Weigh In

Well, we brought Hallie into the ped's tonight to check her weight and to make sure that she was doing ok, ear-infection-wise, even though she has a bit of a cold. Her ears look fine and the tubes appear to be working. And Hallie's new "diet" seems to be working. After a really bad last week of October, things really went relatively smoothly last week. That does not mean we had a single barf-free day (we didn't, alas), but Hallie seems happier, has been a whole lot less gassy and retchy, and is even weathering the cold that she's been nursing since last Wednesday/Thursday pretty well. Much less stridor and mucous this time around. And so, the answer is: yes, Hallie can (and did) gain weight on the goat-milk formula diet. She now weighs a whopping 21 lbs. 9.5 ounces (or ten ounces, depending on which scale you trust), which is the 50th percentile for her adjusted age and around 15th for her actual. This is pretty fabulous. The last time she was weighed, on Hallowe'en Day, she was 21 lbs. 4.5 ounces and had not grown since her last appointment several weeks earlier and and we know that she dropped weight thereafter because she was eating nothing and vomiting everything.

We are also excited because Hallie probably drank at least 5 ounces of her goat milk formula totally awake (a couple of ounces of the bottle, and a few more out of the honey bear). She loves the taste of this stuff. I go on and on about this so much that you'd think I was employed by the goat dairy lobby (I am not, but would be happy to accept an offer if they made me one; I do believe in their product). Anyway, I'm just relieved that the kid is not pushing away her bottle anymore and that she's still growing.

We're not sure how Hallie manages it on under 900 calories a day (our estimate of her intake), but she does. She'll hate her metabolism later on in life, but right now, we're grateful for it. We know that Hallie is an outlier in this respect and we wish that she could pass on her energy conservation strategies to all of her micropreemie pals.