She must not have noticed the baby vomit on my shirt

I went to the grocery store one morning last week, and as I stood in the check-out line, the woman behind me said, “You make it look so easy.” I had no idea what she was talking about. “Getting groceries with a baby,” she clarified. I stared at her in disbelief. This was anything but easy. The whole endeavor required the planning of a military operation and the speed of world-class athlete. I couldn’t remember the last time I washed my hair, and my shirt was still wet with some vomit Fig had deposited there after his breakfast. I had made the calculated decision to go ahead and go to the store wearing the baby vomit shirt because I didn’t have time to shower anyway, and I didn’t see the point in putting on clean clothes when I myself was dirty. “This is not easy!” I assured her, mentally noting that nothing in my life had been easy since I got pregnant. “I know,” she told me, “I have a 10-month old that I dropped off at day-care just so I could come to the store.”

The mere fact that someone thought I made it look easy was mind-boggling, because I never do not feel like I am hanging on by a thread. The past couple of days though, have been a definite improvement. All of a sudden, there are multiple periods per day when he is awake and not crying inconsolably. This is a completely new thing to me. He had given us a few smiles before, but his smiling time has now increased by an order of magnitude. There have even been a few feeding bouts when he didn’t fuss at the end and he actually looked like he was satisfied. It’s like a miracle. I can understand why people have children now. I hope to god that the worst of it is over, but I know we’re not out of the woods yet. The crying hasn’t completely ended, but at least it hasn’t been as incessant as before and it seems more like how a normal baby would cry.

I’m not sure what it is that has done the trick. I’ve got so many things going on. The Domperidone to increase my milk supply. The Prevacid to help with his acid reflux. This week also marked the 3^rd week that I’ve been off dairy, so I suppose it could be that too. His reduced crying also coincided with a reduction in the weird green poo, which is supposedly a sign of a food intolerance. In the meantime, I gave up soy as well, so it could be that. It seemed to me that he was especially bad on days when I had a lot of soy products, and according to the internet, soy is a very common allergen for infants. Particularly for infants who are also intolerant of dairy. I was sick of waiting around and listening to him cry, so I cut out soy just to see what would happen. It was about 5 days later that things got better. Since I don’t know what it was that actually helped, I am just going to keep doing everything for the foreseeable future. It isn’t the easiest thing being a vegetarian/vegan who cannot eat dairy or soy, but once I actually did it, it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. The biggest change I made was to switch soymilk for almond milk. I wish almond milk wasn’t so expensive and had more protein in it, but oh well. I figure I’ll keep off both dairy and soy for another week or so, then cautiously eat something with soy in it (soy flour or soybean oil is in everything, so it won’t be that hard to find something with a small amount of soy). If he tolerates that well, I will eventually try soymilk or something and see what happens.

Hoping for more smiles and less crying. Thanks for reading.