The Booth's: Miss Fussy Britches...

Needless to say, the first week of Sloan's life was a little challenging for us all. For those of you that dont know, a mother's breast milk supply doesn't typically come in until day 3-4 of the baby's life and what they survive off of is called colostrum. Well, Miss Sloan was not having it. She was doing fine with the whole "latching" concept, but the colostrum was not enough to sustain her. The first few nights were very rough for all of us because she would go from being asleep to SCREAMING at the top of her lungs in about 2 seconds and it was hard to console her. She would get so worked up that she wouldn't want to eat and would be very finicky putting herself on and pulling off multiple times. It took us a long time to get through a feeding and really get her to calm down (and I was nursing her every 3 hours). Monday night was probably the hardest night and she skipped a feeding in the middle of the night because she wouldn't stop crying. The nurses in the nursery ended up taking her and trying to get her to calm down. Later in the morning, it was suggested that we try to finger-feed her some formula until my milk production came in to see if that would help her temperament. At this point, it had been about two days and we felt so bad about how upset she was getting that we were up for trying anything. She had been crying so much off and on that her little voice was hoarse (that absolutely broke my heart).

We started supplementing with 20ml of formula (given to her through a syringe with a long skinny flexible extension) after every feeding. We would stabilize the extension on the end of our pinky and let her suck on our pinky. When she started sucking, we slowly introduced the formula so that she was able to get it without getting confused by taking a bottle. If someone had told us on day one that this is what she needed, I would have started it immediately. It was almost as if she was a new baby almost instantly!

Sloan had also started to become jaundiced over those few days and right as we were supposed to go home, they decided that she needed to stay and do at least 24 hours of phototherapy. With the phototherapy, she had to be under the lights the whole time except for 30 minutes every 3 hours for feeding. I was a little disappointed at first because I thought that we would be going home. It was also hard for me to have her away from me and only get to see her for those 30 minutes at a time. Up to that point, we had only given her to the nursery twice. Other than that, she was with us in the room. Even though I was disappointed, I was willing and ready to do anything to get her feeling better and if that meant being under the lights...so be it! The formula was also supposed to help her digestion and help her poop (which helps get rid of the bilirubin/jaundice).

overall, she only needed 24 hours of phototherapy and we were able to home the next morning (Wednesday, February 6, 2013). I had been discharged the night before, but was able to stay at the hospital in my same room for the night so that I could be available to nurse her. I did drive myself home on Tuesday night to take a shower, see the dogs and just get out of the hospital though. It was a nice break, but felt I weird knowing that Sloan was still at the hospital so I went back after about an hour.