The Weight Worry Begins....

A real lazy day today. It was freezing cold and windy outside so we decided to spend the day in, mind you by the time we got up and about half the day was gone. E and I lay dozing on the couch half watching the midday movie whilst M went to gather more essentials. We are realising all the things that we cannot do without now that he is home.

At about 5pm I woke E for a feed and that was the end of that. He did not take kindly to being woken and would not feed properly. M and I also started to become obsessed with his tiny size and got ourselves in a terrible state of worry that he is not eating enough. Out came the trusty books and in we lurched looking for signs and signals that ours was a well fed baby. We even toyed with the idea of taking him to the hospital to weigh him and if I had my way and a lot of money I would buy some hospital type scales for him to sleep on. Not half paranoid. Basically E cried every time we put him in his cot. We bathed him and as usual he loved that but then we had to take him out. We read that you cannot overfeed breastfed babies and so we kept putting him to the breast. Still he cried. We sang to him, patted him and many long hours later (at about 11pm) he fell asleep in M’s arms watching the footy show.

I guess that he was so tired that the whole night he was a gem, he woke up at 1;15 and 5:20 for his feeds almost back to his old hospital routine. I put him in his cot straight after his feed with a sound maker playing the sound of the ocean and he slept right through with no fuss. We had spent so much time before (in the last few days) trying to burp him and then we read that it is not necessary it is just one of those myths that babies need to burp (plus it is a satisfying sound for the parents). So instead of putting him over my shoulder and winding him after every meal I simply put him in the cot and for now it seems to work. He still gets furious with his nappy changes but is much calmer through the feed, unless he has trouble latching in which case he stiffens his head and pulls back and I am amazed at his strength and flummoxed as to what I have to do to bring him closer to me.

We are still counting wet nappies and looking for the signs that he is putting on weight but I have decided to change my breast feeding style and feed him “twin style” all the time and it seems to make him happy so….