Turtle Monkey

This is the third week in a row our son has allowed us to watch ABC’s Lost uninterrupted and the second consecutive week of being able to watch it the night it aired!

Elias is getting a lot better about going to sleep at night. We always get up around 6am. I was shooting for an 8pm bedtime, but most nights he seems to be sleepy before that. One night he went to sleep at 6:30! It’s a bit disappointing because we don’t get very much time with him after we pick him up from daycare.

For the past two nights, Elias hasn’t gotten up in the middle of night to feed (though he nurses on me throughout the night - there’s no telling how much milk he gets there). So he sleeps from about 8pm - 6am!

Elias has always been a good overnight sleeper and I feel really lucky about that. I’m afraid that he’s going to hit a developmental spurt that disrupts his sleeping patterns.

I feel pretty awful about my supply.

When we got to Texas, I had been nursing with the SNS at every feeding except for overnight (because he’s usually nursing pretty much nonstop overnight to begin with and the SNS is hard enough to deal with during the day). I had been on the domperidone for a week and I really felt full of milk.

With the stress of the holidays and being in someone else’s home, I stopped using the SNS and I was not adamant about nursing him first before every bottle. I also wasn’t very good about taking the domperidone. I just feel stupid about this. I should have done it. I should have always made an excuse to do it. At first I would leak like crazy if I missed a feeding. I could squirt milk everywhere. By the end of the week, it was like my supply dropped back down to what it was.

So now I’m back at home, back at work and I feel like I’m right back at square one again. I’m still making milk, but it doesn’t feel like as much as before. I felt like I was so close to getting at least a bit of a supply and I let it slip through my fingers. Stupid, stupid Lynda. Seriously, this is the dumbest thing I’ve done regarding breastfeeding and I’m not sure how I can forgive myself.

My plan is to go back on the domperidone - 3 pills 3 times a day. I will try nursing with the SNS any time I am at home with Elias (or at the very least, will nurse him before bottles). Once I get access to our Mother’s Room here at work I’m going to try pumping every three hours at least. I might try to see if I can sneak away every two hours and pump - it theoretically shouldn’t be hard since the rooms have network access and I have a work laptop I can use. If I can find time, I may also try pumping after feedings when I’m at home. Since I don’t have access to the mother’s room yet, I’ve been hand expressing in the bathroom, but I haven’t saved any of that milk, nor do I know how much of it there is.

I really hope I can get my supply back up to at least what it was when we got to Texas, but I’m kind of doubting that will happen. I wish there was a reliable way to measure how much breastmilk Elias is getting every day, but there isn’t. It would be really nice to cut back on the amount of formula he’s getting once he starts solid foods, though I still think nursing him exclusively at any point in his first year is a pipe dream.

My 10 week old baby is 15 lbs! Oh my word. I’m surprised he fits into his 8-16 lb diapers so well, though I’ve noticed the Happy Heineys getting tighter. No wonder he couldn’t fit into that 3 month old outfit I tried putting him in on Saturday.

{I have to wonder what Elias would weigh if he were exclusively breastfed. I know I shouldn’t think things like this because it makes me sad; it’s kind of painful. The doctor (Whom we really like and respect and is VERY pro breastfeeding and anti formula.) reassured me that by continuing to breastfeed even though the majority of his nutrition is coming from formula, it’s giving him more advantages than if he were strictly formula fed.}

I decided to let him go ahead and get all his scheduled shots today. There are only a couple of vaccines I’m really scared of and I won’t have to deal with making the final decision on those for a while. I struggled with the decision to space out the vaccinations, but in the end due to the holidays and the fact that I couldn’t bring myself to watch him get hurt once a week for the next month or so, we got them all today. Oh god, it was truly heartbreaking. He was crying, but clearly trying to work his way through it by sucking on my finger and concentrating on my face. On the second leg, he lost it and no amount of comfort in the world was good enough. He calmed down, but was still sniffly shortly after the shots, but got upset again a few minutes later when I put him in his carseat to leave. When we started moving he calmed again until I got him into the car and he cried when he saw my face (heart. breaking.) Once we were driving, he fell asleep (it was 3pm and he’d only had about 30 minutes of sleep total since waking at 8am).

When we pulled in at home, he woke up and looked around, not crying or upset. I went back there and stuck my face in his carseat and he just stared at me, but no smiles. Once we got into the apartment and I started unbuckling him from the carseat, he smiled big bright smiles at me. Whew! God, those smiles and that forgiveness make things like these so much harder. I immediately put him into the swing, turned it on so I could unpack quickly. He fell back asleep though and I’ve decided to let him sleep. He’s cool to the touch and otherwise seems to be feeling okay. I’m having Mark stop and pick up some infant tylenol on the way home just in case we need it.

Elias got upset when the doctor looked into his ears, but didn’t mind any of the other normal tests. When the doctor was cycling Elias’ legs, Elias smiled at him several times. He gave Doug a smile last night from inside the Moby (too cute!) It’s nice to see my son smiling at strangers.

He was cooing to the nurse every time she was in the room. She said he was a talker. He really seems to put serious consideration into forming the “words” he speaks, which is just hilarious to watch.

It’s nearly noon and Elias is doing pretty well today. He woke up at 8am and just wanted to be sitting upright. I propped him up on my pillow, keeping a close eye on him as I made the bed, gathered his toys for the day and started the diaper laundry (my 5 extra BumGenius diapers came in the mail! Woo!)

