Hungry Jac

Jac has been making good progress drinking from the bottle, and it really showed today -- he must be having a growth spurt today to make up for the zero-gain day yesterday!

He drank from the bottle twice this morning before we visited him this afternoon. For his 3pm feed, we asked his nurse to bottle feed him so that we could observe her technique. He drank 15 ml in less than 10 minutes. From watching the nurse, we learned to start the feed with the nipple unloaded until he makes a few sucks; and to keep the nipple in his mouth more than we have been in the past.

Jac and I had a nice nap from 3:30 until around 5.

When he woke up, he was clearly hungry again, and sucked furiously on the pacifier! Taj and I decided that this was a good opportunity to try getting Jac onto her breast. At first, Jac didn't know what to do with the breast; but after about five minutes of getting a few drops of milk in squeezed into his mouth, he rooted around and then latched and sucked a couple times. It wasn't much (probably less than 2 ml, total), but he clearly sucked on momma's boob. His first successful breast feed! Well done!

For his 6pm, I fed Jac with a bottle and got him to take 20 ml and then we gavage'd the remainder (31 ml total per feed). Then by 7:45, he was again clearly hungry and managed to take 15ml from Taj in under 5 minutes. Had we had more milk at the ready, he probably would have taken a full feed's worth in one sitting!

We decided to give him (and ourselves) a break for his next feed, and had the nurse gavage his feed at 9pm. We thought he would sleep through that, but he was unhappy with reflux and gas in his tummy. He flailed around for a while, started crying, and wouldn't calm down even after three attempts at swaddling (which normally works).

Jac finally calmed down when I picked him up and then set him back down for another attempt to swaddle him. Before I actually swaddled him, he just suddenly stopped crying and looked very calm. I decided to let him be unswaddled, and then started talking to him. Jas was apparently distracted from his tummy discomforts from the "conversation" followed by some singing. It took a while, but we finally got him to fall asleep by about 10:30 or so.

BTW, he pooped a lot today. A testimony to his big appetite for the day. It'll be interesting to see what he weighs in at tonight.