First trip to the doctor

The colic migrated from midnight to...well, always. She would sleep and cry and not eat for a looooong time. Tina, being a good mother, wants to be sure E gets plenty of food. For a while, I figured she'd eat when she was hungry and would be fine. But my confidence waned (and Tina's evaporated completely) after 7 hours of Elizabeth sleeping and crying and not eating -- the nurses had told us 8-12 feedings a day. So we went to see the great nurses at Foote. We got a new nursing technique on the theory that E is getting too much of the sugarier "foremilk" (the first bit of milk to flow in a feeding) and not enough of the richer "hindmilk."

Elizabeth is a very strong feeder when she eats and then goes at least 4 hours before she's hungry again. She has plenty of "output" and weighed 9lbs 2 oz yesterday -- only 5 oz down from her birthweight -- so we don't think she's starving. But Tina's been trying to feed her as much as she'll eat. Being our kid, she eats a lot, and so she gets one and a half breasts worth of milk. The problem is that breasts start with foremilk, and so E gets two helpings of foremilk to one of hindmilk and all the sugar may be giving her a tummyache.

So we'll try to do a couple of things: first, keep her to one breast at a time, so as not to double up on foremilk. Second, try to pump and have a good supply of hindmilk to feed her by bottle. Maybe -- just maybe -- it'll work like this: when she's fighting, it's easier to keep a bottle nipple in her mouth so when she finally gives up she accepts the nipple and gulps down the milk than to try to put her to a breast, which isn't quite so easy to control.