He ate around 9am and was content after that in his swing for about 20 minutes while I did some dishes and folded the clean diapers I neglected yesterday. TMI, I know, but he seems to prefer pooping when he’s in his swing. He will keep it in if I’m carrying him around, so I just put him in the swing after his morning feeding. He usually only poops once a day.

After changing his diaper and giving him a morning sponge bath, he played with his musical gym toy for another 20 minutes or so. Then I put on my Moby, popped him in and did a few more chores and made myself something to eat. At one point he wiggled around for about a minute (he does this when he gets really tired and it usually precedes him crying for a few minutes, fighting off sleep). But then he just put his face into my chest and fell asleep. Win! I love it when we get through the morning without crying. He’s been asleep for probably about an hour and a half now and will probably be ready to eat when he wakes up. From what I can tell so far, he seems to be feeling better than yesterday. I hope this continues.

In the past few weeks since I’ve been completely off the Reglan, I feel like my milk supply has lowered dramatically. I don’t really know why I feel this way other than I no longer leak from one side at night, which had started when I started the Reglan. I’m still taking herbal supplements, but they don’t really seem to be doing any good at all. In one more attempt to try to up my supply, I’ve ordered Domperidone from a UK website (since the FDA won’t allow it to be prescribed in the US for breastfeeding purposes). People have said wonderful things about this drug, so I hope it does something. I feel so defeated about not being able to exclusively breastfeed. I hate formula. I hate bottles. I’ve gone back to using the SNS full time, but it doesn’t really make any difference supply wise.

Anyway, Elias is waking up, so we’ll start our afternoon together. I hope it goes as well as the morning did.

Yesterday went well! My mom came over and brought a 22lb turkey, cranberry sauce, ingredients to make stuffing and a green bean casserole. I made pumpkin pies and macaroni and cheese. We also had rolls and country crock sweet potatoes, but the latter wasn’t really all that great.

Elias was a bit fussy last night after everyone left, but I think that may have been because he was a bit overstimulated during the day and just refused to take an evening nap. He was up for four hours straight from 7:30-11:30 and wanted to eat most of that time. I’m not sure if he was really hungry, but he kept shoving his fists in his mouth and kept spitting out my nipples, which he doesn’t do if he wants to comfort nurse. He’d just cry inconsolably until I’d give him some formula (we’re doing bottles now mostly, especially at night, though I still use my SNS too because I prefer to at least feel like I’m breastfeeding him.)

He’s getting SO heavy. He definitely went through a growth spurt over the weekend. He seems longer and he’s absolutely heavier. My mom and Jim noticed a big difference in him from when they were here on Saturday.

I’m worried that he may be getting too much formula, but I’ve also heard that young babies don’t overeat if they’re not hungry, so I’m not sure. Who knows how much milk he’s getting from me (he nurses on both sides before each feeding for maybe 15-30 minutes total in addition to comfort nursing throughout the night and day) but I can’t imagine it’s more than a couple of ounces total. Up until last week he was taking between 20-24 ounces of formula a day. Now he usually scarfs down 28-32 ounces a day, most of which is late at night. He’ll drink between 8-12 ounces within a 4 hour period late at night. It doesn’t seem right… it definitely seems like too much, but nothing else will make him happy. We’ve tried every other method we have to comfort him before giving in and letting him eat and eating is the only thing that makes him happy. Maybe he’s still just going through a growth spurt and it will taper back down to ‘normal’ soon. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was up to 12 pounds, so 28 ounces wouldn’t be so far off from that, but I am concerned when he takes 32 ounces in a day.

I hate not being able to exclusively breastfeed. After reading tons of information about it, I definitely do feel like I have low milk supply due to insufficient glandular tissue (especially since the Reglan, very frequent nursing and herbs didn’t make any substantial differences in my supply) but I think the poor start we got to breastfeeding didn’t help matters any. Hindsight is 20/20, but if I had to do it again, I probably would have waited even longer before introducing formula. I felt that there was something wrong with the fact that he nursed half the day away and got frustrated at my nipple, but I now know that at least he was getting SOME milk from that if he had to nurse 24/7 to get all the milk he needed, it wouldn’t have been the end of the world. I think having people around me constantly and feeling like I needed to “do something” didn’t help matters any. Whenever I see a post in the breastfeeding community of someone complaining about the amount of time their baby wants to breastfeed I feel like slapping them. I would kill to go back to having that opportunity.

I think our next child may have a better chance to get more milk from me. I don’t think my supply right now can be built to be enough to sustain Elias, but maybe I should at least try it… skip his next formula feeding and just let him nurse and nurse and nurse to try to pull as much milk from me as possible… I don’t know. I’ve read the information on kellymom about relactation and I’m already doing 90% of that stuff in my normal daily routine with him since the start and it hasn’t made any difference in my supply. Sometimes I can hand express up to 1/4 of an ounce in 15-30 minutes, however I haven’t been able to hand pump more than a few drops and I got the same results with the hospital grade electric pump. These results truly just make me feel that it’s an IGT issue and not me giving up too soon or not doing the right thing. But if it is IGT, then with my next pregnancy I should build more glandular tissue and with a good start, I may be able to exclusively breastfeed, or at the very least supplement with much less formula.

I didn’t mean for this to turn into a breastfeeding post, but it did. I try not to let it bother me, but I do still have a lot of guilt over the formula thing. I am happy that I have at least a little milk so he can comfort nurse and I can nurse him in bed, buying an extra hour or two at times overnight.