New things

We've had a lot of changes this week: Gabriel finally had his first official Birth to Three therapist visits, I went back to work, and he had his first day without either one of us taking care of him.

B-3 sent both a speech therapist and a physical therapist to visit with Gabriel, and now we have homework. They'll visit about once a week for now and hopefully we'll make some progress. The feeding therapy visit was the most interesting. It seems that Gabriel is "self limiting", meaning he has the ability to take more food from the bottle, but he's choosing not to for some reason. So, we are changing our goals. Previously, we were focusing on volume, now we're focusing on attitude. "Feeding time is fun time" is our new motto, and so if Gabriel is showing us stress cues such as falling asleep or rejecting the bottle, he gets a little break and then we try again. We aren't pushing as hard, so if we feel he's done for the session, even if it's only been 5-10 minutes, then we're done. During his feeding tube time, we are making sure he's getting in a lot of pacifier time and also dipping the pacifier in breastmilk repeatedly so he can make the association of yummy milk = full stomach, not syringe = full stomach. Falling asleep may sound like a weird stress cue, but his behavior is certainly consistent with using the tactic to avoid working. He'll fall asleep almost as soon as you start with the bottle, but if you put him down, he wakes back up and wants to be social. He is also almost always very social during feeding tube time, so he's not acutally tired or cranky, he just doesn't want to work on the bottle.

On Wednesday, Gabriel had his very first babysitter. She's still speaking to us and is coming back next week, so I guess he didn't give her too much trouble. I definitely needed the time away, and going back to work was great. I came home, and I was tired, but I felt so much better for having been able to get out of the house for awhile and do something else I enjoyed. Playing with tiger cubs will do that for you. :) We promised ourselves that we wouldn't be helicopter parents and call to check in on Gabriel every few hours. We were good. Neither of us called -- we knew our babysitter would call us if anything happened.

After having two days away, spending the whole day as stay-at-home mommy was hard to get back into. Feeding Gabriel takes a lot of energy. Each session is about an hour long by the time we get through everything, and then I still have to use the breast pump which is another 30 minutes. As a result, several things fall off the wagon. Unfortunately, breastfeeding is one of them. Getting the timing right -- having him hungry and having had enough time pass since my last pumping session is difficult. Plus, he doesn't take much in a session, it's just kind of for mommy-son time at this point, so it adds to the already marathon feeding session. He's never going to be an exclusively breastfeeding baby. I'm looking forward to January when we may be able to start introducing solids and hopefully he'll like that enough to take in his required calories all by himself. The other things that fall by the wayside are the extra baby playtime things. He doesn't get as much tummy time as he should, since I need him to be awake and not having just had a full meal. It's timing again. And there are many other things we should be working on to reach those developmental milestones, but it feels that there just aren't enough hours in the day to do everything. We want to give him the best chance we can to catch up developmentally, but being the all-around super parent just isn't possible. Since feeding is his most pressing issue, we spend most of our time and energy overcoming that hurdle.

However, we do have happy points: Gabriel makes quite the range of sounds and we are able to identify little baby laugh. He smiles quite a bit and loves to look at your face. His abdominal muscles are improving. If you put him on his back, he will raised both legs all the way up over and over without arching his back. It looks like quite the workout. I don't think I could do that half so easily as he seems to. He is also getting quite active with his hands; holding onto toys and looking at them intently and he has even managed to start sucking his thumb.