I was pretty much up and around the next day after Peter was born. Matt was home for the day and that was a big help. I was able to spend a lot of time just resting in bed, nursing, and chilling out. Matt had to go back to work the next day, but my mom was around pretty much every day 7am-7pm, so that I could rest and then so I had help getting back into the swing of things.
Nursing was going really well. My milk came in with very little discomfort, my nipples weren’t getting overly sore from his nursing, but he was pretty much attached 24/7…which was ok, forced me to take it easy and rest. However, by the time he was two weeks old I knew something was wrong.
He was nowhere near as chunky as when he was born. I broke out the kitchen scale and he was down to 8lbs on the nose, from his birth weight of 9lbs 4 ounces. He wasn’t dehydrated or anything…he had lots of wet diapers, but hadn’t pooped in over a week. Bottom line, there’s just not enough fat in my milk for him to gain weight. It was a hard day.
I cried. I was disappointed. I felt like I had betrayed Peter. I really was hoping the breastfeeding was going to work this time…it was working! It was going so well and I was quite literally reveling in my bodies ability to completely sustain this little baby, until it didn’t.
One of the things with breastfeeding after a reduction is the unknown: Unless I pump I don’t know how much milk Peter gets from me. My midwife and I were hopeful that it would all come together this time, for at least a month or two. We had done more research, were finding hopefully information that the more pregnancies you had that the ducts regenerated and breastfeeding became more successful with each attempt, but not this time.
The other difficulty was that Peter developed a pretty nasty case of thrush, that he shared with me. His mouth was to the point that he did not want to nurse because it hurt his poor little tongue too much. Given both of these issues we began pumping, bottle feeding, and supplementing.
He weighed in at 9lbs 11.9 ounces yesterday, which was fantastic! He was up 17 ounces from his appointment 10 days earlier, a vast improve from the 8lbs he was down to. Praise the Lord!
In this family we have a tradition….The Incredible Shrinking Bunny! Each of the kids have had their pictures taken with this bunny to mark how much they’ve grown. Unfortunately, none of the kids have their picture with the bunny at birth…no matter how hard I tried. {You can find the rest of the kids 4 Week/One Month posts HERE and HERE}.
And some other fun pictures from the past month…
I hashtag Peter’s pictures on Instagram with #SweetPicklePeter
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