Tiny child sighed in my ear

For those of you our there wondering if the family M had cleared off on yet another holiday then I am afraid no such luck for us...

Well it turns out that as well as teething the poor sausage also had gastroenteritis AGAIN! By Saturday it became clear the the loss of appetite wasn't just the front tooth that is threatening to pop put any second - the napppies said otherwise.

Unlike last time, when she happily took her full feed volume in electrolyte solution, this time she didn't wantly to drink hardly anything. She got quite poorly and on Monday I had to spoon feed her milk when she had only taken 10oz of fluid for the day. This was working out fine and she drank a few ounces until her gag reflex kicked in and she puked all over her own face. F compared it to looking like she was in a cowboy movie and had a bandana on her face so all you could see were her eyes. We also had a lot of leaky morning nappies and I have spent the last week solidly doing laundry as every morning, even if we changed her in the night she would have wet all her clothes, her growbag, the bed sheets etc.

Looks like she is on the mend now though. Her appetite is coming back slowly and the nappies are back to normal.

That tooth still hasn't popped out yet!

And It's Catching Up

I haven't posted for a while so I am going to bring you all up to date with what has been happening in Olivia land over the last few weeks.

Having been poorly for some while Olivia is finally back to normal. We ended up putting her on fast flow teats, designed for 6 month old babies simply because she just took so long to drink her milk while she was recovering that she ended up falling asleep half way through the bottle. We ended up having a poo sample sent to the hospital for analysis as her digestion still wasn't right and the GP was concerned she might have developed lactose intolerance following her illness. The test came back normal though so she obviously just took a long time to recover from her Gastroenteritis.

I got her weighed and the health visitor reckoned she had put 7 ounces on. Considering that this was during a week when she had nothing but electrolyte drink for 24 hours, less than half rations for several days when she wouldn't eat and then watered down feeds to let her tummy recover I am at a loss to see hw this could possibly be so. She had dropped a fair few ounces earlier in the week as well. I had weighed her at home before taking her to clinic and on my scales she was the same as she had been the week before. I am sure they have a dodgy set of scales at baby clinic. I've also had her weighed again since and she is now up to 14lbs 13 oz so is well on target to double her birth weight by 6 months. She is hovering somewhere between the 50th and 75th centiles.

The other week Olivia also went to visit her nice 'Auntie' L but was a bit grizzly and so while Daddy M and Auntie L talked business, Mummy M had to walk round and round in circles in the back garden with a baby who was very tired but DID NOT want to go to sleep.

On Friday the NCT girls and the babies all came over to our place. Everyone brought bits and bobs of food and the Mummies had a relaxing lunch while the babies played on the baby bym and play mat.

Sleep, sleep tonight...

You know how things come back and bite you on the arse? Well, a little while ago, we were luxuriating in the fact that our little baba sleeps from eight in the evening until six the next morning? Yeah...

Hopefully it's just because madam is still a little put out by her adventures with tummy bugs, but the last few nights, she's been getting us up in the middle of the night for a feed. Last night, I was still up doing a bit of computing. Occasionally I could hear a burst of noise from the baby monitor, but generally it had been quiet. About midnight, Olivia started making noises which built up until we had crying. Then I heard a plaintive voice from K___, "Can you come and get her?"

I grabbed the baby and took her into the kitchen with me and sorted her a bottle. She guzzled the first three ounces, but after that it was a bit of a struggle. On the one hand, she seemed too dozy to eat, but when I put her back in her cot, I had to rescue her again a couple of minutes later. Fortunately, K___ didn't wake. In the end it was half one before I she was tired enough to go back down.

Then she woke us at ten to six. Grrrr. Hopefully this won't last. K___ tells me that Olivia's reaching the point where baby's start to want things NOW, GODDAMN IT! and knows the buttons to push to make it happen (she didn't know this already?). With that in mind, we really don't want her to make the connection that results in her wailing in the middle of the night and us picking her up and feeding her etc.

Might have to break out the SuperNanny book...

Like a Bright New Morning

Well, another bad night sleep for Mummy M. Olivia was tossing and turning all night and I ended up feeding her at 3.30am.

At 6am she had the fullest wet nappy I have ever felt in my life. She had totally filled up the nappy and had soaked through to her vest, sheet growbag and through to the cot sheet. In the name of scientific exploration we weighed the nappy on the baby scales and it weighed 14oz - that is almost a pound!!!!!!! And that is excluding all the wee that went on her clothes and cot!!

On to feeding time...She took 4oz of the final 7oz bottle of electrolyte drink and then went totally postal, although that fact that she subsequently went back to sleep for 3 hours suggested that this might be more due to tiredness than anything else.

After her sleep I weighed her to find that she had lost another 3 ounces, bringing the total to 7oz lost since Monday.

She started back on milk with the 10am feed and has been a bit better about actually drinking it, although she is not quite back to her normal self. She has also started to poop properly again so hopefully she is now on the mend. It has been a difficult few days.

