have to go to work and instead live this idyllic life of the stay-at-home mom, putting around the house and playing with my adorable child.
Things that get in the way of writing when you are a stay-at-home, trying to be a work-from-home, mom
I’ve been trying to work on an honest-to-goodness sciency parenting piece of writing. When (not IF, note the confidence here!) I finish it, I’ll post it on this blog. This particular piece is about iron nutrition for babies transitioning from a milk diet to solid foods. My baby hates cereal, in fact hates eating anything with a spoon, and I’ve been fretting that she isn’t getting enough iron since I can’t feed her that disgusting fortified baby cereal (Preview: I did enough research today to ease my fears a bit, but you’ll have to stay tuned for the fun sciency details.) My goal is to write pieces like this on a free-lance basis for parenting magazines. You can laugh if you want. Or if you have any advice about this dream of mine, please let me know. I’ll write more about my plans soon, but first let me tell about why I’ve made so little progress today. If you are a parent and/or a writer, I’m sure you can relate.
Yesterday one of my grad school papers was finally published. Yes, I finished my PhD almost 3 years ago. Yes, it took submitting to a few journals before this paper was accepted. And no, as you have probably guessed by now, this was not ground-breaking work with exciting results. But still, it felt good to see the neatly formatted PDF with my name first among the list of authors. Even with my love-hate relationship with science, that feeling of seeing your work published has to be among the best feelings. Never mind that I look at the paper and can’t help but see the shortcomings of the study design and execution glare back at me.
