Well, it happened.
We went five days without anyone catching Anna's flu, but last night Michael threw up. So it takes five days to catch this one. Yuck. Something nobody tells you about big families: when you get something like this, it can take a LONG time for it to go through everyone. I'm sure some folks think we're pretty antisocial, but this is how it goes - one of us gets sick and it can take a very long time for everyone to get better. Our solution is usually to stay home from November to March when we have a new baby, and it looks like Jonathan is going to be under even stricter quarantine because no-one's going to want to come over for a while either!
Life around here is going pretty smoothly otherwise. Jonathan nurses a little bit longer every day - it's the same process we had to use to teach him the bottle. When we were bottle feeding we would feed him until he gave up and then we had to put the tube down his throat and feed him the rest. It took about a week before he could eat consistantly from the bottle. Now, Mom nurses him as long as she can - usually about three to six minutes, sometimes on both sides but sometimes only a few minutes on one side - and then she pumps her milk and feeds the rest to him by bottle. He gets very worn out trying to nurse and I think he gets frustrated too. He'll just lay there with his mouth full and refuse to suck or swallow and then he goes to sleep. It's like he goes to sleep on purpose, too, because the minute he gets the bottle in his mouth he wakes up and eats like he hasn't had a good meal for three years.
The good news is that he is nursing better every day...it's just taking way longer than anyone would like. It's usually the kiss of death for nursing moms to give their babies a bottle, because once the baby finds out how easy the bottle is they don't like to go back to doing the work of nursing and they're so stubborn about it that the mom gives up because she's afraid the baby will lose weight. I've heard of this happening more times than I like to count, and I'm sure if Jonathan were Mom's first baby she wouldn't even be trying anymore. The fact that Jonathan will learn to nurse is proof both of Mom's experience and her persistance. Jonathan would definitely like to give up at this point! He doesn't see the big picture: all he knows is that he can eat easily one way and the other way is lots of work.
His neck and body are getting stronger and fatter, though. In four days, he'd already filled out his caterpillar sleeper enough that his feet weren't always getting tangled up in the legs of the outfit anymore. When you put him up on your shoulder he holds his head up to look around. He is also very definite on his desire to be held. When he's awake he'll sit for a little while in his chair, but then he starts squirming and grumbling. Not crying - he won't cry much unless he's hungry, and even then he doesn't keep up the prolonged crying but gives a few cries and waits to see if anyone noticed. As soon as someone picks him up, he gets quiet and just looks all around. Dad says we need to hold him as much as possible because he needs to be held to keep getting stronger.
We all find it very difficult to fulfill this requirement, of course. He's just like a warm little bean bag and you pick him up and put him over your shoulder and he'd be happy to cuddle all day, provided he gets fed regularly. He is starting to get particular about who holds him, though. He has a few top favorites, and Mom has rapidly gone to the top of that list. Where she belongs, of course. Sometimes even when someone else is holding him he fusses until Mom picks him up.
And he's also made the connection between the sound of the pump and the fact that it's time to eat. When he fusses because he's hungry, the minute the pump goes on he shuts up and starts looking around for it. He'll twist his whole body until he sees Mom and then he'll just lay and look at her pleadingly. Well. It probably isn't pleadingly, but he watches pretty intently. Mom pumps for a minute before she nurses him so that he doesn't give up on the sucking before he gets some milk, so the first part of the feeding ritual is always the swish-swish sound of the pump. Being a smart little cookie, Jonathan knows this quite well.
He sleeps all night and is awake a lot in the day still, which is good. Mom keeps waking him up at night to feed him because she says it isn't good for a baby to go twelve hours without eating.
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