Shannon Phillips

I knew Davy was a first-rate nurser, but at our check-in with the pediatrician today we learned that he clocks in in now at 7 pounds 4 ounces. The doctor was pretty stunned. To put this in perspective: all babies lose weight in their first days of life. (Davy had lost four ounces from his birth weight of 6 pounds 11 ounces when we had his last weigh-in on Thursday.) Pediatricians want to see babies regain their birth weight by the end of two weeks. So it’s pretty impressive that our little champ has not only hit his birth weight already, but packed on an extra half a pound to boot!

I also feel it’s a vindication for my on-demand nursing policy. The nurses at UCSF, like those at CPMC, strongly push a version of scheduled nursing: if the baby’s gone three hours without nursing, they want you to wake him up for a feeding. We did this with Robin and it caused a lot of stress. Waking up a sleeping newborn isn’t so easy: you can strip them down so the cold wakes them up, or tickle their feet until they wake, or various other methods that all feel like baby torture. The babies don’t like it; they wake up angry, and if you’re already having trouble getting nursing established then starting a feeding session with an exhausted, outraged infant certainly doesn’t put you on the best footing. My mom watched us struggling with the three-hour feeding schedule and broke her scrupulously non-critical stance to observe that it seemed like madness to her.

So this time around, when the nurses dropped by to check our feeding logs and remind me that it was time to wake Davy up, I nodded and smiled and let him sleep. (I know why they do this. A starving baby is a very sleepy baby: they don’t have the energy to fuss. I still think it’s senseless to treat a healthy baby the same way you would one that’s having genuine problems with nutrition.) As a result, sometimes Davy sleeps for four hours, and sometimes he wants to nurse for an hour and a half straight. But he gets to sleep when he’s tired and nurse when he’s hungry. And clearly it’s working well for him!