This is a picture of my sister Jen, BIL Larry and my new niece, Maddy. This picture was taken in Tianjin, China last week. It is her official adoption photo for some government agency. My sister is still in China with Maddy waiting for her passport and visa. Then they will fly home and Maddy will meet her brother Josh for the first time. We are so happy to have Maddy in our family! She is so cute! I can’t wait to meet her in person!

Ok. not that recent. This was right before Thanksgiving, so you can imagine how much Kai has grown.

Miles and Kai. We were about to leave for school in the morning. Kai looked so comfy in his carseat, I had to snap a photo.

Bath time for Kai. I can’t even remember when Miles fit in our sink, but I know he did!

I just wanted to post and say that things are going really well. We are getting in to the 2-kid groove now. It is challenging, but really fun. Kai is dong great. He is healthy and adorable and smiley. And he’s got thigh and wrist rolls now! Delish!

I’m getting some support which is helping. I am glad the holidays are upon us. Although it is such a crazy time, I really enjoy it. We celebrated the first night of Hannukah last night. It was SO MUCH FUN!!! Miles was hilarious. This is the first year he seems to really “get” what’s happening — the ritual, the traditions, the food, the presents. It’s very cute.

The last couple of months have been full of highs and lows. With all the joy, Ron and I both have close family members who are battling cancer and having a really hard time. Ron’s dad has also been quite ill. But on a happy note, Ron’s mom and brother are getting married soon and we have a new niece!

With all the pressure I have been putting on myself recently, I was reminded of this post at one of my favorite blogs, from months ago. It’s so right on!

Here’s an excerpt:

I love new parents. I love their shell-shocked pride and out-sized concern. I love their myopic devotion. But it’s exhausting to hang out with them too long; I can’t go back to that. Me and my friends, we were such intense devotees of motherhood. Oh the debates about flaxseed oil! About kindergarten curriculum! About toothbrushing and fluoride and non-punitive discipline! Oh the discussions about the right way to give compliments and the proper way to put a child to bed! And as it turns out? The choices are less important than the values that drive them. When they’re ten, no one can know that you used sun-bleached organic diapers or disposable. You can’t even tell the breastfed babies from the ones who got (in the immortal words of the hard-core online APers) SIN (synthetic infant nutrition). The homebirthed babies who ate nothing but organic for their first years are standing by the soda machine jingling their change. The daughters of feminists are putting on lipgloss; the baby boys who nursed their trucks are wrestling on the gym mat. It’s not that our choices have no impact, it’s just that the impact isn’t always what we expect.

ya’know?!!?

My three good-looking boys and one with Grandpa Joe (also good-looking). These are mostly of Kai. Don’t forget he and Miles have their own blogs!

First, let me say thanks to all of you who have called and written and left comments on this blog offering your support. I REALLY appreciate it. I know I have sounded like a big downer lately. I am getting over it. The more encouragement I get from friends and family and the more I talk openly about what’s been going on, the better I feel. I’m coming out of the bottlefeeding “closet” and it is liberating.

Despite the fact that from the outside my pregnancy looked like a horror show, I actually really enjoyed it. Although I endured a lot of testing and 2 hospitalizations, I felt really great while I was pregnant. I felt hormonally and emotionally balanced. I very much enjoyed feeling the baby moving around toward the end. I wanted to have a bio baby so that I could experience pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding. I did. Just not the way I thought it would happen. Now get over it! Ok.

I think God just wanted to let us know that some level of normalcy is just around the corner. We had one GREAT night on Halloween eve. And then, it all went nuts again! I can’t remember if I wrote this, but Miles came down with a nasty cough right around the time that Kai was born. It hung around for 2 weeks and I also caught it, since my immunity was suppressed by the surgery. His cough brought many sleepless nights for him and for Ron who was left to tend to him while I was with Kai. He finally got over the night time coughing for about a week only to catch another cold and cough last week. This one was really nasty and we went to the doctor. The month-long germ fest really irritated his lungs. With the help of a puffer he is doing a lot better and is sleeping, mostly, through the night again.

As much as we tried to keep Miles and his germs away from the baby, it was just pretty impossible. Miles is crazy about his baby brother. If I walked out of the room I would come back to find him stroking Kai’s little head and kissing him. So anyway, now Kai and I both have the cold. Poor little Kai. He’s got mucous running out of his teeny tiny little nostrils and a little wheeze and gurgle when he breathes. It’s scary when such a little guy has a cold! I was up most of the night Wednesday checking him to makes sure he was breathing and taking him in and out of the steamy bathroom. I took him to the doctor yesterday. Fortunately he is ok right now, but we have to watch out for secondary infections since he cannot clear his little airways on his own. So, I am steaming him, suctioning his nose often and taking his temperature every few hours. He’s sleeping in his carseat in the bed with me to keep him propped up. If his temp goes above 100.4 he has to go to the ER!! Oy! I am sure he will be fine, but oh, the worry.

