Pump and Sucking-stance

It may be a little too soon to celebrate but I think we've graduated from the nipple shield. Rachel's just growing up. She is getting to the stage where she wants to try new things. She watches as we eat with verifiable interest, her mouth opening and closing in sync with ours as we bring each bite to our mouths. She took a bottle. She doesn't fight the pacifier as much anymore. And just tonight I tried not using the nipple shield and she nursed for a good half hour without any fussing at all. In fact, she's already in bed, sound asleep.

The nipple shield was incredibly helpful. Without it I wouldn't have been able to feed Rachel for the last 3 months and 2 days. But I was so worried that she'd never be weaned from it. Instead of taking her teddy bear with her to sleep overs, I was afraid she'd have to take the nipple shield. My worries of an ever present oral fixation are waning now.

Don't get me wrong, I was very appreciative of the nipple shield. Rachel and I had our share of problems when we were starting out. Andrew was pretty nervous about it. In our prenatal class we had discussed how it was best if the baby nursed within an hour of being born. Andrew's mind translated this into "the baby must eat within one hour of birth or it with never desire to eat ever again and will shrivel up into a raisin-like creature."

He watched the clock like a hawk and since they were stitching me up for nearly an hour, we didn't even attempt to breast feed until that critical hour was almost up. Andrew was convinced that Rachel was going to turn into a raisin.

As it turned out, though, Rachel was more than willing to try eating. She tried and she tried and she tried, and I did likewise. In the end though, we needed a few crutches to get us to make any sort of connection.

I didn't mind at first. The nurses and pediatrician said that she would be off the shield in two weeks, no problem. Well, those two weeks came and went and people started telling me that the shield would deplenish my milk supply (yeah, right...not so lucky in my case). I was so worried that I would dry up like a raisin.

So, neither Rachel or I turned into raisins. We had nothing to worry about all along. Except for the million times I misplaced the nipple shield. That thing is like a contact lens--if you drop it, you'll be on your hands and knees for quite a while searching blindly, meanwhile hoping that the baby doesn't get hungry.

I don't think we've seen the end of the shield; that last feeding was one battle won but the war is far from over. At least we're now doing a combination of bottles, soothers, and shield on/shield off. That way if I lose the nipple shield long enough for Rachel to get hungry I still have a method or two of placating her.

Rachel finishing up her first (and, so far, only) bottle ever