Glorious Food!
Written by Yih-Chun
Cece has had an interesting relationship with food since she was born. When she was very small, her tongue often curled up, leaving the nipple or bottle on the wrong side. I often would put the bottle in only to find that it was on the wrong side of her tongue, and repeatedly reinserted it to no avail, but had to wait until she started crying with her mouth open in order to get the bottle set correctly. She was also quite jaundiced, a bit less so than our first baby, but each time she ate, she ate very little. She also didn’t like drinking from the breast. During the first couple of weeks of Cece’s life, we weighed her before and after a breastfeeding session, finding that she drank just 15g. Evelyn was somewhat dubious about the precision of this scale, but then we fed her 1oz out of a bottle and re-weighed her and measured an increase of 30g. She was just not eating well on the breast. Because of Cece’s jaundice, we brought her to the clinic four times in the first ten days, and her weight was a non-increasing function until the last visit. We were logging every feed and all her diaper changes, and were really concerned about the amount she ate, because she wasn’t consuming the volume of food needed for healthy growth. We started supplementing her pumped milk with formula to increase the caloric density of her food, and regularly weighed her in this basket to evaluate her weight. She seemed to particularly dislike this basket, so we are glad we got a picture of her in it with a neutral expression.
“I prefer to be held, not placed in baskets, but I will entertain you this one time.”
Because our pump is compatible with Avent threading and not Dr. Brown threading, we used Avent to limit the number of bottles we had to wash. One day, I failed to wash and sterilize the Avent bottles we were using in time, and Evelyn got quite upset at me, but I pointed out that Dr. Brown bottles were still available. Immediately Cece took to the Dr. Brown bottles much better than the Avent bottles, because Dr. Brown size 1 nipples were larger and allowed a higher flow rate. We immediately switched to feeding her with Dr. Brown, and she started growing well. We stopped supplementing her formula, but she still did not want to feed on the breast. Whenever Evelyn would pick her up to breastfeed, she would pretend to sleep until her milk was ready, or she would make a face in protest. As she got older, she would whimper and use her arms to whack Evelyn to express her displeasure. Evelyn and I joked that though she was the source of the milk, I was Mr. Easy Milk, because I never tried to force her to breastfeed.
“How dare you feed me like this?”
As Cece got older, we tried to get her back on Avent with a size 2 nipple, and she was quite happy with that size from then on.
Cece was a very focused eater. She would clench her fists and hold them up near her shoulders, and I imagined her holding a spoon and a fork and getting ready for proper dining. She was very trusting: when she cried and we picked her up, she would immediately calm down, knowing that we would feed her soon. If we didn’t have food ready and had to heat it up, however, she would lose patience pretty quickly and would start crying loudly.
Clenched fists, perfect for utensils!
When I took care of Cece by myself, I always preferred unrefrigerated milk because it was instantly available and was good for four hours— perfect for when Evelyn had to head out for a doctor’s appointment or a meeting. Then as soon as Cece would get hungry I could have a bottle in her mouth in under a minute. But when Evelyn went back to work, we had to keep some milk in the refrigerator and warm it up. Because we had to warm the milk in a hot-water bath, it took a few minutes for the milk to come up to temperature, and Cece often fussed while waiting. The same went for when we ran out of milk while Evelyn was pumping— Cece definitely let us know that this was unacceptable and she needed her milk now!
On the day of the accident, Evelyn brought Cece to the lactation consultant to try to get her to eat on the breast. The nurse explained that we needed to make the “easy milk” from the bottle harder in order to remove her preference for the bottle, so they started feeding Cece with a premie-sized nipple on a Dr. Brown bottle. Cece, we just wanted to be able to feed you on trips without having to manage a pump and so many bottles. I imagine you in heaven drinking from a big Avent size 2 nipple an unending supply of warm, fast, easy milk. ❤️