I want to thank everyone for their encouraging emails. Cat has been somewhat restricted to the upstairs so I brought her my tablet so she could read them. As you can see from the picture, Dalton is showing an interest. This is great news. If I can teach him to play Diablo II, we can have a three person group for our games. He would be a great help in my accomplishing frivolous life goal #3. Of course, this assumes that he isn't a PK.
On a more serious note, taking care of a baby is exhausting! We?ve had tons of support. Cathy?s mom and my parents are here to help and I?m still worn out. While I planned to stay home once Dalton was born, I had the hope of working half days in the back of my mind. Hope is an important thing to have, however, I?m having trouble finding time to do simple things like returning phone calls right now.
I did expect Dalton to be a lot of work, but not in the ways he has been. Our biggest problems are centered on breastfeeding. I never anticipated that this would be a problem. I figured that when the baby cries, you feed him and he eats. Last night was a very frustrating experience with Cathy fighting with Dalton and trying to get him to feed directly from the breast. He essentially starts screaming as soon as the nipple is in his mouth.
I was really worried last night as his weight was down about 10% and he was a bit jaundiced during our lactation consultation visit yesterday. Just in case you didn?t know, my job in the family is to worry about things. Cathy tends to be better about not overeating to things than me. Needless to say, neither Cat nor I got much sleep last night between worrying about Dalton?s weight and fighting with him over feeding.
Today was much better. We essentially gave up on trying to get Dalton to directly breastfeed and have been finger feeding. Cat?s milk has come in as well and pumping has been much easier for her. Now that we have temporarily given in to his refusal to breastfeed, Dalton has been eating a lot. As a result, his weight was back up today. We also had an appointment with our family doctor and she didn?t think he was alarmingly jaundiced. We are all much relieved.
We are going to meet with the lactation consultant again in the next day or two. We need to come up with a plan to transition Dalton over to breastfeeding while still keeping him healthy and keeping Cat and me sane.
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