On Friday, I finally mastered the learning curve on Eric 2.0 and we had a much better day. It turns out that one feature of the upgrade is that he will cry for other reasons than hunger. Now, since he was born, the equation has been simple: if the baby cries, feed it. After two days on Wed. and Thurs. of him eating tiny meals every two hours or so, on Friday I decided to undertake a scientific experiment: if he had eaten less than three hours earlier and started crying, I would try other things first. Worked great. Now he's in this terrific schedule of eating every 3-4 hours in the daytime, and we're figuring out what he needs at other times. And sometimes it's surprising. Last night, for instance, he needed to be put down so he could wave his arms and legs freely for an hour. Here I had been trying to soothe him by cuddling, and he just wanted me to go away. I only managed to figure it out because he got suddenly happy when I put him on the table to change his diaper. Once I knew what he wanted, I took him up to bed and he wiggled happily between me and David for awhile, and then eventually put himself to sleep with just a little help from his pacifier.
He stuck to his terrific 9-3-6-9 eating schedule for, I think, three or four nights in a row. And Friday night David took the 6 a.m. feeding, so I slept from 10:30 to 3 and again from 4 to 9:30. Saturday I felt like I had had a full night's sleep. David was a little tired, though. I figure we felt exactly the same but, coming from different baselines, interpreted it differently. Coming off seven weeks of sleep deprivation, I experienced a level of tiredness indistinguishable from a full night's sleep (until my 2-hour nap at 4 p.m.), while David experienced simple tiredness.
I found myself hoping Eric would stick to this sleeping schedule, even though such a hope violates my dictate to live purely day-to-day. He is at an age when things can begin to get more predictable, so I thought maybe he could keep it up. But last night he did something different. He ate at 9, went to sleep a little before midnight (this has been his routine this week), woke and ate at 3. A little before six, he got fussy, and I got us up and fixed a bottle. He ate about three sips and went back to sleep. "Not really hungry yet," I thought, but I figured I had just anticipated him by a little bit. He gets restless for about 30-45 minutes before he wakes up all the way, and if you try to feed him during that time he's just not hungry enough to be motivated to eat. So I lay down on the couch with him to doze while he finished getting hungry. Next thing I knew, it was 9 a.m. So I figure if I hadn't gotten him up unnecessarily, he would have done 9-3-9. Today, for the second day in a row, I feel almost as if I got a regular night's sleep. Aahh.
The "official" definition of sleeping through the night is that the baby sleeps six hours. That would not be my definition of "through the night," but it's the standard. If I hadn't gotten him up, he might have done it last night. Wow.
Penelope Leach says that at some point in the first two months, your newborn will turn into the Settled Baby. The Settled Baby is the baby you know, the predictable baby. Eric may have become the Settled Baby this week. He and I are into such a schedule the last few days that I am even napping at the same time every afternoon.
It's amazing how quickly things change. On Thursday afternoon, I was so tired and overwrought I nearly called David and asked him to come home early from work, and I was asking myself, "When will I ever feel like a normal person again?" Weep weep weep. Turns out the answer was: the very next morning.
Eric weighed 9 lbs. 10 ounces in a onesie and clean diaper yesterday. Bigger than Noah when he was born! Maybe about the size of Carla when she was born! Only a little more than a pound to go to catch up with Julie at birth! I think it would be fun to make a growth chart with all our birth weights and the weights of the cats on it, and keep track of when he reaches each of them. We figure it will take him about a year to catch up with Mitch, who weighs 18 or 19 pounds.
My allergies have started acting up again this week. I don't know if I told you about the weird post-partum miracle that I have not needed my allergy medication since the birth. Well, this week I started getting itchy. The good news is that I have been able to manage the itching with hypnosis. For some reason I don't understand, it always hits me right after I lie down in bed, and interferes with sleeping. But I can relieve the itching with hypnosis and go to sleep! I'm quite impressed.
Of course, there's no reason I couldn't go back on my allergy meds now that I'm not breastfeeding. I'm just curious to see how long I can do without them.
Remembering that I can go back on my meds is kind of a surprise. I forget that Eric is completely detached from my body now, that what I eat has no effect on him. It's strange after ten months, and In a way, it makes me sad that he's so independent of me. I wonder if continued symbiosis was one of the things I was going to like about breastfeeding, like breastfeeding is a way to slowly break the perfect bond mother and baby share during pregnancy.
On the other hand, it has crossed my mind to wonder why "knowing exactly what your baby is getting" is never mentioned as a benefit of bottle-feeding. The formula never changes, and, while breastmilk is always perfect, many moms also report that what they eat affects the baby. Some women can't eat spicy foods while breastfeeding, my friend Merry couldn't eat jelly beans even though she craved them (she thinks the artificial colors disagreed with the baby), and I was going to forego peanuts in order to avoid triggering a peanut allergy in the little guy. The risk of allergies is greater with formula, for sure--I'm not suggesting formula is better. Just more predictable. And I'm surprised the pro-formula people never mention that.
Sometimes in the past, friends and I have joked about breastfeeding a person forever. Why not, if it's perfect food? But I was just reading about why you can't feed a baby just breastmilk until it goes to college. It turns out that milk (whether breastmilk or formula), being mostly water, is an inefficient carrier of calories. It's not dense. At a certain point, the baby is eating as much as it can at each feeding, and eating as often as it can, but needs more calories than the milk can provide. At that point, it starts to need a little bit of solid food, densely packed with calories, to make up the difference. Last night, David and Scott and I were trying to figure out if there was some point in one's life when one could go back on breastmilk only, when one's stomach had gotten large enough, say. Formula has 20 calories per ounce, so an adult needing 2500 calories a day would need to drink 135 ounces of breastmilk. It's not too appealing (and one shudders to think of the suffering of the poor woman providing it), but it could be done, we think.
Posted by Su Penn at July 15, 2003 10:00 AM | TrackBack