Today, we introduced the baby to her first solid food. I took a ripe avocado and mashed about a tablespoon-sized serving into a small cup, loaded it onto one of her silicone baby feeding spoons, and stuck it in front of her face. She looked at it and immediately grasped the spoon handle with her hands, taking it away from me. Then, she stuck the spoon into her mouth. Avocado bits got into her mouth, and she grimaced and made a funny face. She looked like she was chewing for a bit, generating a lot of saliva, and then spat it out. Well, that was a decent first attempt.

When babies get introduced to solids, they will oftentimes play with the food, grab it, throw it, spit it out, put it in their mouth, move it around, and spit it out. Everything she did was normal behavior. This is how babies explore the world around them and “experiment” and learn. We just have to keep trying to introduce her to the same foods a few times, then rotate in new foods to get her exposed to more and more things. I want to do do both purees and baby-led weaning (as scary as that sounds) so that she can learn some independence and also how to handle food and utensils on her own. Each day will be a mini adventure for all of us.

When reading baby developmental guides, they often say that somewhere around the 6-month mark, babies start rolling over — from their tummies to their back and vice versa. With Kaia’s 6-month check-up coming this Friday, I was hoping that she’d roll over intentionally before that appointment… just so I could have the pride of saying, yes, my kid *is* rolling over by six months. She had rolled over a number of times from her back to her belly and vice versa in the last two weeks, but I wasn’t 100 percent sure if they were intentional movements or just accidents because they happened only a handful of times. Our nanny said that she was almost there last week, but not quite. She anticipated she’d be rolling over comfortably and repeatedly this week.

Well, today, my baby officially became a rolly poley. She rolled three times from her back to her stomach with the nanny, and after the nanny left for the day, she was rolling almost non-stop with me all evening. I lost count of the number of times she rolled from her back to her tummy. I couldn’t believe how proud I felt; I was like one of those annoying, gushy moms who squeals in delight at every little thing their child does. But hey, this isn’t a little thing for babies… Rolling over is considered a huge milestone because it means that the baby has been doing enough tummy time to build core strength, which then lends itself to performing movements like rolling over, sitting, and eventually crawling and walking.

Then, while I felt both pride and joy at seeing my baby doing this over and over, a part of me got a little sad. Why is she growing so freaking fast? I cannot believe she’s turning six months old this Friday. Time just flies by way too quickly. Before I know it, she will be crawling, then walking, and she won’t need me to carry her anymore. I just want to relish each second with her as my little baby.

When Chris’s parents had booked their trip to come visit us this summer, Chris suggested that it might be a good idea for us to look up well-rated infant formulas available in Australia for them to cart over to supplement the baby’s diet. Australian food regulations are just as strict as EU food regulation, so we knew the infant formula would be of much higher quality than the Similac and other mainstream American infant formula brands here. Plus, I wasn’t sure if/when my milk supply would start decreasing whenever my period would come back, so I wanted to be prepared. And well, I’d rather be prepared with Australian formula rather than American formula.

In Australia and the EU, corn syrup or high fructose corn syrup are pretty much unknown ingredients, and so they aren’t used as empty and cheap calories used to fatten up babies the way it is here. I also think that dairy in Australia is overall, just far higher quality than that in the U.S. because again, corn is not the main ingredient used to feed cows there — grass is, as that’s natural and normal for them to eat. In Australia, when you buy a carton of cow’s milk, it’s just assumed (and from my perspective, taken for granted) that the cow who produced that milk for you ate grass, not corn, and therefore, that milk tastes much different than the average cow milk here, which came from cows primarily eating grain/corn, unless otherwise stated.

I chose three brands for them to bring back: two of them are organic and one of them is a goat milk based formula, which Chris got excited about – I’m sure he wants his own bottle of that! The one we opened first was Bellamy’s Organic, which is the first certified organic infant formula in Australia, founded by a Tasmanian mother. It’s made with grass-fed cow milk from New Zealand, specifically A2 milk, which is supposed to be easier to digest for babies and more nutrient dense than A1 milk (I guess that’s regular milk….?). When Chris first opened the can and smelled it, he reveled at the scent and had me come over to get a whiff. As soon as I smelled it, I started giggling nonstop almost — I couldn’t believe how good it smelled! It had a scent that was reminiscent of a sweet Asian milk biscuit (no, there’s no sugar in this!!). It was so pleasing and nice to smell, unlike the formulas here. Bobbie has a pretty nondescript smell and isn’t offensive at all, but it doesn’t hold a candle in terms of “pleasantness” of scent like Bellamy’s.

