Our little muffin is two weeks old today! And he’s regained his birth weight, and then some!

I’ve found one of the toughest things about breastfeeding to be the self-doubt and worry about whether the baby is getting enough to eat. I got so paranoid about it that we ended up buying a baby scale and doing weigh-ins a couple times a day. (Let no one claim that I am not completely neurotic.) Despite the fact that our very cool pediatrician was happy with Griffin’s progress at his checkups, I kept up the daily tracking to be sure things were going well.

It’s normal for newborns to lose up to 10% of their birth weight in the first few days of life, but ideally they should be back to their birth weight within 2 weeks. Griffin was born at 9lb9oz and was down to a 9lb2oz discharge weight when we left the hospital. (This led one of the oh so helpful nurses to tell me I should consider supplementing with formula because he’s “such a big baby”, but that’s a rant for another time.) He lost even more once we got home (I think the low we measured was 8lb13oz). Breastfed babies can take a little longer to gain because they have to wait for mom’s milk to come in, but once they start gaining, a rate of 5-7oz a week is considered normal. As of this morning, Griffin was at 9lb10.5oz. WOOHOO!

The last two weeks have been really really hard, but I feel pretty great about getting through the cluster feedings and the sleepless nights if this was the end result.

Another thing that’s been weighing on me and Jag is our sick kitty Miranda, who took a decided turn for the worse shortly before Griffin was born. We (mostly Jag) have been spending around an hour and a half each day trying to get her to eat. When you have a newborn in the house, this is not an insignificant amount of time! Jag dragged himself out of bed at 7am after a pretty fussy night on Griffin’s part to take Miranda to the vet for some scheduled oral surgery. Let’s hope she’s feeling a whole lot better by this afternoon.