I logged onto MySpace today and the last unread blog listed was dated October 31st ... which means that I haven't been here since Oct. 31st (or earlier) ... phew!  That's been awhile.  I've been slacking ... but, to my credit, so have a lot of you.  Most of the blogs posted were from Cookie or Rausch, to everyone else, well, give us an update!

Sierra alternates between being awesome/the devil, depending on the day or even time of day.  She's usually a happy, smiley baby, but she's getting teeth, which makes her a grouchy miserable baby.  Particularly at night -- she's been waking up every two hours (or less!) to comfort nurse, which is annoying because no one is getting any sleep.  Well, Jason is getting some sleep because he has managed to sleep through several of her night wakings, even though she is in our bed.  Damn him.  Anyway, I can't blame her, the baby book says teething causes excrutiating pain.  I wouldn't want to go through that.  Tylenol only seems to help a little.  People keep telling me to put brandy on her gums, but I think i will avoid giving alcohol to my 6-month-old for now, unless someone can give me scientific proof that it actually works.  (If I believed everything someone swears will work, my head would spin!)

We got a webcam for xmas and I have been experiementing with that.  It's great fun, so let me know if you have Skype/YahooMsgr/AIM and you can see us!  Skype seems to give the best picture quality. 

Okay, baby just woke up, so I will have to postpone this ...

Saturday, Jason and I went to Jen and Ben's wedding and left Sierra with her grandparents.  It was our first time being away from our little girl for an extended period of time.  Grandparents took Sierra to a craft fair and said she did pretty well with everything, including eating from a bottle.  For my part, I did pretty well too. 

I breastfeed Sierra and a breastfeeding mama away from her baby has to do something about the large amount of milk that accumulates in the boobies.  Namely, I had to pump between the wedding and reception (this was about as long as I could put it off) or bad things would happen.  Thankfully, I have a very  nice and efficient breastpump and I was just going to hunker down in the back of the car and spend a quick 10 minutes or so relieving the pressure.  Then, kindly, and even better plan came up.  My friend Taran, who lives not too far from where we were, offered her apartment for my pumping needs.  I figured that would more comfortable than whiping out my chi-chis (thank you, Kelley, for the terminology) in the back of the car. 

First, though, we had to get to Taran's house.  Seems simple, right?  We just follow Taran and she leads us there.  Wrong!  Taran got lost going to her own house!  Ha!  Okay, to her credit, she didn't know the area where the wedding was very well and she was close to finding the way.  Anyway, after pulling over in a bank parking lot, Jason and I entered Taran's address in his parents' GPS thingy and we were there in no time (thank goodness we had the GPS). 

I settle myself in Taran's living room and pull out my breastpump and then realize, Shit!  I left some pieces in Virginia!  I had the pump itself, but I had stuck all the parts in the dishwasher before we left so they would be ready to go.  Unfortunately, I failed to remove them from the dishwasher and put them in my bag.  No problem, though, because Taran lives just two blocks from Target!  This would have been great if only Target had all the pieces I needed in stock.  They were out of the box that is all the parts together, and they had two of the three parts for sale separately.  I decided to just try and see if the pump would work without all three parts.  It looked like it might because I had the part that connects to the breast and the part that directs the milk into the container.  I was missing the valve, but I thought the milk might just dribble on through. 

Back at Taran's, I was setting up the pump and had unclasped the front of my nursing bra under my shirt.  Then I looked down to find a giant wet spot where I had leaked all over myself.  Yes, I really needed to pump!  I stopped, rinsed out my shirt and Taran threw it in the drier for me.  Finally, I connected everything up and turned on the pump ... nothing.  Turns out, the valves are a really important part because without them, it doesn't work. 

Well, crap.  "There's only one thing I can do now," I said.  " ... I'm going to have to hand express."

Then my darling husband chimes in with, "Waitwaitwait, let me get this straight.  You're going to milk yourself like a cow?!"  Well, yes.  Honey.  And thank you for making that analogy.  I had read the section about hand expressing in my breastfeeding book, but I never thought I would have the occassion to use that skill.  I do, afterall, have a very nice expensive breastpump.  Thank god I did read it though!

Taran set me up with a plastic cup and a hand towel and away I went.  Nine ounces of milk later (it had been six hours since Sierra last ate at this point), I put on my freshly dried shirt and was ready to go. 

"Holy cow!  I can't believe all that came out of you!" said Taran. 

"Exactly," said Jason.  

Today, we are under the edge of Hurricane Hanna.  Which means it's raining ... no ... POURING.  This morning, I had to take the dogs to the vet, which meant I had to juggle two dogs, a baby, car keys, a diaper bag and an umbrella. 

For your viewing pleasure:

We started bottle-feeding Sierra every two hours, meanwhile, I was still pumping every two hours trying to get my milk supply to increase.  There was a lot of crying on my part over the next couple days because every time I would look at this tiny little person who was depending on me for her needs, I would be overcome with guilt and sadness that my body wasn't giving her what she needed.  I desperately wanted to be breastfeeding, but it just wasn't happening.  Still, she was finally eating.  We were giving her whatever breast milk I was able to pump, plus supplementing with formula. 

Monday, we went in for a weight check and were overjoyed that she was back up to 6lbs 8oz.  Doc said he thought we were doing a lot better and were to come in the following week.  I also called my midwife to tell her what was going on.  She wasn't in the office, but called me back on Tuesday and told me to come in that afternoon.  She stayed late to spend an hour with me and give me another lactation consult.  Mary Jo told us to stop bottle-feeding because it would make it too hard to get Sierra to go back to the breast.  Instead, we started finger feeding, still every two hours.  This involves putting a finger in baby's mouth and when she sucks on the finger, rewarding her by squirting milk into her mouth from a syringe. 

