Week 6

30th January - 5th February 2005

Caroline's Entry

Emma has been exclusively breast-feeding Evan since birth but sometimes she needs to go out somewhere where she can't take him along. When that happens she has to try to get him fed before she goes and get back quick as he's still feeding pretty much every two hours!

Thumbs Up! Oh no, that's tootsies!

So this week she thought she'd try expressing so we could try a bottle feed. I'll let Emma go into details about the expressing :-) Well a couple of days later we had a couple of ounces of milk (!) and we tried it out - he seemed to love it! He had no problems taking the bottle at all. Just one slight hitch - he went through those two ounces in about 5 minutes and he usually feeds for at least 15 minutes! So we looked up how much he should be taking at his age and sure enough its about 8 ounces per feed! Though probably a bit less for him as he still feeds very often.

Even still, the expressing was so slow that we thought we'd try some formula instead. We bought a couple of cartons of the instant stuff so we didn't have to buy a whole tub in case it didn't work out. Just as well - he hated it! I tried it myself and it was like liquid chalk - yuukkk!! It's a shame really as it was nice to do a feed myself but hopefully she'll be able to try the expressing again with some more success.

Caroline

Emma's Entry

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Evan doing his "Jazz Hands"

I have finally started to feel much better now, the mother of all periods has gone and everything appears to have healed. My mum took me for my hospital scan this week and Evan had his first ride in a lift, he pulled his funny little face that he does when he's about to have a whiney cry and I was thinking oh god not in here. My mum just looked at him and said something like "You can stop that right now!" and to my surprise he did. Do you think I have that effect on him?!?!

That day Evan got to visit his Great Grandmother who is 90 years his elder. I am not sure how much she was actually able to see of him because she was struggling to hear what I was saying and she's also going blind. She thought he was very small, which made me laugh because he's a big growing boy now weighing 11lb 4oz.

Evan likes his change mat a lot for some reason!

I have been trying to find ways to get back into shape these last couple of weeks as I am bored of doing the basic pelvic floor and stomach clenches to strengthen those muscles. I was a fairly active person before pregnancy and because of my breastfeeding I cannot return to playing football and running until after this period as it is painful when I run with 38DD boobs. Evan is a very demanding baby and doing normal exercise is out of the question because he won't let me put him down for longer than 5 minutes at this age and I really want to stop feeling frumpy so I had to find an alternative way to exercise. I had been doing really well at hiding it until last weekend when Caroline spotted me one evening doing this odd looking dance to MTV with a baby in my arms. I wasn't dancing, I was inventing ways to exercise my major muscle groups and to keep my heart rate up whilst holding Evan carefully to my chest. He didn't mind at all because to him it just felt like I was doing a little jig to rock him to sleep as he loves MTV.

As Caroline mentioned above, my first attempt at expressing milk resulted in only 2 ounces and it was a rather painful experience. I have been told by other mums that it gets easier and the more you do it, the more milk you can express so I'll certainly be trying that again even if it's only to help me in the evening when I feel like my boobs are totally drained and he still wants feeding. It was amazing to watch the milk expressing, it sprays out of several holes and it looked really funny. Now I know how those poor cows feel :).

Oh and finally to Caroline's amusement Evan decided to spare her this week and instead poo'd all over my hand, it was nasty and warm!

Emma