The thing that bums me out about this is that it is only November and we still have 5 months of cold and flu season left. Last year was rough for Miles and for us. He had a cold once a month, and Ron and I were not spared. Each of us came down with at least 3 of those colds. I have never given Miles a flu shot or taken one my self for that matter, but I am starting to think seriously about it now. The flu would be awful. I’ve had it a couple times in the past 15 years or so. It’s pretty brutal.

All I can say is how grateful I am that we have good health insurance. We have spent a fortune on copays this past month. I can’t imagine having the added stress of medical bills on top of all this. We really are fortunate.

So, at first Kai was doing really well with the nursing, or so I thought. But then he wasn’t gaining any weight. The first problem was my milk supply being inadequate, and then the problem became his latch, and now…. I have decided to give up on the breastfeeding. I am still pumping and giving him some of my breastmilk in a bottle (about 2 feedings a day) and nursing him for comfort rather than nutrition, but he is primarily being formula fed with a bottle. The loss for me is intense (plus the loss of the birth that I wanted). But I just can’t do this anymore. I really tried to push through and be tough, but I hit a wall this past week and I cannot go any further.

Here’s what got us to this point:

1. c-section–these cause breast milk to take longer to come in.

2. infection developed during labor–fever lasted 5 days and I was given IV antibiotics for all of those days– this exposes baby to these drugs and makes milk production slow because the body is expending energy on healing, not producing milk. The exposure of the baby to all these anti-biotics caused him to have really green, mucousy poops, weight loss and he developed thrush (yeast infection in his mouth) and I got a yeast infection of the breast. Nice!

3. The day I got home from the hospital I came down with a really bad chest cold– being sick causes more compromised milk production. I had lots of coughing which made my incision hurt like hell. I have been on pain management drugs. Not a huge amount, but that is one more drug in my milk that Kai gets exposed to. In fact, I was avoiding taking so much because I was trying not to expose the baby to it. But being in pain actually worked against me.

4. Because Kai lost 9 ounces the first week we were told to supplement. Supplementing (even though we didn’t use an artificial nipple) made it so less time was spent nursing (so less stimulation of the breast to bring in more milk) and got the baby used to not having to work hard to get milk. His suck was already weak due to his size and lack of energy probably from the anesthetics used for my c-section , and now, despite having a highly experienced lactation consultant work with us 4 times to try to get him latched on well and sucking adequately, it is just not happening.

5. I was spending pretty much every other hour around the clock for 3 weeks doing one of these things: nursing, pumping (every 2 hours), feeding (which with the supplementer we were using took at least 45 minutes), washing pumping supplies and supplementer, preparing breast milk… There was very little sleeping and pretty much nothing else was getting done. This made me really exhausted, contributing to further diminished supply.

Throughout this whole process I became increasingly more anxious and depressed. To be very honest, these feelings started to interfere with my bonding with Kai. I started having lots of feelings of regret and guilt, and even some feelings of resentment toward him, which in turn made me feel MORE guilty. I also became obsessed with his feeding and weight gain, and was barely functioning around the house or able to parent Miles. There’s probably a little PTSD thrown in there too because of the c-section and the scary things that led up to it (like when the baby’s heart rate dropped suddenly and 5 nurses and doctors came running in to the room, the extreme chills and uncontrollable shaking I experienced during the surgery and how I didn’t get to even see Kai’s little face until 30 minutes after he was born.) With all this struggling going on, I just think I needed to make something easier for us or else I was going to completely lose it! I think it is more important that I be healthy and happy and bottle feeding than be miserable and nursing. What’s better for Kai? I think a happy mom is better for him.

To top it all off, a few days ago my blood pressure decided to go back up. I have had this high blood pressure since I was 21 years old and not terribly overweight. It comes and goes. I did really well during my pregnancy. Even though I was treated like a ticking time bomb the whole time, I just ticked, I never exploded. But now it is back up and I really need to take something to control it (along with diet and exercise). If I don’t I feel bad. The pedi said that although the meds I am on are considered acceptable for breastfeeding, Kai would need to be onitored really closely for a while to see if he was absorbing it. ACK! I can’t deal with that worry either. So her suggestion was to pump 2x a day–before taking the medicine, 12 hours apart, and feed him the expressed milk.

So now as I try to sort this out for myself, I also need to sort through all the feelings of shame. This may sound totally crazy to some people. Why would I feel ashamed of feeding my child formula?!?! I live in a neighborhood where most women breastfeed and have strong opinions about it. Many of these women, I have witnessed, seem to feel that the choice to breastfeed makes them better mothers than those who bottle feed. I think there is some part of me that believes this. If breastfeeding is best, why wouldn’t I do whatever it takes to give my child the best? Have I done whatever it takes? Are the circumstances really out of my control? Am I wimping out? Should I push further until it all works out?

