This baby girl has been a piggy. She definitely weighs more than what I think an average 2 month old should weigh. Our older daughter got comments like 'she's so small' and 'look how little she is'...this baby gets shocked and fast remarks of 'what a big baby' she is. And I can't help but agree. She's a heavy kid. I just did a little research and found that the average baby of 2 months (boy or girl) is 10 pounds. This was after really loose research...and I know my peanut butter was already 11 pounds at at least 6 weeks old. She turned 2 months this past Monday and I think she weighs at least 13 pounds now. Probably more. And nothing but breastmilk has given her that poundage. She has never had a drop of formula. I love that she's getting so big off of purely eating what I provide for her. I felt that way about her sister, but her sister had formula for a little over a week of her life. I don't regret that, and I think if I'd have known better, I still would have had to formula feed her in the beginning. She had a terrible bruise on her head from a vacuum during the birth, and they say that bruises can cause jaundice. Jaundice can cause drowsiness, and drowsiness prevents the desire to eat...and eating can help bring down the billirubin levels. It's a bad cycle. And with peanut butter, I pumped for a few days before the birth (to try to induce labor), which I think helped my milk come down easier, and she was still borderline jaundiced and almost needed to be kept another night for it. She ate every 2 hours and her levels were still that high. I wonder how any mother is able to get their baby to breastfeed enough to expel all that yucky billirubin filled marconium (I'm probably spelling all these words wrong) in enough time to get discharged after a day.
So there you go...one of the quickest ways to stop a mother from breastfeeding...pressure her into formula feeding during the first 24 hours because of the billirubin levels. We think, automatically, we must not be doing something right. And I have no clue what the real right answer is. Was I just the anomaly? Do I just produce jaundice-prone babies? Or is this possibly one of the reasons a lot of moms out there decide not to breastfeed? I would have given up on it with my first if I weren't so obsessed with making it work. So I'm so glad we got it to work, me and my first daughter. If we didn't, I probably wouldn't have had it so easy with the second, and I'd be formula feeding for both. The reasons why I am so glad they were/are both breastfed are so plentiful that I'll have to save that for another post, but I will say that it's my favorite part about this stage of my children's lives so far. I love my toddler girl...but there's a connection I had with her while she was breastfeeding that I just won't ever get again. A closeness I can't describe with words.
Like I said in an earlier post, you'll hear a lot about breastfeeding over the next year and change.
Time to go to bed, because peanut butter will surely be awake in about 3 hours to eat.
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