We May Have Been Slightly Starving Our Child

Countless baby guides for new and clueless parents insist that in order to have a happy, healthy, thriving child you need to watch for "cues". This is just a fancy way of saying your rug-rat will tell you when it's tired, hungry, dirty, or just plain bored. Since words aren't an option yet, for most babies, the cue(s) consists of crying about all of the above.

Now there are those who profess that they can tell the difference between the different kinds of cries their offspring produces. To that I say, they're either much, much better parents than I or (more likely, I'd like to think) they're lying liars who lie. Because whether Otter cries in hunger, tiredness or anything else, it sounds suspiciously like, well, crying.

That's assuming she cries at all. SB will often communicate her needs with a defiant lack of anything identifiable. So the hand sucking can mean "I'm sleepy," "I'm ravenous," or, "I really like to suck my hand." So what's a mother to do? Assume. And we all know what sometimes happens when you assume..

So it went for Otter's mealtimes. Luckily, when offering boob, I didn't really have to worry how much she was consuming. It was up to her to decide when to say when. But with my return to work looming, we wanted her to embrace bottles and the tricky question of how much exactly one puts in them became paramount.

One baby book provided a formula (reminiscent of my days in calculus) for figuring out how much to put in. I did the math, got a result. Did it again, just to check, got a slightly different result. This was like calculus! Would Otter be eating 5 times a day? Six? Would she be waking up at night to feed?

Add to this the complication that Otter's "I'm full" cue is about as vague as all the other cues. Sometimes she finishes feeding with a smile. Other times, jerks her head away and cries. Because she's full? Because she's still hungry? Then why is she refusing to eat? Who knows? On top of this, I think that she just might be a little bulimic. Contrary to conventional wisdom that tells us babies won't gorge, Otter's never met a bottle she couldn't finish. While I've never tested the theory, I have reason to believe that if we were to offer her 16 oz. of liquid, she'd guzzle it down, only to puke up the "overflow".

So we came up with the magic number 5. Five ounces it would be, which seemed like a reasonable sized meal for a not-quite-13-pound human. For weeks, each time she got a bottle, she'd inhale the 5 ounces, grasping for more. But as I've said, this hardly means she's hungry. Or so I thought.

Luckily for all of us, but especially for SB, Susana, our nanny started this week. After just two feedings she told me that she thought Otter might want more. I explained my reasoning, then decided to trust Susana's experience. The next day, we placed 6 ounces in the bottle. I expected the bottle to be downed, followed by barfing and crying. But... Nothing happened. Otter burped, keeping all the food down, then smiled. And that's when it occurred to me - in my search for cues, I may have been starving our kid.