I fed him today with a bottle!!

I went in this morning with a clearer head. My plan was to learn *with* Daegan...at his 10am feed, his nurse today (a nice one!) had finished all of her other babies early because she was determined to help me through this. She heard that I was a little upset yesterday and planned to help. We sat together and she showed me her technique...really, there is a technique to this...ways to position Daegan, how to hold my hand with the bottle....how to also hold his cheeks and chin at the same time...and between the two of us, he took his whole 10am feed from the bottle. Smile I stayed with him most of today so that I could get a better feel for him...usually I visit for only a few hours (1-3h) at a time. His 1pm feeding was gavaged as planned and then I fed him his 4pm feeding. He did have one of those scary episodes about halfway through, but his nurse was very calm and talked me through what to do and then encouraged me to try the bottle again after he recovered. And he did ok. After his 1pm gavage feed, I did leave him to get some food...and when I was gone, he had a scary episode that required flowby oxygen....I was glad I missed it. It freaked me out to hear about, but his nurse made it out to be not a big deal...that all premies like him do it... I think we were spoiled by how well he was doing that now he's acting more like the other premies I don't know how to react.

But overall it was a good day!!

And the vax: I told his doc I declined it for now, she confirmed that I understood it would make him "behind" (schedule wise) and that I understood the risks and left it at that. It was very non-confrontational.

And as for breast feeding: I emailed the lactation consultant. There is only 1 in the whole city and she isn't at our hospital...and our hospital is the big medicaid/wic center so people use free formula and don't breastfeed here so there isn't really anyone here that knows what they are doing/talking about. I'm waiting to hear back from her, but in the meantime, I am going to not try the breast at the hospital...and just work on bottles...when he comes home we can tackle the breast.