So the night of Friday July 1 into the morning of Saturday July 2 has officially become the longest night of my life...and that's gotta be saying something coming from someone who's had an aneurysm and spent five days in a Critical Care Unit.
The concept of breast feeding is a bit beyond me as a guy...and all the books one reads before the birth mention it as being the most natural thing to do...but watching my wife bravely attempt this was not fun and far from natural...in fact, it was a bit worse than dealing with her birthing pains as every time he failed to latch on brought on another bout of hysterics about how she's a failure as a woman.
Obviously, in my mind, this is not the case...and thank G-d for my in-laws being here. While I was able to send my brother-in-law to the drugstore to pick up some perscriptions, my sister-in-law took over as our lactation consultant and helped me calm Natasha down and remind her that any number of factors could be contributing to the problem at hand...especially since Malcolm had latched on immediately upon being handed to her our first night at the hospital. We got through round one of the "fight to feed Malcolm" with lots of love and support and just a bit of formula from a bottle (let's face it, his health comes first and if any of the Milk Nazis have a problem...well...they can go pump themselves).
Round two was rougher as everyone else was asleep by then (so we thought...my niece was apparently giving my sister-in-law her own problems). But we got through it the same way. Round three was even easier. By morning, Natasha had had some sleep, the baby had had enough food and everything was better.
Malcolm's first appointment with the pediatrician went well...he put on some weight since leaving the hospital (he was 8 lbs. 5 oz. at birth and went down to 7 lbs. 10 oz. upon discharge...this morning he was 7 lbs. 14 oz.) and thankfully, the pediatrician helped put Natasha even more a ease with our predicament ( her breasts are engorged, so Malcolm is essentially trying to suck from a 15 pound Brunswick bowling ball). Luckily we had some over the phone advice from an old friend of the Spickler family who is trained in all knowledge of this stuff...so once we were back from the doctor, my sister-in-law basically set up a "Booby Boot Camp" in the bedroom where we'd alternate Natasha putting hot towels and ice packs on her breasts in between pumpings and feeding attempts. We'd calm the baby down with 10cc of formula via a syringe and then make another feeding attempt via breast, feed him whatever came out of the pumps and then top him off with formula...this has been an all day affair and I'm beginning to think we could actually go into mass production if necessary (and just to give you an idea of how surreal this got, at once point, my sister-in-law was changing hot wash cloths every two minutes on my wife's breasts while my wife's got the electric pump on her, this with my niece slung on her back trying to look at what's going on and I'm syringe feeding my son while he sucked on my left pinkie...it was quite a sight).
We got some milk from Tash and it seemed like the engorgement was starting to subside, but the next morning Malcolm still wasn't latching the way he had in the hospital. I went back into panic mode about us starving our son and my brother-in-law took me out of the house while my sister-in-law went back to work on the two problems (apparently there was a repeat of the odd sights and I'm pretty sure my sister-in-law has seen more of my wife's breasts than I have of late). While we were gone, Malcolm did latch on and nurse briefly...we were called to bring home an orthodontic nipple so we could feed him the breastmilk without causing nipple confusion (and this brought back my fears of starving him, even though no one said anything to the effect that he wasn't eating...my mind just seemed to jump to that).
Armed with something labelled a Nuk, we got home and I discovered the baby was fine. He had eaten somewhat and we fed him some more using the new nipple to give him some expressed milk. So now we had the bizarre routine down to a science with dis-engorging my wife and feeding the baby now somewhat under control, we had to rest up for the next day's festivities...Malcolm's bris.
Be seeing you.
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