Food Poisoning and a start at weaning

I did something really dumb at work and ate some pizza of questionable age. That mistake cost me much trouble. I was violently ill with food poisoning which left me sick for two days and feeling queasy for at least a few more days after.

I had read that although you can nurse your child while you are sick, you should NOT nurse your child when you have food poisoning because the toxins from the poisons are passed on to the child in breastmilk. It made sense to me so I had no choice but to abstain from nursing Sasha while I was ill. She was not pleased at first and spent many miserable moments at my side sadly crying "mama! mama! mama!" while furiously signing milk at me. I was heartbroken and that compounded my misery. But eventually she carried on without me and eventually it seemed like she and her daddy were having a grand time without her mama.

So I guess you could say that the weaning process seems to have started. My milk production (and ahem... chest size) dropped and although Sasha was not happy to go to sleep without a nursing, she eventually seemed okay during the day. By the time I recovered, Sasha wasn't asking me anymore.

I wasn't quite prepared for a weaning like this, so we are back to nursing for naps and at bedtime, but otherwise we're now in the "Don't Offer; Don't Refuse" phase of weaning. If she does ask during the day, I offer her some juice or a cup of milk first and she is usually appeased by that instead. I did want to at least continue to nurse her at least once a day until the end of the cold and flu season, just in case. But I think I do want to have her weaned by her 18th month-old "birthday" in March.

Again I must note that with the decrease in nursing, Sasha's appetite has increased a lot. So I do believe that weaning will be good for her when the time comes to make the cut off. Until that cut off, we are in a state of reduced nursings, and I will have a month or so to figure out how to get her off her dependance on nursing to get to sleep.

The bug

There's been some sort of cold bug going through our family lately. Jon started out with it a few weeks ago and it hit him pretty long and hard.
We thought that the rest of us had escaped unscathed. My immune system seems to have been really strong the last two years or so. But of course it's the holidays, so I started getting sick two days before christmas eve. Fortunately, the worst of it was over by Christmas Eve and I felt recovered enough to be able to go to my family's christmas party.


However it was on Christmas eve that I noticed that I had some strange rash all over my neck. I don't know how long it was there before I noticed it. You can see it in this picture the best (click to enlarge), but it's still not clear. (Pic from the family Christmas party. Sasha was riding on a rocking horse, and I carried her, horsey and all, into the living room when it was time to open presents). It really had me worried. It couldn't be a heat rash as I wasn't hot and neither was my neck. I had a heat rash elsewhere on my body to compare it to, and the rashes looked different. I tried to look it up online, but anyone who has ever tried to diagnose a rash by google image search knows how disgusting and scary that can be. Ugh! Closest I could match it to was measles or rubella. Which made me think. Hrm, Sasha had just gotten her MMR (Measles, Mumps, Rubella) shot earlier that week. She had been crabby and not feeling well also. The vaccines are made with weakened viruses, but it is possible to get reactions from the vaccines. Was it also possible for people to actually come down with the actual diseases from the vaccines??? Was it then possible to pass on that disease to other people around you? It was a scary thought! I was actually really worried that maybe Sasha gave me measles from her mmr shot! But the rash disappeared the next day so I have no idea what it was. I guess it wasn't the mmr shot at all. But you can bet that if the rash had spread or if it was still there the next day I would have been asking some questions to the doctors.

Meanwhile, Sasha was not feeling well yesterday. She was very crabby and she stopped eating again. Such bad timing! I'm afraid we're going to lose any gains we might have had. She is back to nursing like a newborn and refusing to eat. I think she probably needs the immunological protection that nursing provides right now but once she's done fighting off whatever bug it is she's suffering from, I'll have to reduce her nursing sessions again in an attempt to get her to eat. Blah! That will be no fun.

Sadly, Sasha signed a new sign yesterday. "Hurt". That was the first time she ever signed it, and I think she was trying to tell us she had a headache. Poor baby. She was so miserable.

She also signed another new sign today. "Banana", which she signed at the mall when we asked her if she wanted us to buy her a banana.