all ye women with slow-gaining babies... come and sympathise with Aitch here please...

[Aitch]

oh bloomin' heck. she's only put on an ounce and a half in 6 days.

Thank you for the warm welcome.

DS is not great at opening his mouth nice and wide either, and I have to swaddle him to stop his arms flapping all over the show.

Luckily we don't see a HV for another 6 weeks, so I don't feel quite so pressured as maybe you do.

My sis has been great and my mantra came from a question she asked me. If you weren't weighing him, would you be worried? The answer was no as he was alert, pooing, weeing, bright eyed and sleeping. I try and remind myself of this everytime I have a wobble.

Hi Aitch,

As Iliketoscare.... says I would try swaddling for some feeds if you think her hands are getting in the way - gives you one less thing to worry about then.

DD1 was the same with not opening her mouth - just stuff as much nipple as you can in there woman.

BTW I am getting very broody with teeny clothes hanging around my office - any mistakes will be entirely down to you and you may have to venture south for the resulting babysitting services incurred.

I read something a while back that Snafu posted about a reflex - I'll try to find it...

But if you stroke the baby's palm, they're meant to open their mouths wider.

Here you go, Aitch - what a clever Munker

dd would NEVER open her mouth wide enough it seemed - I was always stressing over it - it just seemed to gradually improve as she grew (not a preemie but low birth weight, so quite sleepy/weak to start with too).

I agree with posting the nipples!!

What a coincidence!

hmm. dd has no bodkin reflex...

2 and a half ounces on this week, according to bfc. she pronounced my latch not bad at all but i've a couple of tweaks to make which will hopefully help.

bfc has advised more pumping (which i'd rather stopped doing in the last few days) but i CAAAAAAAAAN'T. i hate it so.

also my freezer is filled with little pots of milk which look a bit funny-coloured. am experimenting with defrosting one to see if it is soured. that'll be just my sodding luck.

What's the bodkin reflex?

weight gain is great too

bodkin babkin, schmabkin, whaddeva. she ain't got it.

Weight gain sounds fab Aitch.

My milk is blue.

[I am sneaking in v. quietly as I know nuffin except want to give Aitch a squeeze and to tell her that ds1 was the slowest weight gainer in the world and fell off the bottom of those charts, and it was all terrible and I couldn't sleep for the worry of it. And I want to tell her he was eleven yesterday and he is a fine figure of a lad, and that all this will pass and your baby will grow and be fine. I'm not sure why I feel the need to do this sneaky thing, except I think I'd have liked someone to tell me that]

Oof - you definitely have my sympathy and empathy. I am going through a similar (but slightly different) thing. DD is just under 4 weeks. She was born 6lb13 (at 16 days post term!) and weighed 6lb11 at 9 days. Had her weighed yesterday and she was 6lb15.5 (so 4.5oz in 13 days). HV said it was fine as she is putting on weight, but to keep an eye on it - she seems to have fed less over the last couple of days (at least less often) so that is creating further paranoia on my part. Tis a worrying thing indeed this weight issue, despite the reassurances.
Hope you are doing ok and enjoying her despite the concerns.

your HV sounds like a sensible woman, i wish mine was. thing is, dd1 didnt' put on her bw until about 5 weeks or something ridiculous and that was with formula top ups as well. it's the ebf element of this i find scary.

did lou33 get some help by the way? i just read back some of the thread and i seem not to have answered her when she was having some diffs with her wee one.

Yes, makes a change to have a sensible HV (my experience of HV with 2 DS's were just useless). DS's were also small (and on formula top ups by 3 weeks on HV advice ) so I can totally empathise with the BF concerns. Wouldn't it be great if they came with a fuel gauge?

[sneaking again - it wasn't supposed to make you sob!]

IIRC expressed milk is funny-coloured. I really really expected it to look - well, like milk. But it was pale blue, as a rule. Did not look appetising at all. I read the bodkin thing at work - for a horrible moment I thought it was a reflex tested by using a bodkin... Weight gain sounds good, too.

it was blue, it went yellow. it seems to have defrosted okay...

Was the yellow maybe just the fat coming out of solution, and sticking to the sides of the container a bit? I do remember it changing a bit in the fridge, as I speculated how long I could keep it there...

Sounds very much like breastmilk you've got defrosting there

aitch if dd1 didn't gain much early on then why should dd2? although she is of course, all those oz (what is she in kilos?)

i spotted ds's red book shoved into a very dark corner of a bookcase last night. i left it there, do not fancy revisiting that. they had to put extra pages in for anxious witterings.

well she's 2.3g and was 1.84 when she was born. i'm missing a few measurements cos the stupid hv won't do kilos, so i needed to check in lbs.