It wasn’t even just the scent of the formula that got us: the way it mixed with water was so, so different. As soon as you add the formula powder to a bottle of room temperature water, it almost immediately dissolves. Then, when you shake it, almost no bubbles or foam appear; in fact, the color and the viscosity of the formula appears almost exactly like breast milk. When we put a bottle of the Bellamy’s next to a bottle of my breast milk, you almost couldn’t tell the difference between the two. That would NEVER be the case with any American formula, even Bobbie, which markets itself to be like European formula. Bobbie foams up like crazy, so I could spot the difference in Bobbie vs. breast milk from across a room.

Chris mixed the baby’s first ever bottle of Bellamy’s formula while we were out at lunch on Sunday, and she seemed to enjoy it. Her initial expression was one of “Hmmm, this is new. What is this?” And then, she seemed to lap it up and really relish each slurp. When Chris stopped halfway through her feed to burp her, I opened the bottle to take a smell again, she started yelping, as though to get mad that I might be taking her Bellamy’s milk from her!

“She might end up preferring Bellamy’s milk over your breast milk,” Chris said to me, tauntingly.

Uh-huh. Sure, she will….

I told our nanny that Chris said this, and she laughed and said, “Chris! Nothing is better than mommy’s booby milk! Nothing!!”

Since last Tuesday morning, I’ve had the most annoying kink in a back muscle on my right side. I have no idea what caused it. Chris thinks it’s because of the flatter pillows we slept on at the hotel, but who knows? Regardless, it’s been lingering for way longer than any muscle kink I’ve had ever had. Usually, they go away after a few days with some massage and nightly tiger balm application, but this time, nothing seems to help. I used the Theragun on me and had Chris use it on me a few times. He’s helped massage me and rub in tiger balm. While it feels good in the moment, I never seem to get back to normal after or the next day. It just feels the same. These are those odd little joys of getting older: having weird back cramps and kinks that have an unclear origin that just seem too stubborn to fade no matter what you do.

Last night, as Chris helped apply pressure on the spot with tiger balm, I thought of all the great reasons to have a life partner, and this was one of them. When you agree to spend the rest of your life with someone, you also agree to help them with these little life annoyances, like taking out muscle kinks, applying tiger balm to hard-to-reach areas of your body, buttoning up buttons on awkward spots behind your neck, sewing the holes in their shirts, soaking and swishing their blazers in a baking soda, vinegar, and tea tree oil + water solution to get out lingering stench. Because if you don’t have a partner to do this for you, who else will be there day in day out to help you?

Usually, when “ripped” is used as an adjective to describe how a person looks, it’s meant to be a compliment. So if you tell someone that they look “ripped,” you’re most likely telling them that they have very tight abs or chest muscles, or very sculpted and defined arms. Well, I discovered for myself yesterday what it meant to have “ripped” nipples, and I mean that in the literal sense, as in.. yes, I actually (accidentally) ripped the skin off the sides of both of my nipples. Unfortunately, this had nothing to do with muscles or looking sculpted. It had to do with pumping with improperly fitted flanges and my own cheapness/laziness.

My Legendairy Milk cups came with 24mm and 28mm flanges, as did my primary Spectra pump. I have no idea why these are considered standard flanges sizes considering that over 80% of women have nipples smaller than 24mm, but hey, it is what it is, and likely a way for these companies to make more money by up-charging you anywhere from $10-20 for a smaller flange size. I had pumped while on the go just twice before with the 24mm flanges and these cups plus my Baby Buddha portable pump, and the output was never as good due to the flange size, but I accepted it just for the convenience. Legendairy Milk did not create 17mm flanges for someone like me, as their smallest one was 19mm, so I thought I was out of luck until I discovered the Maymom brand, which has flange tunnel inserts to hack and place into these flanges. I felt cheap, though, and wasn’t really sure how much mobile pumping I would be doing, so I neglected to buy these $15 inserts when I discovered them about two weeks ago.

Well, I pumped while in the car ride to Philly, and the entire time, I had no idea that I was damaging my nipples. I think I have just gotten so desensitized to all things nipple related that I didn’t even feel the skinning of my nipples as it was occurring. Plus, with all the bumps in the road, that is likely how the cups got off centered with my nipples, which then caused the damage. I had read so many stories in the pumping mamas Facebook group about women who had gotten bruised, split, cracked, bloody, and ripped nipples from using the incorrect flange size, but luckily for me, this had never happened. How does this happen, you might ask? So with flange sizing, it’s like Goldilocks: you can’t have your flanges be too small or too big; they need to fit just right for the perfect combination of both maximized comfort AND maximized output. If the flange is too small, you will bruise and split your nipples that are getting constricted. If they are too big, you risk your nipple getting pulled too deeply into the tunnel, thus creating friction on one side of your nipple, which then results in what happened to me — skinning, peeling of your nipple skin.

