breakfast, lunch, dinner, second breakfast ...

At our speech therapy session this week we introduced breastfeeding (so if talk of breastfeeding makes you queasy, best to stop reading now!) Anne told me it looked like Calder did better breastfeeding than he did with a bottle and that I can now try breastfeeding prior to his G-tube feed for one feed per day.

forget breast milk,
can't you see I want Graeter's?

Breastfeeding has been on my list for a long time because, in theory, it would be more convenient for feeding, at least while I’m still at home. If Calder could be breastfed, I could cut out pumping – hallelujah. This would be huge. I cannot adequately convey to you the time-suck that pumping is. Breastfeeding would cut out the mixing of milk and formula, eliminate/decrease the washing and sterilizing of all the parts (pump parts, bottle parts, G-tube parts) and just generally combine two processes into one. I wouldn’t have to tote milk and parts to every doctor’s appointment.

best done with a sleepy baby

Calder has also decided that now that he gets a bottle, he is not a big fan of the tube part that comes next (who would be, I suppose), so we have refined our technique: we now simultaneously bottle-feed and tube-feed him. But you have to be strategic, because if you tube-feed him too late, you’ll run out of bottle, but if you tube-feed him to soon, he gets full and doesn’t want to finish the bottle. Throughout the whole process he is probably swinging his hands wildly and grasping at the extension tube while you of course try to keep it from his death grip lest he yank the whole thing one direction, taking the mickey with it. Which would be very bad news. Most times I am left wishing I had two more hands – it’s a miracle I have not yet dumped an entire batch on myself, (knock on wood.) You know, I like to eat as much as the next person (okay, let’s face it, probably a lot more) and will devote as much time to feeding as is necessary, but some days it seems like this is all we do!

obviously, Mom bought this outfit
before she knew she was having
a G-tube baby!

In the meantime, Anne also gave us the go ahead to up his bottle intake, so we are now working on 3 oz per feed rather than 2 oz. Kraemer, who is always confident in our boy’s abilities, is already pushing the limit with 3.5, and Calder has been responding. As you can see from most of the photos, he does not want for calories!