Meltdown

Our plan to give Ian a bottle of EBM after I've nursed him has backfired. Although it has helped with his weight gain problem (we discovered he's probably only getting about 9 ounces a day from me whereas he needs about 15 ounces a day), now he doesn't want to nurse at all. Nadia didn't start going on strike with nursing until she was about 6 months old; I can't believe Ian is doing so 2 days after turning one month old. I didn't want either child to have formula, but when your babies are admitted to the NICU, that's impossible to avoid as they start feeding them immediately and a woman's milk doesn't come in immediately after giving birth. In fact it often takes longer for milk to come in because you're not having any physical contact with your baby. He was born on Saturday and wasn't allowed to attempt to nurse for the first time until Thursday. I tried to get him to have as little contact with a bottle as possible; he was primarily fed through an NG tube. My plan had been to wait several weeks before introducing a bottle and then hoped that he'd only have bottles while I was at work on Monday and Tuesday evenings. I hoped this would mean I could nurse him for at least 12 months, but one of the conditions of discharge was that I give him a bottle after every nursing session, so my plan went out the window.

I had plenty of milk at one point, but I cut back on pumping when we came home from the hospital. It's really hard to pump several times a day when you're taking care of a newborn and an 18 month old. Since at that point Ian wasn't nursing very well, my supply went down. Then last week Diane suggested I stop pumping and my supply went down further even though Ian started nursing longer. Over the past 24 hours I've been taking lots of Fenugreek and pumping many times a day. The lactation nurse I spoke with today said I should see an improvement by Saturday. It won't do any good if Ian refuses to nurse. I am tempted to go cold turkey off both the shield and bottles over the next 24 hours - figuring that if he is hungry he'll nurse eventually, but it's so hard to watch him scream, plus I would then worry about him losing weight and/or becoming dehydrated. The next 3 days will be pivotal. Either nursing will improve a lot, or I'll likely throw in the towel, and that breaks my heart. I really wanted to nurse for 12 months for emotional reasons for myself and physical reasons for Ian. The pediatrician wants him to come in for an appointment. She said she's concerned that he's not gotten back to his birth weight yet. I really don't know how an appt is going to help anything. I'm going to wait until Monday to call. I would be an emotional wreck if I went in tomorrow.

I'm going to ask Paul to call Sarah and see if Nadia can spend the day there tomorrow. Nadia has been asking many times a day about Abbey (Sarah's 3 year old), and it will be well worth $20 if we avoid buying formula for 11 months. I want to spend all the time either nursing Ian, pumping, or sleeping. It's 7pm now, and from 3am until now (16 hours), I only slept 45 minutes. Nadia took a morning nap (that's when I got some sleep), but not an afternoon nap. If she's only going to take one nap, it needs to be in the afternoon. Starting tomorrow, I only plan on having her go down once a day. Hopefully this also will mean that she'll get up later (she got up at 5:30 this morning).