growing baby

The one thing he’s not doing, however, is latching to the breast. The whole time in the hospital after birth Linda was trying to get him to latch on and start sucking. Sometimes he’d suck, but not be latched on (and thus not really get any good suction). Sometimes he’d look like he latched on, but he’d just fall asleep. Apparently, combining these two activities in one time was too much to ask.

Since he clearly needed to eat, we started feeding him a bit of expressed breast milk (and supplementing with formula). The way to do that was to insert a finger into his mouth, and hold a little syringe with a pipette-like tip in the same opening of the mouth where the finger is. Fill the syringe with milk (or formula) and slowly push the plunger of the syringe to get the liquid in. Mateo responded by sucking it and 5 minutes later the feeding was done. He was left with a desire to suck some more, but that was kind of secondary to actually getting fed. Of course while we started with one syringe-full (15 ml) we quickly had to go to double that as Mateo’s a growing boy and needs more food every day.

The syringe trick worked for quite a while, but it wasn’t really helping him learn how to suck. So on Tuesday of this week Linda went to a breastfeeding clinic with Mateo (men were not allowed: apparently the clinic is just all women with their tops off, walking around with their kids). There the lactation consultant (the wonderful and oft-recommended Susan Orr) tried to identify the problem — she thinks that Mateo’s tongue is just not sticking out enough to properly suck. She did, however, provide an alternative tool called SNS, or “snuss” in the vernacular. The SNS is a bottle with a capillary-like tube coming out of the teat: sort of like an IV, it is designed to slowly drip out its contents. The advantage of the SNS is that it encourages the baby to suck properly, developing its sucking reflex and hopefully turning it into proper usage of the real breast.

So the new method is for me (or in theory Linda or someone else) to thoroughly wash our fingers, and tape the capillary tube from the SNS to the finger with some paper tape, fill the SNS with pumped milk, and stick said finger in our son’s mouth. The milk flows, the son sucks, and everyone is happy. With the exception of the finger: since the capillary is small, and Mateo these days eats 60ml or more per feeding, it takes about 45 min to an hour to go through a feeding bottle. We also supplement with actual nursing for a little bit, and take short breaks for tummy time and burping.