As you might expect, I feel better as the days go by. There are still some moments of sadness, but not as bad. One thing that is helping a lot is that Eric is eating very well on the formula. Finger-feeding was very hard work, so he ate slowly and never ate nearly as much as a baby his size was "supposed" to. On the bottles, his average meal size has jumped by at least half again as much, and he is able to eat much more quickly. Breastfeeding still would have been the best option, but I am thinking that bottle-feeding is a better option than continuing to finger feed might have been. My friend Carol wrote me that she pumped for eight weeks before her first son caught on to nursing, and she said they eventually started giving him the milk in bottles because the other feeding methods were so slow. I think we would probably have done the same, next week when David goes back to work if not sooner. I'm not sure it would have been physically possible for me to do all the feeding, pumping, and other baby care by myself all day.
Eric has had a little constipation as he makes the transition to formula, and he does spit up a bit more, though the special angled bottles do help. And he may only be spitting up more because his stomach is getting so full. But he's doing great. And I am, frankly, enjoying feeling rested and having the freedom to, for instance, go to Pride on Saturday and to worship yesterday without worrying that it would ruin my pumping schedule for the day. I keep noticing things that I like better about this new feeding system, ranging from "I can leave the house" to "Eric obviously read the section in the baby book that said bottle-fed babies eat only every four hours." None of them are reasons I would have given up on pumping if I'd had a milk supply, but I am letting myself enjoy the benefits anyway.
More than 24 hours have passed since I wrote the paragraph above. Caring for Eric isn't especially difficult but it makes me quite interruptable and I never know when I'll be able to get back to something.
Eric's constipation improved but his poop still looked not quite right to me, so I double-checked one of my books and discovered that the poops he's pooping are perfectly normal for bottle-fed babies. Noah is the source of all my knowledgea bout babies, and his poop never looked like that, but I remember now that Noah was never exclusively bottle-fed, so he was producing some kind of hybrid breast/bottle poops.
I have to remind myself that everything is not the same for Eric as for Noah. Here's an example: when we started giving Eric a bottle, I noticed that when he was about done eating, Eric would bite down hard on the nipple with his tough little gums. Now, when Adrianne taught me to give Noah a bottle she emphasized that it was very important that the baby not be allowed to bite down on the nipple. I couldn't remember why right off-hand, but I remembered that it was of the utmost importance that no nipple-biting occur.
The reason, I remembered later, was so that Noah wouldn't get into the habit and think he could bite Carla when he was nursing. I don't think Eric is likely to bite Carla, so I'm not being too uptight about nipple-biting at this point.
I am not always clever at making transitions from one situation to another. I did a crash course on bottle-feeding on Friday, having previously ignored those sections of all our books, and then I told David that we had to be careful not to either underfeed or overfeed Eric, and that we could do this by allowing him to set the pace, feeding on demand, and letting him stop when he was full even when there was milk left in the bottle. Further, we must understand that some feedings would be bigger than others and not expect them all to be the same. It was vital, I told David, that as we made the transition from breastmilk to formula that we continue to let feeding be Eric-driven. The books all emphasized this point, that it's much easier when breastfeeding to feed the baby exactly the right amount, but that parents who bottle feed might either push too much on the baby in an effort to drain the bottle, or not give the baby enough if the baby finished a bottle and still wanted more. David pointed out to me, gently, that this wouldn't be much of a stretch for us as Eric had never actually been breastfed and so we had been practicing demand feeding with the finger-feeder practically since he was born. Right, I said sheepishly.
The finger-feeding was marked in increments of 2 ccs (30 ccs is an ounce) and we were logging what Eric ate, so for the first three weeks we knew to the milliliter what his intake was. Bottles, of course, are marked in ounces, and Eric has also started eating a lot more--50-60 ccs, or about two ounces, would have been a really big meal from the finger feeder, but is a small meal from the bottle. Also, we have let go of logging because it is so obvious he's eating, wetting, and pooping enough now. But it is a little hard to let go of that kind of meticulous record-keeping. Today I have found myself keeping a rough tally of ounces in my head, just to check in. I came downstairs today from a nap and found David feeding Eric. "Do you think he's eating enough?" I asked. David said, "I was just wondering if we were over-stuffing him." I said, "It must be exactly right, then."
