I’ve been trying to think of something to write here for the past few days, but I’m drawing a blank, probably due to sleep deprivation. Here are some random bits:

* Cate is four weeks old today. Her one month checkup is next Wednesday, and I’m trying to remember to write down everything that I want to ask the pediatrician, because otherwise I think I’ll probably be so tired that I’ll just walk in and be all “errr… duh?”

* I met up with my friend Janet for lunch yesterday, just to get out of the house for a couple of hours. (Cabin fever is starting to get to me.) I took Cate along with me, and she was absolutely delightful. She didn’t fuss in her car seat, she slept while I ate lunch (imagine! A whole meal! With no interruptions!), and she cooed and was generally adorable afterward. Janet is 36 weeks pregnant, and I think the exposure to my completely charming baby girl made her feel a little less nervous about her own impending motherhood.

* Janet also recently took a class based on the book “The Happiest Baby on the Block.” She got the DVD with the class, and burned a copy of it for me. (Cat, I know you said you were going to mail it to me, but now you’re off the hook.) I didn’t think that very much of the DVD would apply to us, since Cate isn’t the type of baby to cry for no reason. I guess we’ve been blessed with an incredibly mellow child. But the author does promote the idea that his little techniques can help babies sleep longer, which sounded awesome. Cate wakes up hungry every three hours, and I’m so exhausted from the constant sleep interruptions that I feel like I’m losing my mind.

Well, I watched the DVD, and now I can say with absolute authority: suck it, Dr. Karp. I did all of his little techniques to get Cate to sleep longer, and she still woke up hungry every three hours. Hmph.

One of my cousins (on my dad’s side – no relation to anyone who reads this site) suggested that I slip a little rice cereal in with Cate’s formula in her nighttime bottle to get her to sleep longer. For any of you moms who bottle-fed your babies: is that normal? It’s not something I had ever heard of. But I’m going to ask the pediatrician if that’s something we can try, because the idea of getting a solid four or five stretch of sleep sounds like absolute heaven.

* Back to that whole cabin fever thing: remember that I joined a book club a few months ago? Even though I haven’t read a single book or been to any of the meetings yet? Well, they’re meeting tonight, and I don’t even know what this month’s book selection is, but I think I might go anyway, just to get out for a little while. Besides, they’re meeting at Whole Foods, and picking up some organic mac n’ cheese while I’m there sounds pretty good.

I haven’t mentioned anything about this for fear of jinxing it, but it’s been a couple of weeks now, so I think it’s safe to talk about it. Here’s my big confession: we’ve given breastfeeding another shot.

After I had that little meltdown a couple of weeks ago, I took a couple of days off, and I announced to Dave, my mom, the Internet and anyone else who would listen that I was Not Going to Do This Anymore. Then the next day, for reasons that I still can’t explain, I stuck Cate on the boob again. I guess I felt like I had officially given up, so I had nothing to lose.

Aaaand, we’ve been doing it pretty consistently ever since then. I nurse her an average of five or six times a day – and despite what all of the breastfeeding experts say, the frequency and duration has not made my milk supply increase at all. Each time she nurses, I only hear her swallow a few times, and she’s still ravenous for a bottle afterward. And I keep having to increase the amount of formula she gets, so obviously my milk supply isn’t keeping up with her appetite. So I don’t know how much benefit (if any) she’s getting from it. I rationalize it by thinking that some breastmilk must be better than none, so we’re hanging in there.

I honestly don’t know how long we’ll keep it up. I’m thinking in short-term goals. We’re about to reach the one month point, and it’s not so bad, so I’ve started thinking that maybe I’ll try to keep breastfeeding until she’s six weeks old. Maybe, just maybe, I might make it to two months. But I’m not holding my breath on that one. We’re working the “one day at a time” plan here.

And I still don’t get the whole crazy-love-bonding thing from it. I’m constantly trying to make sure she’s latched on right, counting the number of times I hear her swallow, and watching the clock to see how long she’s been nursing. It’s not this Sweet Hallmark Moment that people make it sound like. It feels like Work – something you do out of some sense of obligation, not because you like it.

In contrast, this morning, Cate and I lay on the couch together and did nothing but stare at each other for a half hour. That was an awesome little Mommy & Baby Hallmark Moment. The nursing thing? Eh, not so much. And that’s ok, I just don’t know how long I can keep myself motivated to keep it up. But we’re doing alright for now.

Today marks two big events: first, it’s officially my due date. Ha! Take that, nature! I beat you to it!

Second, today is the day that I had my first post-partum meltdown. I left Cate and Dave at home (her in the swing, him on the couch) while I went to the grocery store and to grab some take-out for dinner. I’m not exactly sure what happened, but I came home and promptly dissolved into a puddle of tears in the kitchen.

I guess it was because the take-out place took forever with our order, and sitting there waiting was the first opportunity that I’ve had to get wrapped up inside my own head. When I’m home, it’s All About The Baby, All The Time. Having that extra 15 minutes of alone time was not necessarily a good thing.

So, the breastfeeding? It isn’t working. My milk just hasn’t come in. If I squint my eyes and turn my head sideways when I look in the mirror, my boobs look a tiny bit bigger, but overall there’s been no engorgement of any kind. I bought a nursing bra, and the woman at the store talked me into getting a C cup so I’d have “room to grow,” and believe me, there is still plenty of room in there. I feel gypped, I really wanted to have big bodacious breastfeeding ta-ta’s.

Yesterday I pumped six times and produced a combined total of two ounces. Is there any wonder why I nurse the baby for thirty minutes at a time, and then she screams in frustration afterward? Yeah, I didn’t think so. I’ve been trying to breastfeed her first, and then offer a bottle afterward, and she sucks down the formula like she’s starving to death. And I guess she probably would starve, if we were relying solely on me.

