Sign Me Up For Mother of the Year

For the last four or five days, Tim and I have been growing increasingly annoyed and concerned by a new seeming habit of the sleepy baby. Every time we would lean him back and pop a bottle in his mouth he would scream. We knew with as much certainty as one can have that he was actually hungry (due to the fact that his fist would be so far back in his mouth that we were worried he'd swallow and just not stop until he went *poof* - this is his classic "Feed me, Seymour" signal.) So it was confusing that he would just simply scream as if feeding him was the most horrific evil we could ever perpetrate.

I talked to some friends and, on their advice, kept an eye on his temperature (dead normal all the time) with the thought that it might be an ear infection and the discomfort in pressure change was causing the shrieking. And that's a valid concern (even without the temp) but he was perfectly fine laying back as if to eat with a binky (pacifier) being sucked contentedly. He would lay down completely to sleep with problem. And, honestly, sometimes you could calm the shrieks by reclining him the rest of the way onto your knee and bouncing him gently. So all in all, the pressure theory didn't seem super plausible.

Last night, as Tim sat up in the rocker in sleepy one's room, trying valiantly to feed the guy, I had a wild hair. Five or six days ago, we switched SB to the stage 3 nipples for his bottles. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, he was getting really slow on the 2s and was doing a lot of playing rather than eating - suggesting that it just wasn't coming out fast enough. I did the math in my head grabbed a 2 out of the ziplock bag on his bed that was waiting to get put into the box of things he's outgrown under his bed, swapped it out...and the crying stopped, the eating began, and he's been happy and charming and, dare I say, eager with each bottle since.

Cause I guess when you're just as likely to drown as not, eating gets scary.

Poor kid.