Three months in review

Well, Will is officially 3 months old. Most of the time I still find it hard to believe that I was every really pregnant (the whole thing just seems like a continuous blur of nausea and vomiting), that I ever actually gave birth, and that I have managed to sustain this little life for 3 whole months. But somehow we’ve made it.

I never really thought that all our difficulties with Will would end the instant he turned 3 months old, but I guess I was kind of hoping that they would. They haven’t. Things are better though, at least better than they were in the bleak of September when I seriously didn’t know if I was going to make it from one minute to the next. When I think about it like that, I realize we really have come a long way. By the skin of my teeth, I managed to power through the hellishness of Low Milk Supply and Will has not had a drop of formula in his life. Not one drop. But getting through that has been the hardest thing I have ever done.

Where are we now? Will is well fed and growing by leaps and bounds. He has a full, round belly, chubby little cheeks, and even some darling little rolls of fat on his thighs (Will, if you are reading this someday, sorry honey, but I had to mention your darling little rolls of fat because they are adorable). He’s getting plenty to eat, but I am still on the Domperidone—90 mg a day. Luckily, I’ve been able to reduce this nearly $9 a day Domperidone habit by ordering it from Vanuatu. Yes. Vanuatu, a volcanic island nation some 1000 miles off the coast of Australia. I was able to get 300 pills for $50 and without a prescription. I know it sounds sketchy, but it worked. This ordering-from-Vanuatu option was actually suggested in a well-respected breastfeeding book, The Nursing Mother’s Companion. My lactation consultant herself had suggested ordering it from Canada, but that required faxing a prescription and whatnot, and I just couldn’t deal with all of that, so I went the Vanuatu route. No prescription required or anything. Just click “add to cart” and you’re good to go. Eight days after I placed the order (and there was a weekend in there too), my shipment of Domperidone (i.e. Motilium) arrived and there was never a lull in my milk supply. If anyone out there who needs Domperidone finds this blog and is considering ordering it from Vanuatu, I can totally vouch for the Inhouse Pharmacy.

My plan was to keep taking the Domperidone until Will was 3 months old and then to gradually decrease it. The last time I tried this (many, many weeks ago), my milk supply plummeted again and there was all-around general despair. So I am naturally petrified of trying it again. The last couple of days I have reduced my dosage to 80 mg (8 pills a day) instead of 90 mg, and so far so good. I’ll hold steady another couple of days and then drop it by another pill to see what happens.

Other things to review: sleeping through the night. By the time Will was about 6 or 7 weeks old, he was sleeping around 8 hours at a time—usually from 10pm to 6am. It worked out really nice for mama. Except for the plugged ducts that I endured when he first started going an 8-hour stretch without nursing. I was constantly worried about what this would do to my precarious milk supply, but as long as I was taking the Domperidone, things were okay in that department. It was just that during the daytime, it seemed like he cried all the time and he rarely napped for more than a few minutes at a time. It was exhausting. Then a couple weeks ago, I was listening to the New Moms New Babies podcast and realized that some of this fussiness might be because Will was not getting enough sleep. It was like he would get so tired that he couldn’t fall asleep, or that he would refuse to let himself fall asleep for fear of missing something that might happen in this great big world. So I decided to get better about making him take naps and get to bed earlier at night (Ha! Easier said than done!). What has resulted is that usually I can get him to take at least one nap during the day, and usually I can get him to go to sleep for the night around 7-7:30. The drawback to this is that instead of “sleeping through the night,” he would sleep until about 3 or 4am, so I was back to a nighttime feeding again. The past two nights though, he has actually slept from 7:30pm to 6:00am, so that has been really nice. The end goal of all of this, of course, is so that he is less fussy during the daytime. So far it’s been hit and miss. We’ll have to see how that turns out.

Onto the milk, soy, and acid reflux issue. It’s been at least 7 weeks since I’ve had any dairy and at least a month since I’ve had any soy. The green poops finally ended (again, sorry Will, if you are grown up and reading this some day), but as I’ve mentioned the crying and fussiness has not. As far as the Prevacid, I honestly didn’t feel like it was doing anything, plus his prescription was starting to run out, so I’ve been cutting down his dosage (the doctor told me to do that). I’ve noticed no difference in his crying whether he takes it 3 times a day or 1 time a day. And really, I don’t think his symptoms are consistent with acid reflux. He spits up sometimes, sure, but all babies do that. The main thing was that he cried all the time, and especially he cried after I fed him. I think the doctors just wanted to give him acid reflux medicine to make me feel like they were doing something, not because he actually had acid reflux. As far as dairy, I don’t care if I ever eat that again, but I decided that when he hit the 3 month mark I would gradually reintroduce soy. So far, I haven’t noticed much of a change, so we’ll have to see how this pans out.

So much more to say, but Will is crying so I need to try to figure out what he wants. Thanks for reading.