So Unpleasant Inside and Out

Having woken us up at 12.30 and then woken me at 2 and 5am, this morning Olivia woke up properly at about 7 and showed very little sign of improvement. It is strange as she is still so happy in herself when she is awake, but the stream of nappies had not slowed and she still showed little interest in feeding. It is crazy as she can spend literally an hour sucking on the bottle and you would swear she was feeding but when you check the bottle she has actually only taken about half an ounce. It is like the bottles that came with baby dolls when I was little, where you tipped the bottle and the milk disappeared but then when you put it upright again all the milk came back.

Yesterday, not knowing how fit I was going to be, F_ has arranged with his boss to take today as holiday to help out with the childcare. At 8am I spent 10 minutes pressing the redial button on the phone trying to get hold of the doctors surgery to try and get an appointment for Olivia. We were told to come along at 10 and they would fit us in in between sessions.

The doctor was very kind and understanding. He looked Olivia over and reassured us that she was not showing signs of dehydration and had not suffered any real harm. He asked us if she had lost any weight. Luckily I had decided to weight Olivia that morning to check the situation myself and she had lost 4oz since Monday. He did agreed that we needed to nip the situation in the bud as by now she had been ill since Saturday.

These were difficult words to hear as her Mummy, but we were told to 'starve' her for 24 hours. We were to stop giving her milk and instead give her a powdered electrolyte solution, which should allow her digestive system to recover and reset itself. Babies can apparently manage quite well for days without being fed as long as they get the essential fluid and salts etc. He asked us what flavour she would prefer, Blackcurrent or Citrus... Now bearing in mind that she is 3 months old and has only ever tasted breastmilk, formula, Calpol and Infacol, I'm not sure that she had a strong opinion either way! We opted for Blackcurrent. We have to give her 1 to 1.5 times the volume of her normal feeds in the clear drink.

Although she screamed at first, probably because it was something new and she didn't know what was going on, she soon got used to the new drink. I'm not sure if she finds the new drink easier to take because of the thinner consistency meaning she doesn't have to suck hard to get it out of the bottle, or if her appetite had returned, but Olivia has been draining 7oz bottles of the electrolyte solution pretty quickly. She has had 28oz of the solution today on top of 7oz on milk we got down her before we went to the doctor. We have to continue this tomorrow morning and then hopefully she can return to milk.

Presumably due to the volume of fluid in her tummy, the drink satusfies her for a short while and then she cried for food. It is truly heartbraking to see her poor little face crying and wondering why mean old Mummy won't give bubba her milk. I just keep focusing on the fact that we are trying to help her and that her bottom will thank us for this in the long time. The doctor had warned us that we had to stick with it and not cave in and give her milk this evening and that it would be pretty hard going 'starving' her.

He wasn't wrong. It is starting to be a bit of a theme through these posts, but hopefully tomorrow will be better.

Maybe You're Just Too Upset Inside...

So, when I went to clinic with my friend E_ and her baby I_ it turned out that we were leading parallel lives. I_ had been poorly since Friday and had sickness and diarrhoea all weekend. E_'s hubbie had also come home sick that lunchtime. I began to suspect that I was paying even more for my afternoon of decadence on Friday because I think Olivia caught a sickness from I_ or one oft he other babies, as at least one other had been poorly the previous week.

By Tuesday morning Olivia still wasn't feeding and after her first bottle of the day it was a struggle to her her to eat more than 2oz before she fell asleep. We thought that surely the constant stream of dirty nappies had to end at some point as what was coming out seemed to be exceeding what was going in. We thought wrong. You would not believe how much poop could come out of such a small person in a 24 hour period. I'm glad that we are an environmentally friendly family because otherwise Olivia would have to have her own personal landfill full of poopy nappies.

F_'s Mum and Dad phoned to say that they had both spent the morning vomiting, so we had truly spent the weekend spreading the love far and wide in our family - oops. F_ was very worried as he had visited his elderly Nana and feared that he may have given her an illness that she wouldn't be strong enough to deal with, but luckily she has not gone down with anything.

F_ was still off sick and I spent the morning boasting that it was a good job that one of us was hardy cause if I got ill who would look after the baby? Immortal last words as several hours later I was running a fever of 101 and felt pretty rubbish, although with me it was a headache and aching joints but no gastrointestinal problems, thankfully.

Feeding Olivia became a constant job. It was like going back in time to when she was a newborn and we spent all day cup feeding her. As she wouldn't take a full feed and we wanted to get as much into her as possible we tried feeding her small amounts more regularly. This effectively meant that we would start a feed, the feed would take an hour, during which she would consume about 2 ounces, and then an hour later it would all start again. She still only took about half of her daily formula load.

We both agreed that if the situation showed no sign of improvement by the next morning we would take her to the doctor.