Bliss of Life

Until now, Lily only smiled in her sleep.  Once last week, she gave a half smile to her mobile friends that hang above her changing table, but yesterday morning while I changed her diaper she gave her mobile friends a full beautiful gummy smile.  It was there and gone in a flash. Later in the day, I readjusted the pillow she was lying on in my lap.  I started laughing at the expression she made when her body shifted at the adjustment.  She looked at me when I was laughing and shot her great big gummy smile at me.  It was priceless. Today, she reciprocated a few of my smiles when she woke up from her late morning nap.  And then she started screaming from hunger.

Why yes, yes I do. After an entire week of taking herbal supplements and eating milk enhancing foods, I can now say that I have plenty of milk to feed the Little Bean. I’m still having to pump after each meal, just to keep my supply up. We’re hoping that by the end of the week Lily will be able to get all the milk she needs right from the breast and bottles will be used only when I need to rest. Right now, I have enough milk to cover little over four meals. Tomorrow, I’m going to start freezing some breast milk, just in case I get into trouble again. You never know.

(This is Ben posting on Kisha’s behalf)

Our lactation consultant stopped by yesterday to see how things have been progressing since the last visit and the results are in…

Lily was able to extract almost an ounce and half of milk in a little less than 45 minutes which is a huge improvement, she’s able to get more than double what she was able to get just a few days ago, but she still has a ways to go. Our new game plan is to supplement 1/2 ounce of pumped breast milk in a bottle in addition to a normal 30-45 minute feeding followed by Kisha pumping some more milk afterwards to help increase her supply. This is a big improvement to having to pump all of her milk and then feed her. It is still more work than 100% breast feeding but it is a lot less stressful than only pumping because Kisha was spending all of her time either pumping or feeding Lily. We felt like we were living paycheck to paycheck in terms of milk supply.

Ben took off of work today (I think he used a floating holiday) so I have some time to eat, sleep, pump milk, shower and blog. So here it goes…

On Tuesday Dawn, the lactation consultant, came over and used her scale that can measure to one hundredths of an ounce to weigh her before and after a 30 minute feeding session. In 30 minutes Lily was only able to extract 6/10ths of an ounce of milk. Considering that she drinks about three ounces of milk per feeding, you can see why she needed to nurse for hours and hours and hours at a time. Because I would feed her for hours and hours and hours at a time, she has continued to gain weight, about .66 of an ounce a day, which is a healthy amount of weight gain for a newborn. The problem? Her top pallet is too high. When babies have high top pallets, the nipple won’t reach it, which means they aren’t able to suck properly. Dawn recommended cranial sacral therapy to help her top pallet drop.

(This is type breast pump that is on loan to me.)

On Wednesday we went to see a physical therapist who also is an acupuncturist and does cranial sacral therapy. Cranial sacral is subtle to say the least, and Joan, the therapist who worked on Lily, was very respectful of Lily. I like that she treated her like the whole person that she is, but I’m getting off track.

Joan thought that it might take another session or two to get Lily’s pallet to drop completely, so made another appointment for Friday. A day after the session, Ben and I noticed that Lily started playing with her tongue, pushing up it out of her mouth. We tried nursing again, just so Lily could start getting a sense of how her new pallet feels. She wasn’t too happy about nursing. I thought it might be because she’s been taking bottles for the past two days, but Dawn said that babies often get fussy at the breast when their pallets start shifting because they aren’t used to the way it feels to nurse.

We had another appointment with Joan today, and Lily didn’t seem to do nearly as much fussing when I nursed her afterwards. I’m not sure if the cranial sacral therapy is working or not. I want to believe that it will fix our nursing issues. Tomorrow Dawn is coming over again, so we’ll be able to see if Lily is now able to get more milk when she nurses. I hope so.

One unexpected hurdle that I’m still trying to overcome is a low milk supply. Since Lily wasn’t able to extract much milk at one time, my body stopped making it. Lily now sucks down three ounces of milk at every feeding. When I started pumping milk for her on Monday night, I barely pumped an ounce, and that was from both breasts. I’ve been going overboard trying to increase my milk supply. I started taking a tincture with fenugreek, eating alfalfa sprouts and oatmeal, which are supposed to increase milk supply, and drinking a tea that has pretty much all of those things in it. Today my milk supply started increasing, but it still has a ways to go before I can keep up with the Little Bean’s needs.

We’re hoping for some good news tomorrow–fingers are crossed and prayers are being said.

