Teething

After my babies had their 3-month birthdays, any problem I had with them was attributed to teething. I complained about their erratic sleeping schedules, their weird nursing habits, a strange one-day fever that struck each of them 2 days apart. . . . in every case, someone or another would sigh and say, "They're teething, I guess."

[In the first 3 months, every expert/book/fellow parent attributes problems to the fact that baby "misses the womb." It's the third trimester. So we snuggle and swaddle and nurse 'round the clock and sling and bathe -- all in a really ridiculous attempt to re-create the most un-re-creatable of states.]

The one exception was my father-in-law, who insisted that they could not be teething: "They are going to have problems when their teeth come. Pain. Dysentary. Fever. It cannot be avoided." I told him that I and my sisters had had relatively easy teething experiences; maybe Kishmish and Pista got my genes? He rejected that idea: "They will have problems! We took our daughter to the doctor when her teeth came. He said even Queen Elizabeth would have suffered this way."

You cannot imagine my joy, then, when the spoon I was using to feed Pista clinked a little as it hit a tooth the other day. Not only had she pushed out a little tooth (two, actually, as I later learned), but unlike even a queen she had managed to avoid all sorts of ills! Moreover, several vexing habits she had acquired--waking a lot at night, in particular -- ended abruptly.

Kishmish, on the other hand, is still waiting for her teeth. [It's okay: she crawled first, turned over first, and was born first. Pista deserves her own "first" this time.] She is, however, spitting and drooling constantly; she loves chewing on parts of my body that I choose not to describe here; and today I saw her chewing on a chair.

There's only one answer: "Us ke dant aa rahe hai. . . . She's teething."

Teething Biscuits
These are my answer to whatever trashy garbage they sell for babies to chew on. A neighbor tried to get me to give the girls "cream crackers" recently, so I concocted this recipe. It's free of wheat, refined sugar, eggs, dairy, and random chemicals that make commercial teething biscuits nasty.

1) Measure out about a cup of some flour that you know baby can eat. I have used ground oats, amaranth flour, and ragi (red millet) flour, in different combinations.
2) Add some ghee to the flour, a little at a time, until it clumps up in your hand when you knead it.
3) Cut some gud (jaggery/raw sugar) into the dough, and break it up. I think maple sugar might be an acceptable substitue.
4) Add a small amount of water, just enough to make a stiff dough (stiffer than the dough for chapatis or bread).
5) Pat the dough into a pan, and bake in the oven. I can't tell you a specific temperature, since my oven doesn't have a temperature control. It just has to be pretty hot, maybe 400 degrees Fahrenheit.
6) Bake until the dough is dry and hard. Then, after it's cooled, break it into biscuits.

These biscuits should be safe for a teething baby to chew on. But keep an eye on a baby who likes to shove things into her windpipe.