Noah and Adrianne came up on Sunday and we had a wonderful visit. On Thursday when they were here I was too distraught about my milk to enjoy them. I even wondered whether having my own baby had suddenly made me incapable of loving Noah anymore! But I am happy to report that I seem to love him and his mom as much as ever when I'm not in despair. Noah was interested in our cats, and I tried to take a picture of him petting MItch and Harvey but whenever you point a camera at Noah, he straightens up, looks directly into the lens, and smiles a big smile. So I was unable to get a shot of him from the side, crouching down petting the cats. Instead, I got a very nice shot of him smiling big for the camera while the cats lounge at his feet. I was teasing Adrianne about her baby being obviously trained to have his photo taken. She said, "Yes, I admit it, he's been doing some modeling."
We went out to dinner with some friends on Saturday. As we were leaving the restaurant, they took a couple of pictures of us and Eric to use up a roll of film. I said, "hang onto those pictures until we get a roll back from the developer, and be ready to make copies--the way things are going, they might be the only baby pictures Eric ever has."
Noah has been handling the chaos of our house remarkably well for a baby whose own home environment is pet-free. He doesn't like it when Stevie yells (and Stevie yells more when Noah is here, Noah being a stranger), but he doesn't make a big fuss about it. He just stays close to his mom, where it's safe. And in the quiet periods, Noah explores quite boldly within sight and easy reach of Adrianne. It's a big relief to me; I was afraid Noah and Stevie would be so mutually upsetting that we would have trouble managing visits while Adrianne and Carla are in Michigan, but it's been fine.
Adrianne was going to come up from Ann Arbor without Noah today and devote herself to assisting us with menial labor around the house, but she woke up with pinkeye and her babysitters bailed on her for fear that Noah would also have it and would pass it on to her children. Sigh. We figured if she came up, we could manage for her not to touch me or the baby, but if she and Noah both came, the sets of people who couldn't touch each other just multiplied into the realm of the unmanageable: Su and Adrianne, Su and Noah, Noah and Eric, Eric and Adrianne...just too much.
Noah is fourteen months now, and big and sturdy, in about the 80th percentile for isze. He is so big and blonde that he makes Eric look tiny and swarthy by comparison, although though Eric looks big to us as he continues to grow. He's got back-of-the-hand dimples and a big round belly now, just like a normal baby. Not to mention those chubby cheeks. It was chilly yesterday so we put him in the red union suit and purple had and snapped a picture, but it won't be the true Elf Baby. The true Elf Baby has disappeared into Eric's impressive double chin.
Adrianne laughed at me on Sunday because I kept saying things that started with, "When Eric was really little..." I got huffy when she laughed, and she said, "I'm sorry, but I'm looking at you holding this tiny baby." But it's true: he's practically a whole different baby than he was two weeks ago, and it's not just about fat deposits. He seems to be capable of exercising some volition re: getting his fist or thumb into his mouth, and his hands are starting to uncurl.
Eric is very much enjoying the set of black-and-white flashcards David made him. I call it his Rorschach test. He likes to lie in his Rubbermaid tub and look at the ones David has taped to the side, and he likes to cuddle in someone's arms and look at pictures they show him. He has wonderful long awake times now, when he looks around and waves his arms and legs. One of my challenges is to put him down and go to sleep when he has one in the middle of the night. He is perfectly capable of being happy in his cradle and then dropping off to sleep at the end of his awake time, and I need my sleep. I am also sometimes guilty of sitting and relaxing with him after a feeding instead of quickly changing his diaper and putting us both back to bed. I did that this morning, after we got up at 7 to eat. He was done eating by 7:20, and we both could have been back in bed for another 90 minutes of snoozin' if I'd gotten my butt out of the chair. But I sat there holding my sleeping baby and thinking pleasant thoughts until it was too late--Stevie and the dogs were ready to get up. I did take a little nap after morning chores and breakfast, but it's not the same.