Today, I spent the first day alone with Lily. It started out swell, but then it fizzled into something that I’m not sure how to describe. It was as if someone secretly swapped babies with me. For the past couple days Lily has been nursing for an hour (sometimes two) at a time. GB had warned us that she should be hitting her two week growth spurt, so I was kind of expecting some excessive nomming (our word for eating and nursing) behavior. Today, I realized that she wasn’t falling asleep after nursing, and she had only had one sleep period all day. She nursed for hours, literally, and she still seemed hungry. If I tried to lay her down after nursing, she would wake up and want to nurse again. By six o’clock I was wondering what was taking Ben so long to get home from work. I didn’t have time to shower, get enough to eat or drink, or even change out of the clothes I slept in. After a long shower and a phone call to my friend Elizabeth who has a four-month-old baby, I called GB.

Lately, it seems like every time I call GB she says, “I’ve been thinking about you two.” The reason for all this thinking? As GB put it, “Something just doesn’t seem to fit.” Apparently, the missing piece to the puzzle in all the little issues that we’ve had with Lily is something that has kept GB pondering about us. What she began to suspect is that Lily isn’t getting enough milk when she nurses. Her tongue isn’t tied anymore, but there is still something wrong with the way she is latching on and she may still have an uncoordinated tongue. That would explain her delayed pooping, her slow weight gain (she still hasn’t caught up to her birth weight, which usually happens by 2 weeks of age) her constant desire to nurse, my excessively sore nipples and why she wasn’t able to sleep today. She was too hungry!

So tonight, per GB’s instructions, we bottle fed her milk that I pumped. Lily sucked down 2 ounces in no time and promptly passed out. Poor Little Bean. She was so exhausted. Tomorrow I have a lactation consultant coming at 2:00. I’m just going to keep pumping and bottle feeding her until then. Hopefully, she can help us figure out our latching problems. GB seemed to think that it might take as long as a week to get it all sorted out. A week can’t be longer than the day I had.

P.S. I’m not going to write about the emotions that followed the realization that my body isn’t giving my baby enough food. As you can imagine, I felt pretty crappy.

Having Lily has left me pondering what in the world I did before she came along. So far, motherhood has been the most repetitive (wake to feed, change diaper, feed, burp, and sooth to sleep) yet fulfilling thing I’ve ever done. And so far, it’s been a roller coaster ride.

It started out just fine until the Wednesday night after she was born. She would try to latch on to breast feed, suck two times and then burst into tears. That went on all night. Thursday morning my doula came over with a breast pump and bottles. She watched her trying to suck on the bottle and diagnosed the problem, a short fraenulum aka being tongue tied. My midwife picked up some formula for us and I pumped the little milk that had come in, we were expecting Thursday night to be better, but it was another sleepless night. Lily’s little tongue got confused about how to use a bottle, and she was so hungry. Friday, four days after I gave birth, we dragged ourselves into an appointment with an ear, nose and throat doctor. He clipped Lily’s fraenulum and sent us on our way. Lily spent the next 24 hours eating from 40 minutes to an hour with only an hour in between feedings. Because she was so used to not being able to actually suckle milk, she would cry for about ten minutes while trying to latch on, but by the end of that 24 hour period she had put the short fraenulum experience behind her. That night, reinforcements came in the form of Lisa, Ben’s sister, and Vinyoo, Ben’s father.

Lisa stayed on our sofa Friday night and took care of all of the diaper changing and burping, so Ben could catch up on his sleep. Saturday night, she and Ben swapped feedings, so I could start catching up on my sleep. They left on Monday afternoon, which was around the time that I realized that I had a temperature of almost 100 degrees. The cause? A urinary tract infection (UTI). I just had a baby! Talk about adding insult to injury.

On Tuesday, my mom came in to give us some much needed help. By then I was able to pump enough milk to cover all the night feedings, which meant delicious uninterrupted sleep. With all the post Lily excitement, my body’s healing process was put on hold. I’m still trying to kick the UTI, but I feel a lot stronger than I did a week ago. In the meantime, our Little Bean has had some serious gas and constipation issues. There was one night last week (I don’t remember which night it was, they all run together) that the only way we got any sleep was for Ben to take Lily for a walk around the neighborhood in his sling from 2:30 to 4:00 in the morning. Yes, he is already a super dad!

Today, we took her to see Dr. Fan at AOMA (Academy of Oriental Medicine at Austin) who teaches Tuina. He worked on her for about 15 minutes and showed us how to give her the massage too. We’re supposed to do the Tuina massage one to two times a day. He thinks she’ll poop tomorrow. We’ll see…

P.S. See my husband’s site for pictures of Lily. http://www.themungbeans.com/