Sigh. Went for another weigh-in today, and Lucas only gained 70 grams, where the ped wanted to see him gain twice that. He’ll be five weeks old on Friday and is only two ounces above his birthweight at 10 lbs 3 oz..<\/p>\n
I don’t think the problem is with my milk supply, but perhaps with the quality of my milk. I can hear him gulping when the milk lets down, and he has plenty of wet and soiled diapers, as I’ve mentioned<\/a>. More likely, it seems like I’m making skim milk when Lucas needs something more like homogenized. So, starting tonight, I’ll be supplementing my milk with one bottle of formula per day. Hopefully, this will be enough extra calories to help him gain a bit more.<\/p>\n I left the substitute ped’s office (mine’s on March Break, but this is the plan we formulated – pardon the pun – before he left, in the contingency that Lucas did not gain at least 20 grams per day) feeling inadequate, even as I tried to convince myself that it’s no fault of mine. Heck, I even supplemented with Tristan from the time he was four months old right through until he weaned himself at 10 months, and that worked fine. But damn, I felt lousy standing in the formula aisle at Loblaws this afternoon. Rationally, I know this is what Lucas needs, so of course this is the best thing to do. I’m not giving up breastfeeding entirely, so he’ll get the best of both worlds… nutrition from the formula, antibodies and iron and other goodies from my breastmilk. But I still feel like I’m letting him down… or, more specifically, that my vexatious breasts have once again let me down. <\/p>\n The greatest irony is that the nursing has just become easy again — it doesn’t hurt to latch, and he can feed to his heart’s content without hurting my nipples. He has been, too — last couple of days, he’s been feeding every two hours in the afternoon and every three or so overnight, so maybe that’s another sign that he’s just not getting satisfaction from the quantity he’s getting from me. <\/p>\n One other alternative I might explore is some sort of supplement you can add to expressed breast milk. I am not overly fond of pumping – especially in those kind of quantities and over the long term – but maybe it’s worth looking into. My midwife just mentioned it now, so I’ll ask the ped about it next week.<\/p>\n Crying baby alert… more later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sigh. Went for another weigh-in today, and Lucas only gained 70 grams, where the ped wanted to see him gain twice that. He’ll be five weeks old on Friday and is only two ounces above his birthweight at 10 lbs 3 oz.. I don’t think the problem is with my milk supply, but perhaps with … Continue reading “Not good enough”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67,66],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-baby-days","category-lucas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1229\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}