Day 44, Monday, December 27

Speech came again today (Angela hadn’t seen him since last Wednesday.) and decided Tate was ready to move up to medium flow nipple instead of the slow flow. I was telling her about the problem I have been having when I feel like he’s doing good but then he hasn’t drank anything so she checked and said he was collapsing the nipple, which is why he wasn’t getting anything out. She compared it to when we drink a thick milkshake and have to suck really hard on the straw. I mentioned I was the only one having that problem though and she said that could mean I was giving him better cheek/chin support than the others. Hence he was sucking better and harder for me than the others and that’s why he was collapsing the nipple. I’ll go with that because it makes me look better!


Speech let me start feeding him but then we switched to the medium flow nipple right away. I started giving it to him but he choked so she took him and did the rest of his feeding. That was okay by me cause it freaks me out when he chokes. I was already nervous just feeding him and then really nervous when she switched to medium flow. He took the whole bottle for her with no problems and didn’t even stop to burp.

I was really nervous to do his 3 pm feeding but we did it. He choked at the beginning but after that he gobbled it up in less than 10 minutes. The nurse said to make sure to only fill bottle ¼ full at beginning because if he’s really hungry he’ll start sucking really hard and fast and then the milk overwhelms him. This was the first feeding that I felt like I did really well with. The others I haven’t felt as good about but this one I felt like Tate and I worked well together.

I tried to nurse/kangaroo him after his 3 o’clock feeding but all he wanted to do was suck. I didn’t want to wear him out too much so I tried to make him stop but he just kept rooting. His leads for his monitors were loose too so they kept going off so I finally decided to lay him back down. I got his leads back on and him all swaddled and he still wanted to suck! Gave him his paci and he was still awake when I left at 5:15. Those are all good signs that it’s all starting to click with him.