Update on Weight

I was rereading some old posts (whats with the nostalgia?!)

It got me thinking about how long we have been struggling-obsessed-consumed by V's weight. Right from birth, at 910g. Actually, no, before that! We were following her projected weight via ultrasound weeks before she was even born.

I don't think this focusing on weight has done all that much good really. I mean, sure, it got use to enrich her milk, which seemed to have somewhat of an effect. But really, in the NICU, we would celebrate one days of 100g increase and then come crashing down the next when she gained only 10g. The truth probably was simply somewhere in between and she gained an average of 55g per day. And knowing versus not on a DAILY basis was more of a distraction than anything. In fact, our lactation consultant was telling us that they were soon going to stop weighing daily because they found that it discouraged moms from continuing breastfeeding... Its hard to march on with breastfeeding when you are obsessing about intake and there is no way but time at the breast to measure how much your baby is actually ingesting. *insert lots of arguments with Mr. D here about how effective my initial breastfeeding was* Legitimate concerns really, she was only 5th percentile and it really didn't look as though she was taking all that much in. In the end we stuck with it and I'm fairly certain there would not have been any weight difference either way.



Then when we got home, a nutritionist would come weekly to weight V. Have we ever mentioned how  much we hated this? It felt like such an intrusion... Quick quick quick, pick up, we don't want the nutritionist seeing these piles of laundry or dishes or toys or whateverotherembarassingmess. PLUS, she would always roll her eyes when we would ask her to wash her hands. AND she always insisted on putting V's weight on her actual birth date curve... Because of course she was miles off the curve at 4 months of age when she was actually 1.5 months corrected... this was not obvious to her for some reason... ughhh. Anywayyy, so like I was saying, it was no fun. Of course, this was another wonderful opportunity for us to be either super happy or really worried. When the weight was on the low side, she would offer up lots of great advice, like waking poor V up in the middle of the night when she had been sleeping 7 hours for a while. In retrospect, her weight stayed exactly the same with and without wake up (this was past 4 months corrected, and keep in mind she never crossed any *corrected* percentile lines, so it was really minor variations). It did however change mom and dad's restfulness... you won't hold it against us if we hold a teeny tiny little grudge against her. Right?! Am I the only one who mass breastfed just before weight in and would hope that the daily poop would wait till after? Sad but true! We kind of fired our nutritionist (with our paediatrician's blessing). That was one really satisfying phone call!

An now, here we are almost 18 months later and we are still struggling with keeping V's weight up. Or perhaps with learning to accept that no matter what we do, she varies between 5th and 15th percentile. No matter if we "butter-dope" as my husband calls it, or sneak cream in everything we can think of... cream avocado? yumyum! creamy beef? delish! So you'll understand that using our very cheap scale to attempt to weight her is really just an unwanted distraction. I am boycotting it! If my paediatrician thinks we can wait 3 months between weight ins, that should be good enough, right? (we LOVE her btw, she is really awesome and incredibly knowledgeable!)

The thing is, that with bronchopulmonary displasia, my understanding is that the bigger her lungs get, the more healthy lung tissue there is. More healthy lung = less likely complications from lung infections! But if she is teeny tiny for her age, that also means her lungs are teeny tiny.

So wish us luck in trying to stay away from the wildly inaccurate bathroom scale. Until May... we can do it right? We are hoping for 20lbs, but really we'll take what we can get.

I think we'll all be better off focusing on the bigger picture rather than the daily ups and downs.

xo
C