I have a paranoia too that others are thinking along the same lines about me: “she didn’t try hard enough” or worse: “she didn’t try at all.” So then I feel defensive about it when I go out in public, like I want to explain myself to people so they don’t think I am one of those “bad bottle feeding mommies!” It is SO ABSURD. I even felt a little bit like this with Miles when I would bottlefeed him in public! Ridiculous! Some closer friends I have talked to have been really supportive and understanding. And others, who I haven’t gone in to as much detail about it with seem to have this attitude of, “well, it was hard for me too, but I did it…” and then they want to give me all kinds of unsolicited advice on techniques or tricks to increase my supply (which I have already tried of course.) A lot of the people I feel judged by are people who had a hard time breastfeeding and pushed through until it worked out, but they only have one child. I would like to see them be so militant about it when they also have a toddler at home to take care of. Each day that goes by, and the more support I get from people, makes me feel more confident with my decision to do what I thought was best for my baby, my family and myself.

Some people just have it easier than others. As a result of my whole fertility struggle with all my losses (and the losses of people very close to me), going through the adoption process and experiencing a traumatic birth and complicated pregnancy, I am learning to be kinder to myself and to others. You never know what some women have gone through to have their kids (through birth or adoption). I wish women were not so hard on each other. Having gone through all of this, I hope I will never judge another woman again for her family-building or family feeding choices!

Ok, so I will end here on an upbeat note. It’s Saturday morning. Miles and Ron have gone to the zoo and Kai and I are home together in the quiet house. We are snuggled up in our warm, cozy bed. He’s sleeping next to me as I type this on my laptop. He’s pink and soft and developing a double chin and I am falling more in love with him each minute. He’s healthy and has a wonderfully calm disposition, just like his big brother had. We are lucky to have him. That’s all that really matters.

After 10 days of pumping and supplementing with donor breast milk and my own breast milk, Kai is 7 lbs! 4 ounces above his birth weight. He’s now a little over 3 weeks old. What I have been doing has definitely helped fatten him up and has kept him exclusively on breast milk. But now the problem we need to deal with is his latch. That means another visit from the lactation consultant and more pumping and some supplementing with the donor breast milk a little bit too. I have been told that usually when they hit 8 to 9 lbs, they suddenly get the whole latch thing. Everyone is telling me not to give up, that it will get better. It’s so time consuming though. And I really cannot go ANYWHERE for more than 2 hours, because that is how often he has to be fed and I need to pump. Hopefully it will only take just another 2 weeks or so to get there. I am told once everything is in working order, it will only take like 5-10 minutes to feed him. THAT is what I am looking forward to. That means easy travel and a little more sleep. I hope it works out.

Ugh. I thought things were going better, but at his 2 week appt. we discovered Kai had lost one ounce. Not much to lose, but he isn’t gaining. It seems I am not producing enough “hindmilk.” Basically, I am making skim milk and I need to be making whole milk. So Kai is not getting the calories he needs. This is probably because my body is using calories to heal from the c-section and to heal from the lovely chest cold I caught just days after the birth. I have a lactation consultant who has me in troubleshooting mode right now, and it is really tough. I understand why many women get scared and switch to formula. Fortunately Kai is my second baby and I know from Miles how resilient and strong babies actually are. I know he is ok right now and is strong enough to hang in there while we figure this out. I am hopeful that it will work.

So here is what we are doing:

1. Kai is eating donated breast milk from an acquaintance who has very fatty milk. We are waking him up every 2 hours and feeding him about 2 ounces with a finger-tube feeding system , so when my milk does come in, he can pop back on the boob without “nipple confusion.”

2. I am pumping and dumping with a hospital grade pump every 2-3 hours. The frequency will help bring in my milk.

3. I am taking fenugreek capsules, acidopholous capsules, omega-3 capsules and flax seed to raise the quantity and quality of my milk.

After 48 hours of this, Kai is looking really good. His skin looks better and he seems more alert and content. He is having more awake time and is sleeping more soundly. His poops are improving–less explosive, better color, etc.

I am not seeing much change in my milk production, but I have been told it can take a few weeks.

There ain’t much sleeping going on around here for people over age 3. Even Miles’ sleep patterns have been disrupted. He usually wakes at 5 or so and goes back to sleep. But if he sees someone awake, that’s it! He’s up for the day. This makes for a very grouchy young man the rest of the day. His grouchiness plus our grouchiness equals complete household insanity. This weekend was tough. It will get better. It has to!