Sickness?

I think Sterling has caught her first cold. She's been snortly for several days. It's been the worst when she first wakes up (when she's been laying flat for several hours), then it gets better as the day goes on.

Yesterday, she was more congested than usual and she was cranky for most of the day. She refused to be put down for more than a few minutes and she cried more than she usually does.

This morning, she was even more congested. She makes a little snorting sound when she breathes. She woke up about 6:30 and we nursed and she had a bottle, I changed her, then she fell asleep and I took her back into the bed. She slept until about 9:30, then we got up and nursed / bottled / changed again. She fell asleep again and she slept till 11:30, then repeated. Normally she has a good period of awakeness after her first morning nap, but we skipped that this morning. She wasn't awake very long until probably 3:30, but every time I tried to put her down she woke up and cried. I held her the whole morning. I tried taking her axial temperature (underarm) around noon; it was normal.

She had a happy awake time around 3:30 and I put her on her play mat and she had a good wiggle. I'll post about her wiggling prowess next.

Mike brought home some saline nose drops and we dropped some into her tiny, tiny nostrils this evening. She found the experience to be quite disconcerting, which I'm sure I would have thought as well.


Then, we got out our Nosefrida and tried to clear out her sinuses. The way this thing works is you put the blue part up to her nostril and then suck the red mouthpiece. There's a filter to prevent anything from moving all the way up through the tube, but you'd have to suck really hard (and have a lot of snot) for that to happen. We didn't get much out, but it did seem to clear a path and she's not snorting as much as she did before.

Relatives

We visited my dad yesterday. He's totally in love with Sterling. He's decided that he's going to go by Doodad (my brother and I have called him Doo practically forever).

Two of my aunts and an uncle (my dad's brothers and sisters) were visiting and they were also very impressed with the baby. I learned something interesting talking to one of my aunts - she didn't produce enough milk to feed her babies either. She's the second one of my aunts to tell me that. I remember my aunt who lives in Portland mentioning it when she visited us when Sterling was probably about a week (or maybe two) old, but I apparently chose to ignore it at the time. But now, having heard about nursing problems from two different aunts, I think it's fairly likely that there's some genetic component to my low milk supply.

This news is both depressing and relieving. It's sort of a relief to hear that there's some physical problem 

and that there's nothing I could have done to prevent it or to have made it better if I'd done something differently earlier on. It negates a lot of the "what ifs" that I've had running through my head. On the other hand, it means that there's nothing that I can probably do to improve my milk supply beyond where it is. That's really depressing. I'm going through a grieving process about breastfeeding. 

6 week photo shoot

I got a coupon in the mail for a portrait package at Sears for $7.99. One pose, several prints; I figured I couldn't lose even if the pictures sucked.

She's actually trying to nurse on Mike's face.

I like this one, even though Sterling has a funny expression on her face.

What could be cuter than tiny feet?

We ended up being photographed for over an hour and buying the CD of all the pictures, plus 10 sheets of prints. It was way more than $7.99. However, I figure she's only 6 weeks old one time and now we have a couple of nice family pictures. Our next photo shoot is coming up at 3 months with Michael James again.

Carlton Crawl

Today was Sterling's first daytrip. We met my mother in Carlton for the Carlton Crawl, which I had found LivingSocial coupons for. It was basically a walking tour of wine tasting places. We went to eight shops and tasted things at each of them (mostly wines with tiny foods paired with them). All of the stops were excellent. We bought several bottles of wine and a very tasty pesto. I'm really looking forward to breaking into them soon.

Sterling had an excellent time and was very happy. So was her Daddy.

Baby's first wine tasting.

This was in a stop back at the car to nurse / have a bottle.

We put the car seat in the BOB stroller, which worked out great. It's pretty big, so it was slightly cumbersome in some of the smaller stores. It's very maneuverable though, which made up for it.

Pumping Experiment Results

The results of the pumping experiment are in. I nursed up until this morning. This morning, we had our last nurse right before getting out of bed. I wasn't quite ready to get up, so I let her nurse off of one side before I got up and changed her diaper. After she nursed, I pumped and continued pumping roughly every 2 hours for the rest of the day. Results can be seen below (of course there's a graph!).

There's a very strong correlation between time and ounces produced. Well, duh. That makes sense. Increasing time by 2 fold seems to roughly increase production by the same amount (60 minutes = 0.5 oz, 120 minutes = 0.7-0.9 oz, 180 minutes = 1.4 oz). There are also other variables that aren't being taken into consideration, such as time of day (I think anecdotally that I produce more in the morning), how much I've had to drink recently, and when I've taken medication / supplements in relation to pumping. So pumping more often doesn't produce a greater quantity of pumped milk, but it should help to stimulate further production (like tomorrow's results perhaps?)

The total pumped today is 7.3oz. Sterling consumed 24.5oz via bottle (including all of the breastmilk pumped). That's pretty much in line with what I had predicted, although the pumping results were on the low side. She took roughly 16oz of formula, which is on the high side of what she has been drinking. She is supposed to be more efficient at extracting milk than the pump is, so the results pretty much agree. I'd say that typically, she's getting about 50% of her milk intake from me and 50% supplemented via formula.

These results are sort of reassuring and depressing at the same time. I'm producing about 12oz of milk a day, which seems like a lot when I take into consideration that she only drinks 2-3oz at a feeding. However, 50% seems pretty low for the amount of effort that I'm putting into it. I pumped 8 times for an average of 17 minutes a piece. That means I spent 136 minutes of my day today attached to the breast pump.

Next Breastfeeding Experiment

Tomorrow, we're trying basically the opposite of the 24-hour breastfeeding cure. Rather than trying to breastfeed the whole day, I'm going to try to pump the whole day. It'll give me some idea of how much total milk I'm producing. It will also give us a baseline to see if production is going up or down (if we try the experiment again later on). We'll also see how much formula Sterling wants to eat during the entire day, which will allow us to sort of extrapolate how much she's getting from me.

Here's my prediction: I think I usually produce between 0.3 and 0.5mL of milk per hour. That means that I should be producing between 7 and 12 oz of milk per day. That agrees with Sterling's current formula consumption level - she usually eats between 10 and 15 oz per day. Most websites suggest that to determine the amount of milk a baby needs, you take 2.5 x pounds of baby. Sterling weighed about 8.5 pounds when we last weighed her. That means she should need about 21oz of milk per day, which fits in with my prediction.

Eating

Lacking sufficient breast milk, Tiny Squee is forced to seek other food sources.