"Elizabeth will be two months old tomorrow."

June 18, 1991 - Tuesday

     Elizabeth will be two months old tomorrow.  I can hardly believe it's been two months already.  Sometimes it still doesn't feel real.  I look at her when she's sleeping and she looks so sweet and precious like a little angel.

     I'm so far behind in my writing.  I don't know if I'll ever catch up but I'll try.

     After all that the nurse said that Sun. night I was afraid I was starving Elizabeth because I couldn't get her to nurse.  I told the nurse to be sure that the lactation consultant knew I wanted to see her when she came in Monday.  It turned out to be Janice Harville, our Lamaze instructor.  She spent so much time with me, at least 2-3 hours, trying to help get Elizabeth to latch on.  We didn't make a lot of progress though.  She did figure out what part of the problem was: Eliz wouldn't keep her tongue down, she'd hold it up to the top of her mouth.

     She came up with an idea to try & help Eliz. learn to keep her tongue down.  She got a syringe that was a pretty good size (maybe 3/4" diameter) but instead of a needle on the end it had a removable feeding tube.  It was maybe 1/8" diameter and about a foot long.  She suctioned the breast milk out of the bottle into the syringe.  Then she used some surgical tape to tape the tube to Guy's little finger.  He was supposed to put his finger in her mouth & whenever she got a good suck & kept her tongue down he was supposed to "reward" her with a little bit of milk from the syringe.  Janice said by the end of the week Eliz. should have gotten the hang of it so that she'd keep her tongue down when I'd try to nurse her.

     So we did that all that week - pumping the milk into the bottle and putting it into the syringe for Guy to feed her.  The reason Guy did it was so that she wouldn't associate eating from the syringe with me & wouldn't expect that instead.  So I'd try every once in awhile to get her to nurse but she'd only get a few sucks and then either fall asleep or get too frustrated & fussy to even try.  I talked to Janice on the phone a couple of times during the week and by Friday we decided to rent an electric pump from the hospital.  That made the pumping a lot easier cause my arms were getting sore from the manual pump.

     But I didn't really keep to a regular schedule with the pumping and my milk supply didn't seem to increase very much.  I could only get 2-3 oz. at a time.