Foooooood

[ailbhe]

Here I am breastfeeding a newborn again.

FEED ME.

I am barely functional and hugely short-tempered, most days, and it's entirely due to inadequate food intake. I can't do anything needing two hands because if I put Astrid in a sling she spits up on me, but she also doesn't want to be laid flat on her back because that makes her spit up too. We need to buy a reclining bouncy chair device. I'm sure we used to have one but Rob can't find it in the attic and we may have given it away.

For brief periods (long enough to put something oven-ready in or out of the oven) her sisters can prop her up, so oven-ready things are fine. But even cutting a bagel in half can be a problem, unless she's asleep.

I really need to figure something out. We need oven-ready dinners for evenings, which are easy enough, but we also need something ready to eat lunchwise. We tried reversing it, but it takes Rob just as long to get a bunch of sandwiches ready in the evening (when I'm feeding the baby more or less constantly) as it does to get a basic cooked dinner. And that makes the evening meal too late.

Weekends spent cooking things up are the answer for the evening meal... but what about snacks and lunchtime?

I bet by the time I have this figured out she'll have stopped eating so much. Two days now, maybe three, she's eaten almost constantly from noon to 7pm, sometimes eating in her sleep. As I said earlier, if she doesn't weigh 13lb by Monday I'll send her back.

Comments

[sidheag.livejournal.com]

I'm not quite getting it. In what way is your food intake inadequate? I first read this as a "I just can't get enough calories" post, but read that way it TBH just doesn't make sense. If calories were your only consideration, it's not clear why you'd need to cut a bagel in half, and not clear why one of the older girls couldn't bring you a bagel on demand. Sounds as though there's something more interesting going on here. Is it that you feel you need more protein, rather than more calories, i.e. the bagel is only useful once you've cut it in half and put something inside? Or is it more about appetite, e.g. that you could grab a plain bagel and gnaw it but the idea just doesn't appeal, maybe because you want to feel that you or someone have enough time to take care of you that you get "proper meals"? Or what? I think the right thing to do might depend on what the real issue is, and that's not quite clear, to me at any rate.

[ailbhe]

Uh, if it were just calories, I could just eat icing sugar straight from the packet. That really *would* be inadequate food intake, though definitely easy.

Anyway, the issue with a whole bagel is that chewing a whole unmoistened bagel would be more work than it's worth - it would make me tired of eating long before I'd managed to eat enough fast-burn white processed flour to even slightly fill me up. I suppose I could dip it in water, but the idea doesn't appeal.

Edit: Just realised you said "inside" the bagel. I tend not to eat bagels cut in half and re-assembled because they are too big to put in my mouth comfortably. Which is why biting into an unsliced one is not fun.