I didn’t even realize this had happened until I removed the cups when we got to the hotel room. I took them off and immediately noticed that the top of my left nipple was a deep purple color. And then upon examining both sides of my nipples, I realized that the skin was peeling off to reveal a raw, exposed under layer. The pain finally started settling in, and everything and anything that rubbed against my nipples hurt. I applied shea butter to help soothe and repair it, but this rawness will likely last for a while until my skin repaired and healed. Luckily for me, my nipples aren’t bleeding. After physically taking care of this, I logged into my Amazon account and purchased the stupid $15 flange inserts for the cups. This pain and injury was not worth saving $15 for.

This is the shit mothers go through just to feed their babies. Pumping mamas truly have it the hardest. You will never quite understand how annoying and taxing it is to be a pumping mom unless you actually do it yourself.

Although I got the Legendairy Milk cups to go along with my portable Baby Buddha pump in early March, the problem with this setup is that it’s not really 100 percent wearable: the Baby Buddha pump is portable in that it’s the size of a smart phone and you wear it on a lanyard around your neck, but it actually comes with bottle attachments. That’s what necessitated buying the Legendairy Milk cups for me to hack and wear with the pump. The cups are way, way too big to be discreet (they hold 8 ounces of milk EACH; who the heck pumps 16 ounces of milk in one pump sitting?! Whoever you are, I am super jealous of you!), plus there are still wires attaching the cups to the pump. Well, shortly after I purchased this combination to create a wearable pump for myself, lo and behold, Willow, a high end brand of wearable pumps, releases their next generation of wearable pump that is completely wireless, where you can operate the pump fully from an app on your phone. Each cup is essentially its own breast pump. The programming for stimulation vs. expression mode can be adjusted for each breast, so in case one breast performs better than the other, you can adjust (this is not the norm for the average breast pump, including the Spectra that I own; these assume you want the same settings for both breasts). In addition, this Willow Go pump allows you to customize what size of a cup you want, so the cup you could choose could be smaller (five ounces per cup sounds more discreet and reasonable than eight!). It’s a bit too late for me to get this pump, especially since I already bought the Baby Buddha and have only used it about five times, but if I had to do this all over again, I’d sell my Baby Buddha and buy the Willow Go pump.

One gripe I had with wearable pumps is that you can’t really do breast compressions with them. I also can’t see the milk spraying out, so I wasn’t sure if I’d know when my let down reflex started. Some women can actually feel their let down, and up until the last week, I was not able to feel it. But amazingly, as I’m currently in my 24th week postpartum, I actually started feeling my letdown, which would alert me to change the setting from stimulation mode to letdown /expression mode to maximize my milk output. Now, without even looking, I know when to switch the mode. This has helped me when I’ve needed to pump during work calls. I make sure to position my web cam so that it just reached under my neck, so no one has any idea I am pumping. In addition, I have my Zoom sound setting on so that background noises are blocked out, so no one can hear the subtle “burrrr” sound that my pump makes while on. I’ve never appreciated working from home more than while pumping milk. Pumping in a sad, windowless pumping mom room at work would have been miserable, not to mention I’d be time constrained.

Endless women in my Facebook pumping mamas group have raved about the Willow Go, how it’s really changed their pumping lives because they can literally pump anywhere and no one will know, as these cups are small and flat enough to fit into their bras, so they don’t make pumping women look like they got breast implants. And more impressively, women have also said their output is comparable if not more than using their Spectra pumps, and no need for breast compressions! It’s a $330 investment, so definitely not cheap or a potential impulse buy. If I ever do this again, I would get it, but for now, I’ll stick with my Spectra and my occasional Baby Buddha use.

Our nanny grows callaloo, a West African cousin of spinach in her backyard, among other vegetables. She said she will bring us some since it’s just sprouting now. She said she knows I will like it… because my baby farts a lot, so she knows I eat a lot of vegetables.

“Mommy eats lots of vegetables and fiber!” the nanny exclaimed while feeding the baby last week. “That’s why Kaia farts so much! So much fiber in the breast milk! In the booby milk! So much good stuff in this booby milk for baby Kaia pookie!”

It’s debatable how much of what a breastfeeding mother eats will end up in her breast milk. It’s already been widely established that alcohol, certain medicines and drugs, among other things, can get into breast milk in traces, but the concentrations of which are still debated. Either way, I try to eat a wide variety of things not just for myself, but also in hopes that our baby will develop an affinity for all these different foods. I’ve intentionally eaten nuts daily, hoping she won’t have any nut allergies. I especially hope she will love all leafy green vegetables and mangoes.