We kept this up for several days and Thursday the 19^th of June, I added another method suggested by a friend whose baby had a similar problem when he was born.  This involved a silicone cover called a nipple shield that goes over the nipple and helps stimulate the suck reflex because it goes a little farther back in baby's mouth.  I was thrilled the first time I used it because even though Sierra wasn't breastfeeding, she was sucking at the breast.  It felt like we were moving in the right direction.  The next day Mary Jo called to see how things were going and told me that to wean Sierra from the nipple shield to the breast, after a few days, I should little by little cut off the top of the nipple shield.  I never got that far. 

Very early in the morning on Monday, June 23^rd, I tried breastfeeding and it worked!  Sierra nursed for almost an hour and a half, switching from one breast to the other.  She wasn't consistently breastfeeding but she would suck and rest.  It was definite progress, but we weren't out of the woods yet.  She would still only occasionally take the breast.  Other times, she simply refused and still others, she would try to latch on and couldn't do it efficiently so she would get frustrated and cry and essentially get in her own way.  At this point, I was attempting to breastfeed every feeding, but if it didn't work within the first 15 minutes or so, we would switch and finger feed her.  We wanted feeding to stay a positive experience.  It paid off when her weight was up to 7lbs 2oz at her appointment Tuesday. 

Over the next several days, Sierra got better and better at breastfeeding and she would more consistently latch on and suck.  We had to finger feed less and less often.  Finally, at around 10am on Thursday, June 26^th, we finger fed her for the last time.  Since then, she has been exclusively breastfed.  It makes me so happy to see her doing what should be such a natural bond between mama and baby and what took us more than two weeks to figure out.  I still have to squeeze my boob during her feedings to remind her to keep sucking and sometimes it takes several tries for her to latch on correctly, but I am beyond pleased that she has finally gotten the hang of something as simple as eating the way she is supposed to!

I must say, I am proud of myself to have been so determined to keep working not give up on breastfeeding my baby even though it would have been so much easier just to give up and give her a bottle.  And it felt good that both my midwife and our lactation consultant told me the same thing. 

WARNING:  I will probably be talking about my boobs a lot in this post, so if that's weird for you, you might want to skip this one. 

You would think that breastfeeding is a natural thing that all babies just instinctively know how to do, right?  Wrong.  Sierra was born on June 10^th (as you may already know) and seemed to breastfeeding really well in the hospital.  Today marks her three-week birthday, but only her 5^th day of successful breastfeeding.  Turns out, she was faking us all out in the beginning.  She was taking the breast, but she was resting too much and not sucking enough and she was also not doing enough of the deep sucking that gets the good stuff out.  As a result, we entered this vicious cycle.  In order for a mama's breasts to produce enough milk for baby, baby has to stimulate her by sucking early and often.  Sierra was not doing this.  Consequently, she wasn't getting enough to eats and my boobs weren't making enough for her to eat.  She became really weak and lethargic to the point where she didn't even have the energy to suck well. 

We checked out of the hospital on Wednesday, June 11^th and went in to the pediatrician for weight check on Thursday.  She weighed 6lbs 15oz at birth and 6lbs 13oz when we left the hospital.  That Thursday she weighed in at 6lbs 8oz.  Now, it is normal for babies, particularly breastfed babies, to lose between 5 and 7 percent of their birth weight before beginning to gain again, but doc requested we come in two days later for another weight check.  So, we headed back to the pediatrician's office Saturday and found out Sierra weighed only 6lbs 2oz.  This was more than normal weight loss and reason to be concerned. 

Jason and I started being really diligent about feeding Sierra every two hours, which meant that we woke her up and got her to eat.  I also called a lactation consultant, Robin.  Robin got back to me Saturday evening and when I told her the situation, she said, "I don't mean to worry you, but I think I should come tonight."  She arrived about 8pm Saturday evening and stayed with us for two hours.  Sierra was latching on to the breast but she would either not suck, or she would fuss, scream and squirm around.  Robin gave me some tips for getting her to suck well for longer periods of time and she was also the one who noticed that Sierra was just too tired to suck because she hadn't been getting enough to eat.  She advised that I start using a breast pump every two hours to make sure that I was making enough milk.  I wasn't.  Because Sierra hadn't been stimulating body with the message that I need to make milk, it wasn't.  In the beginning, I would pump for 20 minutes at a time and get only enough milk to barely cover the bottom of a bottle. 

That night, I woke every two hours to feed Sierra.  She did well the first feeding, but got progressively worse.  At 7am Sunday morning, Jason came into the living room where I had been trying to get Sierra to nurse for the past hour to no avail.  She simply would not take the breast.  It was too much work for her and not enough reward.  Still, she needed nourishment.  Defeated, I said to Jason, "We have to give her a bottle."

That's what I've decided that I am.  I am round like a hippo (or at least that's how I feel) and I walk like a duck.  Quack!

I'm also conflicted.  At this point, I've reached 38 weeks in my pregnancy, which is considered full term, and I'm just starting to get rather uncomfortable.  So, in that respect, I just wish baby would decide to come out.  On the other hand, I have now finished writing my thesis, and my advisor thinks that I can actually defend it and be completely and totally finished before baby gets here.  Then I wouldn't have to come back in August to do a thesis defense.  That would be spectactular.  So, in that respect, "Stay in, baby, stay in!"  I need these last two weeks.