Where have we been?

So we've been absent from the internet. In fact, this is the first time I've checked my computer in about three days. I wish it was just because we're in the giddy throes of new parenthood, but we're in Weight and Milk Supply Hell. At four days old, our daughter was listless, dehydrated, and down 10% of her birthweight. We gave it another day and she got down to 13% less than birth weight. She was 5lb 13oz and the pediatrician said that we HAD to supplement with formula, that she was getting more dehydrated - she was not pooping and peeing. I cried.

We started with supplementing small amounts of formula at the breast after nursing. We didn't know how much to give her, but it wasn't enough. She was still hungry and listless. She wanted to sleep all the time and it took 45 minutes to rouse her to eat. We learned that we would need to supplement more, so our supplementing system (a 3cc syringe attached to a tube we could slip in her mouth when she nursed) wasn't going to work for us. We bought a Supplemental Nursing System, a weird gadget that is essentially a bottle you wear around your neck that has two teeny little tubes that you tape to your boobs. Theoretically you latch the baby on to your nipple and the little teeny tube slips in. Theoretically.

What REALLY happens is that you end up either getting the baby latched on nicely with the tube hanging off to the side somewhere, or you manage to stuff the tube in the baby's mouth and her latch sucks. And the whole time, you're cursing the thing, you're trying to latch on 100 times, you're screaming, the baby's screaming... fun times.

And in the process of all of this craziness, we have been to appointments up the wazoo. We've gone for weight checks on July 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, the hospital for bilirubin checks on July 6 and 7, a local breastfeeding clinic on July 10, the breastfeeding support group at the pediatrician's office on July 11 (with some time with the pedi as well), a DAY OFF today, and we go in for another weight check tomorrow.

The weight checks were coming up as office visits, and after paying copays for six days straight, I had to tell the pediatrician that we were having financial issues with the copays. That was fun.

So we've had to re-evaluate. We weren't sleeping. We weren't eating regularly. We were spending all of our time trying to wake the baby every two hours to eat, struggling to rouse her, trying to nurse, getting frustrated, finding a long, drawn-out way to supplement her formula, helping her calm down and fall asleep, and doing it all again. We had to re-prioritize. Were we fighting to increase my milk supply for her, or for me? We had to decide what was our number one goal, and that goal was to get the baby to gain weight and get stronger. Milk supply is secondary at this point, though we do want to preserve our nursing relationship.

I never thought I would have a bottle-fed formula baby... but hey, I guess that's how parenting is, right?