Babies who are born before 34 weeks of gestation are too young to know how to coordinate swallowing and breathing. Bubble Baby loves to suck on her pacifier, but if we'd tried to feed her like a full-term baby, she would likely have inhaled some of her milk, sucking dangerous fluid into her lungs. So initially she received all her nutrition through an IV, then breast milk in small increments until she was getting enough to go off the IV support last week.
On Friday I had an appointment with the NICU lactation consultant to begin what's called non-nutritive feeding. How it works: after I express milk for Bubble Baby, I hold her while she gets milks through her nasal feeding tube and try to have her pretend to nurse. The first time she slept through it, but the second time she did great. I felt almost euphoric the rest of the day. We'll keep trying to get her to do it once a day and hope that as she continues to gain weight she'll build enough stamina to switch to feeding on her own without the feeding tube. The concern as she learns to feed on her own is to make sure she doesn't use more energy to feed than she's consuming in milk calories. In the past couple of days she's done fairly well, but gets tired within about 10 minutes, so then I just cuddle her while she feeds through the tube and eventually falls asleep. I'll be so glad when we can finally have her home with us to hold like that for more than once or twice a day.
