Daily Peep: Little Baby in the (Big) Bathtub

Okay, so there aren't any photos of her actually in the bathtub, but there's a very good reason - she was in there with me. And nobody needs to see that.

Last night, at our very first Le Leche League meeting, DoulaK made a great suggestion.

She said that I should take a nice, long, hot bath (my first since Peeper was transferred - I like them hot, and didn't want to bake her, but didn't want to take a tepid bath either, so I blew them off for the duration) - then, when the water has cooled off, have Shrike bring little naked Peeper in to join me.

Baby gets clean, without all that coldness and screaming, and Baby and Mama get some naked time together.

The skin-to-skin contact ("kangaroo care") is great for wee ones, especially preemies, and she says that the more time we spend just hanging out together while I'm "hanging out," the better for the breastfeeding, which she's not doing so much of at this point.

A Quick Update on the Breastfeeding:
I'm giving her an opportunity to nurse at the beginning of each meal, but she's not generally taking me up on it.

She usually roots around and looks interested, and even latches on (typically with this big ol' chomp-latch move, like it's her favorite thing in the world) but after a suck or two, she pushes it away and starts getting mad, probably because the milk's not coming out fast enough for her.

(ie - Not as fast as the bottle.)

She had a couple of really good days last week, but not so much since then.

So, I'm pumping and she's getting breast milk from bottles. I'm making more than she's eating (and even have about 6 (2 oz) bottles worth in the freezer!) so she's getting only breast milk now.

She's had a total of maybe 2 ounces of formula since she was born, and none since Election Night, when she ran a little bit short on expressed milk while I was away at the victory celebration.

Healthwise, the most important thing, of course, is that she's getting the breast milk, no matter how it's delivered, but it's still very important to me that she actually breastfeed, eventually.

I'm trying to be as patient as I can, and we're hoping to transition her (back) to the breast over the next few weeks, but right now we have both her immaturity and nipple confusion working against us.

We're plugging away at it, though, and I'm confident that with a lot of persistence and a lot of great support and advice (which I'm getting) she'll catch on eventually.

By the way, feel free to refer back to this post now. Yeah. This is what I get for being smug and judgemental.

In my defense, I was right that I started with a good foundation of information (and have learned a ton more in the past 23 days, of course) and I do have a lot of support.

If I didn't have those things, and if I didn't know how good it is for her, and if I didn't feel so strongly about it, I'm sure I would have given up on it long before now.

So, anyway, we did the bath thing this evening, and it went really well. Next time, I think I'll have the water a little deeper before she gets in, so that she can be mostly underwater while on my belly, so she can stay good and warm.

This time, I had to scootch her way down til her little head was around my crotch and let her dangle there in the water to stay covered up, because I didn't want her wet and exposed and cold.

It was a little bit scary for me, but she was actually quite secure (I didn't soap her all up or anything, so she wasn't very slippery) and seemed to be rather comfortable. She mostly just kind of lay there all relaxed with her eyes closed (asleep?) .

I did wash her hair and her little milky neck with a bit of baby soap, but other than that, it was just about the hanging out and floating more than the cleaning.

After all, how dirty is she, really? Her diaper-parts get cleaned with every change, and other than that the only parts that get yucky are her face / neck / chest, where she dribbles milk.

By the end of the day she does have rather a glaze of dried breast milk on her.

As do I, actually.

Pretty much all my dirty clothes and hers - and some of Shrike's, I'm sure, because she does a lot of the bottles - reek of sour milk. Very appealing.

So, we've mostly just been wiping her down well before we take her out in public, and I think we'll probably just continue to do that mostly, and try to get a big bath with a mom every few days.

Once she's big enough to want to splash and play, we'll probably start putting her in her little tub, but for now, I think it would just piss her off.

So, after the bath, we all snuggled on the bed for a while, and that's what we got photos of:

(Please try to focus your attention on the cute naked baby, not the flabby naked Mama.)

We did eventually put some clothes on her. And me. Hers are cuter.