Steve<\/a>, I have already been trying out some discipline with Ruby. She’s developed an unpleasant habit during nursing where she writhes and turns away. Not only is it annoying and time-consuming, it leads to sore nipples for me. At best, she squirms a bit during feedings. At worst, she arches her back and cries as well. Weirdly, she always turns her head away to the right. I don’t know why.<\/p>\nI’m not sure of the cause. Possibly she’s impatient for me to let down. Possibly she picked up some bad habits from bottle-feeding (where the bottle followed her mouth around as she turned her head; Steve has now stopped this). In order to stop the problem, I have unsuccessfully tried:<\/p>\n
– Feeding with her and I both lying down
\n– Feeding with her lying down and me sitting up
\n– Feeding with both of us sitting up
\n– Feeding while I stand and jiggle her
\n– Feeding while I bounce on the yoga ball (a moderately successful tactic)
\n– Facing her to a blank white wall to minimize distraction
\n– Holding her hand to calm her inner jitters
\n– Holding her body tightly so she can’t move easily
\n– Taking her off for a minute after she turns away
\n– Saying “No” in a firm voice<\/p>\n
Today I tried a more martial-arts-inspired approach: use the enemy’s energy and momentum against them. While feeding her (in the standard position), I turned her body so her head was ALREADY turned to the right. This really seemed to help. If she turned her head, it only went a little bit, and she didn’t break the connection. She also seemed calmer. I’ll have to give this approach a few more tries to see if it’s a winner.<\/p>\n
It’s hard trying to enforce discipline on an infant who not only doesn’t speak, but can’t even understand me very well. I suppose it is a good warm-up for the terrible twos.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Not every whim Unlike Steve, I have already been trying out some discipline with Ruby. She’s developed an unpleasant habit during nursing where she writhes and turns away. Not only is it annoying and time-consuming, it leads to sore nipples for me. At best, she squirms a bit during feedings. At worst, she arches her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mynameisruby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mynameisruby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mynameisruby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mynameisruby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mynameisruby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mynameisruby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mynameisruby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mynameisruby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mynameisruby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}