Dexter Cooley: Dexter's First Blog Post

Dexter is officially 3 days old, almost to the minute. It's been quite a trip. Dennis and I decided that they need to have "newborn time," just like they have "dog years," because we feel like we've been doing this for at least a week already.

Saturday night wasn't too bad. We didn't really know what to expect and all that, and we made it through OK.

Sunday night was AWFUL. His nursery nurse was AWFUL. He was clearly hungry and wouldn't nurse. She was condescending about our breastfeeding techniques. ("Why don't you try X?" Seriously. Like I haven't already tried X, Y, Z, and @#$%^$ 20 times each.) When I suggested supplementing with formula, she got all, "oh, don't give up on breastfeeding just yet. He's doing OK and your milk will come in soon. It'll be OK." I resisted my maternal instinct to tell her to shove it, because she was the pediatric nurse, right? So surely she would know, right? Turns out Dennis was doing the same thing.

Well, she was wrong, wrong, wrong! What everyone told us was "good" breastfeeding turned out not to be. He wasn't latching properly and wasn't actually getting much at all, even considering how little they're supposed to get in those first few days anyway. (Parental instinct lesson = learned.)

We asked on Monday morning to be put on the lactation consultant's list, and Dexter and I spent a little over an hour with her on Monday afternoon. She thinks he may have a "posterior tongue tie" (inherited directly from his father) and can't really use his tongue effectively to suckle. The pediatrician gives little credence to this theory, but we will definitely be watching it closely.

Since he'd gone pretty much all day with no pee or poop, we settled on a new plan. The new process is breastfeeding for 10 minutess on each side, then Dennis feeds him some formula while I pump for 15 minutes. Then I take him back and help him chill out while Dennis sucks up the tiny drops of colostrum from the pump into little syringes and cleans the pump stuff. Sometime during this process, we feed him (by syringe, like a baby bird) the tiny drops of colostrum collected from the last pumping session. As of this writing, we're up to 1.5 mL of colostrum in one session. Quite an improvement over the 0.65 we got just yesterday.

Overall, including rousing him to feed and burping and everything els, this process takes about an hour, sometimes more. We repeat every 3 hours, so that leaves 2 hours for us to get him back to the nursery, eat, bathe, use the bathroom, and sleep. (And get visited/called by housekeeping, room service, the OB resident, the OB on call, the pediatrician, the pediatric nurse, the postpartum nurse, the postpartum technician, the webnursery photo people, the hearing test lady, chaplain services, the birth certificate office, and whoever else decides they absolutely.must.talk.to.us.right.this.minute. Honestly, someone knocks on the door about every 4 minutes.)

As annoying as they all are, though, I'm pretty scared of what will happen tomorrow when we go home and have to figure all of this out by ourselves. And I can't even imagine what would have happened if we'd've had to go home on Sunday or Monday - we never would have even known he wasn't breastfeeding properly, since everyone up to that point told us he was "doing great!"

Anyway, now he's pooping like a champ and taking between 20 and 30 mL of formula (plus over 1 mL of colostrum!) every 3 hours. He's really so much happier now.

I did get these super cute pics of one of his first diaper changes on Saturday night. Perhaps even the first one we did ourselves. See those tiny feet sticking up? Thanks to the c-section, Dennis has been on diaper duty this whole time. Between that and his not having dirty diapers thanks to the breastfeeding problems, I didn't change one until today.

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