#teammikaere

On finally putting on weight!

By 9th July 2018 No Comments

Woohooo!!!!! Thank fuck – Mikaere is gaining weight again. It was scary to watch his weight fall off, the beautiful chub of his cheeks disappear, his little arms and legs get more defined. That with every vomit I knew he was losing calories, and I watched at our weekly weigh in as the numbers went down and down and down. He got to under the 20% percentile – which isn’t a huge deal. He looked healthy (everyone kept saying he he was growing up, but it was because he lost all his baby weight!) and was still alert and aware, still active. There was a reason he was vomiting (#borderlineGastroRegret) and so we were reassured by our team that it was okay.

But as a mama, it was NOT okay. There was always the fear from our dietician that if he couldn’t get his weight up a ‘nutritionally complete’ formula was in Mikaere’s future, and as someone who hates the idea of processed anything (particularly when some of the ingredients are high in glycine aaand its stored in plastic bottles – so terrible!) I went on the offensive.

The first trick was getting the vomits down – we reduced his feeds from 4 meals with three snacks to four meals period, increasing the calories and the feed time, reducing the volume. We got to three hours on/three hours off. We hadn’t been on this schedule since we were on end of life care in hospice.

We moved away from regular formula to the blended diet where I painstakingly worked out the calories of each blend, going for high calorie low volume (he eats a lot of avocado, peanut butter, coconut oil and coconut yoghurt). It’s hard work and I have spreadsheets coming out my ears but you know what? It WORKED!

Because my baby is putting on weight. There is something beautiful about all that hard work and extra effort paying off in tangible numbers. Something beautiful that is mostly epic amounts of relief.

It’s even more likely that his was putting on weight had little to do with me and more because Mikaere very gradually stopped vomiting as frequently. For every feed he kept down he gave himself a better chance of putting on weight. That’s not to say the vomits have stopped, because they haven’t. We’re still at at least a vomit a day. Sometimes too. But against the 4-5 vomits we were having? I’ll take that improvement. In fact, even yesterday he had his first vomit free day in forever, so that’s positive!

I feel like I’m on high. When he reaches the 50th percentile, I’ll reduce the calories to a more appropriate level and start adding in more nutrition. We’re not there yet but that his weight is going up? I’m pleased. So so pleased.

 

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