Today’s been my first day back at work since Peter was born. After 2½ weeks, he’s still not feeding well from the breast, and hasn’t been gaining weight. He’s still not back at his birth weight (which ideally happens by around 1 week). We’re working on feeding him a lot via bottles so that he can get some more calories in him. But that’s a lot more work, and we still have to take care of Hannah, too.

Yesterday, our lactation consultant said that it appears he has posterior tongue-tie, which could be a big contributing factor. (Other factors are just that not getting enough to eat quickly becomes self-reinforcing, as he doesn’t get the energy to have the next feeding and develops some jaundice.) So, we’re working with our doctor’s office today to get a referral to a specialist in tongue-tie recommended by our lactation consultant, based out of some hospital out in Concord.

So hopefully seeing this specialist and correcting the posterior tongue-tie will help get things back on track. Peter’s doing okay for now, as he does like bottle-feeding, but it’d be nice to have all the benefits of breastfeeding and make it easier on all of us for him to get up to the weight he should be at.

The first week with Peter with us has been quite an adventure. I think that difficulty of raising children is multiplicative rather than additive. (That is, if one could quantify the effort in raising one child as 10, then the effort in raising two children is much closer to 100 than it is to 20.) Part of the trouble is that Peter hasn’t much wanted to drink milk straight from the source, so we’ve been feeding him pumped milk and formula, primarily with syringes and then bottles. He had lost more than the average amount of weight before starting to gain again on Wednesday night, and has had some Jaundice, so the doctors have been monitoring him on a regular basis. If all goes well, today will be the first day that he won’t visit a medical facility of some sort for checking bili levels and weight. (Although phrasing it that way makes it sound more ominous than it was. Things were going mostly okay, we just needed to monitor things to ensure that they started getting better rather than worse.)

But he’s been eating enough now, even if he prefers a bottle, and is a beautiful healthy boy. We may end up consulting with a lactation specialist to see about getting him to breast feed better, but last night he did fairly well, so maybe he’ll figure it all out on his own soon anyway.

But it’s been tough getting any sleep. It feels like Jessi and I have been running on all cylinders all day and night for the past week. I don’t know how Jessi will deal with the children by herself once I go back to work after Christmas, but maybe things will be less hectic by then.