Also, when I’m nursing her, I’m constantly fussing with her head, moving her to a better angle, re-positioning my breast, trying to find a way to sit that doesn’t hurt my back, whatever. Compared to that? Giving her a bottle is actually pretty fun. I can prop her up on my knees, and lean over close to her face and talk to her and coo at her. And now that she makes eye contact, we can just stare at each other the whole time, which is pretty darn awesome. I feel way more bonded to her during bottle-feeding time than I ever have when trying to nurse her.

So, I kind of just… stopped. Sometime in the last day or so, I decided that I couldn’t do it anymore. I’m still pumping like crazy every couple of hours, because I figure that if I can produce enough to make one of her feedings a bottle of breastmilk, then all the better. Some is better than none, right? To try to help things along, I’m taking fenugreek, and drinking this disgusting organic “Mother’s Milk” tea (actual quote on the package: “To promote healthy lactation.” You know, as opposed to the unhealthy kind). That tea alone is proof of how much I love this child, because it tastes like licorice, which I despise. And yet I dutifully slug down my three to five mugs daily, in the hopes that maybe it will allow me to produce a few more droplets of milk for her.

Anyway, I was sitting at the take-out place and I started thinking about how most women have at least one part of their body that they hate and obsess about constantly? Mine has always been my breasts. They’re too small, they aren’t a pretty shape, my nipples are proportionally too large, whatever. Hating my boobs has pretty much been a constant in my life since puberty. I guess I feel like this is just another way in which they’ve failed me. And in turn, it makes me feel like I’ve failed my daughter, because I didn’t even make it through the first week.

I know I’ve said all along that I was ambivalent about breastfeeding and that if it worked, great, but if not, no big deal. And I guess I realize now that I was full of crap, because I really did want it to work, and I’m upset that it just hasn’t. I do wonder if I gave up too soon, but for the sake of my sanity, I couldn’t stand to keep putting both of us through the stress of it all.

Man, that Mommy Guilt thing sure can sneak up on you and kick your ass, can’t it? I never even saw it coming.

Tonight, Dave came downstairs with the baby after changing her, and found me crying while putting away groceries. (Hey, look, I can multitask!) I tried to explain why I was upset, and he held the baby out to me and said, “Look, she’s healthy, she’s happy, she’s doing great.” And he’s right, really. That should be enough.

But so help me, the first time I get one of those Mommy Drive-By’s where someone makes a disparaging comment about me bottle-feeding my baby, I am probably going to lose my mind and punch that person dead in the nose. Hopefully Dave will always have bail money on hand, just in case.

When Cate was born, we knew she was tiny, but she seemed totally healthy. Her five minute APGAR score was 9.9, so we figured that hey, all is well, she’s just really small. Five pounds and 14 ounces isn’t considered a preemie, so no problems.  

Before we left the hospital, they told us that she was jaundiced and that we needed to follow up with our pediatrician the next day. Dave and I both thought that was odd, since jaundiced babies are supposed to be yellow, and she was just about the pinkest thing I’d ever seen. But ok, sure, we’ll do as we’re told.

By the next day, the pink of her skin had been replaced by an awful lot of yellow. We saw the pediatrician that afternoon, and found out that her weight had dropped to five pounds, five ounces. Nine ounces in two days. It’s pretty typical for babies to lose weight the first week – it’s just that when you’re starting with such a small baby, you don’t have a huge margin to work with. Here’s the problem: the primary way to cure jaundice is to make sure that the baby has plenty of food in her tummy, because it makes the digestive tract start working to move things along. And on Monday, my milk still hadn’t come in. The pediatrician told us that it was time to start supplementing with formula.

The thing is, I knew I wanted to try breastfeeding because of all the health benefits for the baby and for me, but I’ve never been that militant about it. I wasn’t breastfed myself, and if anything, I’m probably too bonded with my mother (we talk on the phone every day), so I wasn’t worried about that aspect of it. Also, I read Amalah’s blog when she was struggling with nursing, and it broke my heart – that, combined with a lot of the other mommy blogs where women have talked about their guilt about breastfeeding (or lack thereof), made me decide that no matter what, I was not going to beat myself up about it if nursing didn’t work out. I’d give it my best effort, and that would just have to be good enough.

So, per the pediatrician’s orders, we’ve started supplementing with formula. It’s actually kind of a relief, because it lets Dave be involved in feeding time, which he loves. And which I love because it means that I actually get a break every now and then. As a bonus, I don’t have to worry about whether the baby is starving because my milk supply hasn’t completely come in yet.

Yesterday, we had our post-partum follow-up appointment at the hospital. The nurse practitioner told me that since my breast size didn’t really increase when I was pregnant (does half a cup size even count?), and my glands were still only partially full, I may never get a full milk supply. Which means we’ll always have to supplement with formula.

And you know? The only reason I feel guilty about that is because I’m kind of relieved, because (warning: Bad Mother Alert) I really don’t like nursing. It hurts, it takes forever to get Cate into the right position, I’m never sure if she’s latched on right (I thought we had it nailed until the lactation nurse yesterday told me that I was doing it totally wrong, oops), and I never know if she’s getting enough. I rented a breast pump from the hospital, and I actually prefer to use that because I know exactly how much I’m producing. And it doesn’t hurt as much.

My original plan was to try to breastfeed for the first six months. At this point, I’m starting to think that maybe we’ll try it for a month and take it from there. Also, we’re only on Day Four, so I’m trying to relax and just see how things progress. Maybe I’ll feel completely different in a week, who knows.  

My number one goal at the moment is to make sure that our baby is well-fed, growing and getting healthier every day. As long as she’s thriving, my Mommy Guilt can take a big fat hike.

And it can wear a cute little matching fleece hat and jacket when it goes.