Lip Service
April 10th, 2025Shot but no Beer
I don’t plan to put my son’s name on the blog, but I keep violating my resolution not to blog about him, so I’ll have to call him something. For now, I think I’ll go with “Herr Mozart” because these days we are supposed to turn all babies into Mozarts.
So today Mozart went to the pediatric surgeon to see if he had an oral issue that made him slow breastfeeder. He is not a slow bottle feeder. Much the opposite.
Bottles come with nipples made to move milk at different speeds. A 1 is a very slow nipple, and a 3 is a fast nipple. You don’t want to drown your newborn with a 3.
One problem people have with bottles is that the move milk faster than women’s bodies, so babies drink too fast. They end up overeating, so to speak, they may throw up more milk than is normal, and they may get really spoiled. Who wouldn’t prefer a #3 nipple to a #1 mom?
Experts teach mothers to do paced bottle-feeding. Essentially, this means you hold the bottle horizontally so the milk comes halfway up the nipple. This prevents gravity from pumping milk into a baby that has to drink it to avoid drowning, and it is also supposed to make babies drink more slowly.
Not Mozart. We got him slow nipples, I do as the experts say, and milk flows into him like foreign bribes into a Biden. I don’t know how he does it.
With Mom, he latches on and takes a nap. Every so often, he takes a little milk. Then he conks out again. He lies there, blissfully snoring and breaking wind, as long as she permits it. He doesn’t fill up.
Mom was convinced he had a lip tie or a tongue tie. These are little strips of flesh we all have, connecting our lips and tongues to our bodies. If they are not made just right, they can prevent babies from opening wide enough to feed well.
The pediatric surgeon said he didn’t see anything that needed to be corrected, so now instead of being trapped in the “Mom wants to know for sure” vortex, we can move forward.
I knew he did not have a problem, because he has breastfed well in the past, and because when he uses a bottle, he opens like a python swallowing a stray dog.
A friend of ours has fed two kids successfully, and she called it. She said Herr Mozart was lazy. The surgeon said the same thing today. Our friend said he liked sleeping on mom. She told us to take off his clothes and make him uncomfortable so he would stay awake and get feedings over with. A warm, comfortable baby is an unmotivated baby.
Mom’s cooperation has been spotty, because, well, she’s Mom. The enabler.
Now, with confirmation from the surgeon, we have agreed to stick with my friend’s approach. Assuming Mom behaves.
He’s doing okay. He’s a little behind on height, but he is way ahead on fat. It looks like he gained over a pound in under two weeks, and he grew half an inch.
We also took him to the health department for shots. Don’t ask me why, but his not-great pediatrician told us to do this instead of giving him shots himself. That guy has to go.
We got him fixed up for several common diseases, and we will get two more shots next week. I didn’t want his body to have to deal with side effects from like 52 different vaccines at once.
The health department is a good resource. They have been very helpful with breastfeeding. But it seems odd to go to the county instead of doctors. I am old, and until this year, I had never been inside a county health department building. This county has a lot of low-income people, so I think standards are different here. Pediatricians ask for your Medicaid number without even asking if you have real insurance, and they pimp formula without asking whether you would rather give your baby actual milk. Formula is for poor uninformed people and for feminists who want illegal aliens to raise their babies.
Everyone we saw today thought he was wonderful. He is still very cute. That hasn’t worn off. It’s still paying dividends. When pediatricians who see 50 babies a day see your baby and gush over how cute he is, you know he’s unusual.
I was very happy to get the vaccinations and lip business over with, so I came home and treated myself to a nice toasted bagel with Sam’s Club smoked salmon. I found out that Sam’s sells very good salmon for half as much as supermarkets, so I no longer feel bad about eating it, and I plan to keep it up. That means I have to get back to making bagels.
The only decent bagels I can buy here without driving 25 minutes come from Publix. They’re made by the Einstein Bros. chain. Every Publix has a little cabinet containing Einstein bagels. Unfortunately, old Jews or maybe fat gentile girls get in there early every day and clean out the plain bagels. By the time I get there, they are usually gone, and nobody really wants a sesame-seed or asiago bagel with salmon on it. They usually have “everything” bagels. These are like bagels rolled in coarse dirt. Incomprehensible.
So now I have to get back to working on my own bagel recipe. And I have to figure out how to make garlic bagels.
It’s amazing how bad the Internet’s bagel information is. The recipe ought to be everywhere, but the web is full of bad recipes and wild guesses. Pages with recipes contain phrases like, “These are pretty good…”
I made some bagels back in November, and they were real bagels, but they were not inspiring. I have to resume.
It appears I need to try a hydration rate of 55%. Some recipes go as high as 64%, which is idiotic. That’s Wonder Bread territory. A bagel has to be dense, and that means low hydration.
I’m going to crack a Schneider Weisse, do some figuring, and get to work. I am never going to beat old retired Jews to that Einstein Bros. box.