Clarification

OH! What great advice I got. I want to thank each and every person who commented and/or emailed me after that last pathetic post. And I have and will try many of the things you suggested, I promise.

BUT.

I want to clarify what I wrote because, dude, what I wrote was far from clear!

The issue is not so much that Matthew cries allatime for no reason. Oh no. His reason for crying is very very simple.

He does not want to take his naps. Unless he is allowed to take them in my arms or in the Snugli. Period. He will sleep, once we get him to sleep, which I will discuss in a minute, in his crib overnight, and he's still doing pretty well at that. But once the sun is up, that boy cries his head off when I put him in there, no matter WHAT state he's in when I put him in. Awake, asleep, half awake, half asleep... doesn't matter... the minute I lower his little self into that bed, he commences to wailing. For a very very long time. Napping in the crib, unless I am willing to let him cry for 45 minutes or more, is a NO GO.

Now, the putting-him-to-bed thing. Here's the issue. Peabody likes his belly plenty full when he goes to bed for the night. Trouble is, he also likes to eat many, many times leading up to bedtime - he's a cluster-feeder starting around 4:30 or so. So by bedtime, he can eat and there are milkies there, but he is tired and The Girls are not chock full and he is displeased with that situation. He fusses and fights and fumes and WILL drift off to sleep and allow himself to be placed into his bed, but then, 5 or 10 minutes later he's up crying and screaming and mad.

So we've been giving him a couple of ounces of expressed milk from a bottle, which for some reason, does the trick, puts him out like a light, and he's happy.

Trouble is, the way the days are going, I have a baby strapped to my front all day and zero free time or really opportunity between live feedings to actually pump any milk anymore. He seems satisfied with what he gets from me during the day at each feeding, but JUST satisfied. And two hours later he eats again.

Now maybe, MAYBE this no napping, eating every two hours thing is STILL the 6 week growth spurty thing, but if so, that means he's been growth spurting for TWO FULL WEEKS as of tomorrow. That's a long time, and I haven't read or heard a thing about a spurt lasting longer than a week. So.

But the issue is, well, after tomorrow, if I don't find time to pump at some point, we will have gone through our supply of expressed milkies.

AND even more importantly, is this little "supplement" at the end of every day (would it still be a supplement if I pumped it out at some other point during the day?) somehow going to mess up or at least not properly adjust my supply?

To be honest, after all of this baby-wearing feed-on-demanding I EXPECTED my supply to be noticeably more plentiful, but it doesn't seem to be at all. Maybe it's because at the exact same time as that growth spurt my body finally adjusted itself, but lately I do leak less, feel less full, and then there's those feeds that never seem to want to space themselves out even a little bit more over time. Also the night feeds are staying exactly as they were, or are maybe slightly closer together, too.

All of this is rattling my confidence.

And the baby-not-sleeping thing too.

And I feel whiny. And tired.

This is all SO EXACTLY BEAN. She did all of these things. And we ended up letting her cry (which I so do not believe in for a baby this age!) and giving her formula. And all that made life so much easier for everyone. She slept, we slept, she was happy, we were happy. (Well, I wasn't all that happy about the crying and the formula, of course.)

I WANT this to get better without employing either of those methods. I wonder, though, if it will.