She slept till 6am.
Today, I produced enough milk to get her through the day with no add-ons from the rapidly diminishing frozen store, or formula. This does not necessarily mean the worst is over, but I can't help but hope. It's a careful juggling act of the extra expressed in between meals and the stuff in my breasts at the time.
Tonight, two days after I'd run out of Fennel tea, Nora screamed for an hour and a half after she'd finished her feed even though she was mind numbingly exhausted after refusing to have a mid afternoon kip. So tired, and in so much gut pain, she completely forgot how to latch on to her bottle for a while. Nora is not the world's greatest latcher, as we know, and she often sits gumming her bottle for a good couple of minutes until she manages to get the angle right. Earlier on, sitting in the near-dark, she was screaming with pain and in danger of choking herself on the teat, slamming her head back and forth in frustration and misery. I managed to swaddle her up eventually. A loathed procedure but one which manages to knock her out in minutes. Her stomach meanwhile continued to roll and rattle, reeling up a storm inside her sensitive guts.
Downstairs in the kitchen trying to shovel my dinner in to my mouth as quickly as possible, Mackay upstairs taking over the "soothing Nora" activity momentarily, I started to express the leftovers from her last meal and witnessed the extraordinary pumping the female body can do when a baby (as in, my own baby) is crying. Moments after apparently emptying one, lo and behold it yields another near-ounce only minutes later. And an ounce, in my position is somewhat akin to a gold bar in terms of value.
I love her with such weight, looking at her small confused face, contorted with pain and tiredness, my helplessness and intense guilt at not drinking enough herbal tea (look, I have to have guilt. It's clutching at straws I know) was as nothing compared to the intense wash of concern and care as I held her close to me. My darling love. I can't explain anything to her, all I can do is hold her through the bad stuff.
She's been having a really good week apart from this, too. All gurgly and happy for a large amount of the time. She says "Meur" and "hyeeeee" then does a sort of solitary hick, whilst kicking her legs and touching my lips with her teeny toes. I swear to God she has the longest legs I've ever seen. They seem entirely disproportionate to the rest of her. I predict a future as a tights model.
And Geoff Hoon should have resigned today, the spineless cunt.