I am happy to report that some unconscious part of my mind has made the decision not to have a big hysterical drama about the breastfeeding equipment and literature that litters the house. I could see me crying over the unused nursing pads in my underwear drawer, or weeping and howling as I rend my nursing bras with pinking shears. But I wore a nursing bra the other day when I needed a black bra for under a sleeveless black top, and my only reaction to the nursing pads, very nice re-usable cotton ones, is "What the heck am I going to do with these?" David suggested Tiny Dog Frisbees or making a quilt; it's too bad I don't still keep rodents, because I think the gerbils would have enjoyed shredding them for bedding. I packed up all my breast-milk collection supplies; I was tempted to throw it all away, as it is not great hand-me-down material. Another woman could maybe use the stuff if she boiled it all, but it's probably better if she buys her own. But I decided to keep it because it seems not entirely inconceivable to me that I might be breast-feeding a baby in a couple of years, and I would be sorry to have to re-purchase $70 worth of plastic tubing, breast bugles, and plastic bottles.
One of our books classifies babies into three categories: Active, Average, and Quiet. We have found these categories very interesting; Noah, for instance, fits the description of the Active Baby to a T. He is very sensitive to stimuli in his environment, and so can sometimes be overwhelmed, but he also thrives on stimulation. He has never been a baby you could hand a toy to and walk away from for an hour. He finishes with things quickly and is ready for something new. Adrianne has said that they bought many more toys for him this first year than they expected to, and finally had enough to institute a system of rotating toys out of active service periodically so they'd be "new" again. Noah has also always liked a high level of interaction with people, I think. When he was tiny (as tiny as he ever was), he liked to have a person help him make his transitions from, for instance, being awake to being asleep. He liked vigorous rocking, and Adrianne was just reminding me on Sunday of the strait-jackets she used to have to construct for him in the name of "swaddling," to help him calm his arm movements enough so he could settle down.
Our baby, we think, is about on the borderline of Average and Quiet. He is mostly oblivious to what's going on around him, sleeps a lot and easily, cries only when he's hungry. I would think he was a full-blown Quiet baby except that he can be relied upon to wake up to eat; one of the classification terms for the Quiet baby is that it often needs to be woken up to eat. I am more sure about Eric on this point since he's been eating bottle milk. He used to have trouble staying awake through a whole finger-feeding, so we were changing his diaper in the middle of feedings, tickling his feet, rubbing his stomach, massaging his head and back, anything to vex him enough that he'd wake up and keep sucking. I think now that the feedings were just too hard and took too long; he has no trouble staying awake for a whole feeding now. He also does have plenty of quiet happy awake time in the course of his day. Eric sometimes needs help with his transitions, but does not need to be rocked or walked; he just needs to be held and given a finger to suck until he drops off.
We (David, Scott, and I) found this whole classification interesting, and then came across the same classification scheme in a development psych book of Scott's. Only in the developmental psych book they used different terminology. How's this for judgmental: instead of Active, Average, and Quiet, you've got your Difficult Baby, your Good Baby, and your Slow-to-Warm-Up Baby. It makes it much less fun to talk about how Eric and Noah are different if Noah is suddenly "Difficult" (I'm sure his mothers would not agree with the label) and Eric is suddenly "Good," on the borderline of "Slow to Warm Up." I can't dispute that Eric is a "good" baby, but Noah is a pretty darn good baby, too. And I keep telling Eric that it's perfectly OK if he gets more challenging as he gets older; we don't love him because he lets Mom sleep at night. Or at least not only because he lets mom sleep at night.
OK, time to go hold my sweet baby.
Posted by Su Penn at June 19, 2003 08:14 AM | TrackBack