Chugging along

Just a short entry to update y'all - we've been on the sleep/eat/sleep plan trying to be sure my body can keep up with milk production and everything, so not a whole lot of blogging energy, yet.

The ultrasound went fine, although being at East General was really hard. Also, the ultrasound dept didn't know how to handle Noah's temporary health card and sent us to patient accounts. The last time I was there was paying for Emily's and my charts. Patient accounts laughed at ultrasound and gave us a hall pass (almost literally; a piece of paper saying it was fine to go ahead with the scan). And yes of course Carl was right there too, looking equally strained.

The results go to our family dr., so we may hear Tues am. I am not really worried at this point: it's more about his weight to me than some nebulous possible hip problem, but I am glad to follow up on it.

I breastfed in public, in the waiting room, and Noah did great. He's still looking kind of scrawny to me though and combined with being in Emily's birth/trauma place, the system had a kind of meltdown at night that he's starving to death and it will all be death, death, dead, dead, dead. Predictable, but a lousy reaction, and when you add serious sleep deprivation in, it becomes overwhelming.

He's feeding at regular two hour intervals, which means no more than 1.5 hrs sleep, much of it nightmares. The feeds are good, he sucks and swallows and seems contented afterwards. But we remain unconvinced, because a) his weight wasn't going up on Thurs and b) the pooing thing. It's really frustrating not to know. I thought I could make it to Tuesday to find out, until about 9 pm at night, and then all of a sudden he looked on the verge of death. Today I may see if the clinic would weigh him, but thanks to the whole "ancient scales at dr's office" thing, it really has to be *her* scale. And of course it's Labour Day weekend.

It's a bad loop, emotionally, and of course there's no short-term solution. Carl and my mother in law took turns putting Noah back down after feeds though so all I had to do was get up, offer breast, and go back to bed. I got more sleep than I have a few nights, anyway - probably 6 hrs total. Have I mentioned we can't sleep in the daytime? It's old trauma, that one, but it is complicating things a bit. If we're really tired enough sometimes we can, but people wake up freaked out.

But. Noah's been developing by leaps and bounds. He likes to spend time in a sort of pseudo-bed playmat thing my work colleagues gave us, staring at the newborn-friendly bright patterns and cooing. He is discovering the visual world and he is *interested*. He stares at my shirt, the wall, the couch - anything he can focus on. He can turn over, I may have mentioned, onto either side, seemingly at will. He's awake more between feeds and he seems to actually get bored and cranky if one does not provide adequate things to look at. We're buying a mobile today.

But he's still hanging onto his poo. What *is* that about anyway?

I find I like hard data (weight) over soft data (he seems like a very happy and contented baby).

Shandra