The days after...

We spent the next few days in the hospital just resting and cuddling.

The first night, we sent Cooper to the nursery so we could get some rest. It had been a long day. But since I was trying to breast feed, they would bring him to our room for every feeding. I was told this would be every 3 hours, so when he didn't come in during a time I was expecting him, I started getting worried that they had forgotten about him or that something was going on. So I couldn't sleep anyway. But they soon did bring him in and said that he had been sleeping so good that they just let him sleep. He slept 4 straight hours.

 

Friday, he slept most of the day. I think I only saw his eyes open once.

 

  My parents brought the twins by for a visit.

Chloe loved giving him kisses.

 

And Connor just wanted to be silly.

And then Connor decided he was ready to hold the baby.

Connor is the one that would remind me 20 times a day that there was a baby in my belly and that the doctor would get the baby out. So on this day, he saw that I still have a belly and I guess he got a little confused because he looked at Cooper and then he looked at my belly and said "mommy has 2 babies". We quickly straightened that one out.

 

That evening, David's parents came to visit.

 

This is also the day Cooper started losing weight. Yes, it's normal for babies to lose weight when they are born. It's usually all of the fluids that are pumped into me before I have the baby, but he was losing more than normal. They base it on a percentile. But the nurses summed it up to me not getting my milk in and that it was no big deal and that I just needed to keep trying. But he wouldn't latch on. He was hungry and I would try to feed and he wouldn't latch on because I think he knew there was nothing in there. The nurses suggested that he stay in our room that night and that I try to feed him every 2 hours, even if he was asleep. And if he didn't latch on and feed, they wanted me to pump instead and give him what I pumped. I was only pumping about 1 ml of the stuff that comes before the milk. So he still wasn't getting much.

 

Saturday was more of the same thing. It felt like our days were on repeat. I was constantly trying to talk to the nurses about him not eating, me not producing, and on top of all of that, we were still waiting on his circumcision.

 

We had another visit from the twins, my parents, and my brother. Chloe clung to me a little more this time. She just wanted to sit with her momma and eat her snack. Neither one of them really paid much attention to Cooper.

Connor saying "Cheese!"

Saturday night, Cooper still wouldn't latch on and I wasn't pumping even a drop of anything. So he had gone another day without eating and lost even more weight.

 I was feeling so frustrated and was upset that no one was doing anything about it. When I saw that his lips were getting chapped, I had had enough. I called the nursery and insisted that we start supplementing. I was told that my nurse was with another baby right then but they would have her come see me as soon as she could.

 Well, when I still hadn't heard anything from her 45 minutes later, I called again. I was fed up. Someone needed to do something and I didn't care how much I was bugging them. Finally, 2 hours after I first called, the nurse came in with formula and a tube. We were going to try tube to breast feeding. She put the formula in a syringe hooked to a tube that was taped to me and that would go into his mouth when he latched on to try to breast feed. We did this so he would still latch on and help my milk come in and at the same time also get some food in him. He went to town and drank 20 ml within just a few minutes. He was STARVING! Also, afterwards, he was more awake than I had ever seen him. He felt better instantly. This made me feel better and I was happy that I used my own judgment about what to do about this and actually got something done.

  I continued to do this type of feeding the rest of the night, every 2 hours and on until it was time for us to leave the hospital. He immediately gained weight and I immediately felt better.