Brandrea

When you come home with a baby, you accept that you will spend over fifty percent of your time feeding them.  If it is not the actual act of them swallowing milk, it is waking them up, burping them, coaxing their eyes open, or begging “please oh please move your mouth!”  Their little bellies can hardly hold anything with their tiny size, so their bellies quickly empty, making them quickly demand more food.  Then they prompty fall asleep after drinking for anywhere from 10-32 seconds.  Upon finally finishing a full feeding, often close to an hour had passed.  And guess what?  You get to do it all over again in one more hour!

So is the life of a new mom.  I remember the amazing feeling when Cora transitioned to one meal in the middle of the night (by that, I mean the middle of my sleep time).  And then there was the day that I realized she was not taking very long to eat each time.  Instead of 45 minutes, she was done in fifteen.  Then it was only taking ten minutes.  And suddenly, she did not seem all that interested in one of her evening cluster feedings.  So I dropped it.  Before I knew it, Cora was eating only six times a day, eight minutes feeding time, tops.  Within a span of four months, I went from spending 33% of my day making sure she was eating to spending barely 3% of my day feeding her.  It has been wonderful.

Right now, Cora eats around 8am, 11am, 2pm, 5pm, 8pm and 11pm.  I am trying to figure out if she really needs that last feeding.  When she was two and three months, I did it to make sure she could make it through the night.  I did not want that luxurious sleeping-through-the-night thing to stop!  Then it just became habit.  I fed her right before I went to bed.  Shower, dress for bed, brush teeth, feed Cora.  It has just been part of the routine.

I am starting to think that she may not need this feeding anymore.  She is typically in a deep sleep when I get her for this.  She usually only wakes up because I also do a diaper change at this time.  Also, sometimes her daddy gets a little exicted to see her and his enthusiasm wakes her up…  Anyways, I think I will experiment.  I think I will push that last feeding up a little, maybe feeding her around 10pm for now.  What I cannot decide on is if I should drop another feeding entirely.  She can go much longer than three hours between feedings, so I do not know why I am cramming them in there.  It was the same sort of thing when I went from seven to six feedings.  She would eat, but I could tell that it was not exactly necessary.  In addition to that, it also seems like her schedule (as far as wake and eating times goes) is not working for her as well as it has.  Maybe shifting feeding times around some would help that.

When I do a shift like this one I am considering, I temporarily allow myself to become the opposite sort of “parenting style” for a while.  Instead of maintaining a schedule, I watch for Cora and what cues she gives me.  I am thinking tomorrow that I will let her nap as long as she does and maybe even wait until she shows me she is hungry before I feed her.  I will follow her pattern for a day or two and then rearrange things to work within that.  It is good for me to remember to reevaluate often (though, at the same time I feel like I never stop re-evaluating, I can get stuck in my habits and ways!) and listen to what “Cora says.”