Caffeinated

Not overly so. Just enough.

Last night I sat up for just a moment before forcing myself to sleep and I read the short section on food allergies in the Breastfeeding Answer Book. It's a LLL publication that is really quite good--any average mother's breastfeeding questions can be answered there (and pretty much anything else can be answered by Hale's Medications and Mothers' Milk). Leo's been spitting up a bit, and neither of the girls did, like, ever. That combined with consistently green stools, and I was starting to think maybe something was going on.

Sophia had a milk protein allergy that lasted most of the first year, but she had different symptoms (gas, diarrhea, and a diaper rash from hell). I cut milk out, of all sorts, and she was better about 2 weeks later.

Maeve, of course, the easiest baby in the world, had nothing going on of that sort. I remember she had one green diaper. One. No spit up, rare diaper rash (and it was always my fault, no mystery there).

Well, I read through the section and I'm not convinced--green stools are a minor symptom, and his spitting up is all still milk, nothing is digested at all. I think he's spitting up because he gulps. I can hear the desperate swallows at the beginning of every feeding when milk lets down. Poor thing. And so I think we might have a bit of foremilk/hindmilk imbalance, which is no big deal and I can fix it easily if that's the trouble. So I'm going to give that a try before I drastically switch my diet.

Anyway, this is a long introduction to the point. In that same section was caffeine. Fussy baby? What sort of caffeine intake does mom have? That's one of the first questions to ask once it's established that basic problems are not going on. Babies can become over-stimulated quickly. Caffeine is actually the most likely culprit of breastmilk problems in the average mom-baby couple. And there were a couple of interesting facts.

The half-life of caffeine in an adult system is 5 hours. For newborns, it is 96 hours. That's a long time to hang out in your system. But only about 5% of mother's caffeine load passes into breastmilk. So that's not so bad. And the author estimated it would take about 5 cups of coffee a day to start causing a problem. Five cups. A year and a half ago, that would have been a problem. But I've cut way down since then.

So I picked Maeve up from school (after my hour and a half nap this morning) and we went to Starbucks. I prefer a couple of local coffee places, even St. Louis Bread Company, to Starbucks, but they have a drive-through. I got an iced tall nonfat vanilla latte.

It's working.