Help! Weight loss!

[TandB]

We are having huge problems with feeding at the moment and everyone seems at a bit of a loss about it.

DS2 fed very well to start with - only lost a tiny bit of weight, regained birth weight by day 4 and piled it on over the first week or so. We then had a lot of discomfort and were referred to a tongue-tie specialist who was unconvinced that he had a tie and suggested cranial osteopathy due to his very tight jaw and lopsided head. We saw the osteopath 3 times and his jaw loosened up a lot, his head changed shape quite substantially and the pain eased and stopped.

Feeding was then fine for a while - we could even feed completely hands-free in the sling on occasion! I got him weighed at 8 weeks, by which time he had started fussing quite a lot over his late afternoon and evening feeds - coming on and off and crying - he had slipped from just below the 50th centile down to the 9th. I got him weighed again this week (11 weeks) and he is still heading downwards - now just above the 2nd centile.

Feeding is now a constant struggle. He unlatches constantly, rarely staying on for more than 5 seconds. Sometimes he does this right from the start of the feed and sometimes just towards the end. Sometimes this degenerates to him refusing to latch at all and just lying there lunging at me repeatedly and screaming. He will never, ever stop feeding of his own volition - he either falls asleep or has to be taken away by his dad or put in the sling. Quite often at that point he will stop crying and go 2 hours perfectly happily. He feeds better at night and until a few hours ago he fed better with me lying down, or in the sling.

Today every feed has been a fight - he is on and off constantly, pulling his head away to the side and wailing, then re-latching and doing it again immediately. He is trying to feed at least every hour and won't settle in between, presumably because he is hungry. He wouldn't latch properly in the sling. He will settle and sleep in the sling but that means I can't pump to increase supply in case that is the problem. I also now have to keep hold of my breast at every feed or he lets go immediately.

Bizarrely, he is still sleeping 7 hours at night though, which is odd if he is hungry.

Any ideas would be appreciated as I am not sure what we are going to do if we can't get him feeding effectively.

I just wanted to update this thread and thank everyone for their suggestions and support.

It turned out that DS did have a tongue tie and it was slightly more substantial than it first appeared. He had it snipped and it made an immediate difference, but unfortunately that was the day that I ran out of expressed milk and he was screaming for more so he finished up having his first formula top-up.

Despite a full-on supply increasing campaign (fenugreek, constant pumping, feeding at the slightest sign of peckishness) we haven't quite managed to ditch the formula. He seems to need about 9-12 oz of top-up over the course of the day - I generally have about 6 to 8 oz of expressed milk and he generally has anything between 2 to 5 oz of formula, so fairly negligible in the scheme of things I suppose.

He put on half a kilo in 6 days after the top-ups started, and was back up to between the 9th and 25th percentile within 2 weeks. I haven't had him weighed for a couple of weeks but he has clearly had a massive growth spurt and is now the biggest of my NCT group babies despite being a month younger than a couple of the others.

Feeding still is a bit up and down. He is rarely completely relaxed when feeding - there is usually faffing and wanting to switch sides constantly, and if he gets tired he will get himself into an on-off-on-off feeding and crying frenzy until he falls asleep. He also feeds fairly regularly - very rarely going three hours except at night.

He feeds fine lying down at night and reasonably well upright in the sling while walking around. He is not so good at the "traditional" nursing positions or feeding when sitting down.

We still have a lot of support and the general consensus now is that he is unlikely to ever be a model nurser, but we are pottering along not too badly. One BF counsellor who has seen a lot of him is rather of the view that a lot of the faffing is now about personality rather than any technical issue - he is quite impatient generally - happy and chilled as long as everything is perfect and then going from everything being fine to OMG THIS IS TERRIBLE I AM CLEARLY ABOUT TO DIE IF YOU DON'T [insert need which requires satisfying] ME RIGHT NOW in about half a second.

So while it is disappointing that we didn't manage to EBF, things aren't too bad at all.

Thanks again to everyone.