I second Pat Young (in Southern NJ)'s comments about what we think is
"normal" what may not be at all normal.

While in Illinois, I often saw mothers and babies who gave birth at home
with a particular midwife group within 24 hours of the baby's birth.  (and
later, as well)  Most of those babies simply stayed at birthweight for 3-4
days and then began gaining!  NO WEIGHT LOSS!

Those who did go down, came nowhere close to 10% loss; they too also
started gaining within the first week.

Until we start seeing mothers and babies who are NOT MEDICATED and who are
NOT SEPARATED AT ALL and who are totally comfortable with their caregivers
and have the same ones for their entire hospitalization (or--better
yet--stay home and give birth), we will probably never really know what is
a common (and therefore to be expected) weight gain/loss pattern.

By the way, for what it is worth, one of my current soapbox items when
doing conferences is making a distinction between what is "common" (occurs
very frequently) and what is "normal".

They are not necessarily the same!  Each of you wonderful people can, I am
sure, come up with examples of common occurrences that are not necessarily
normal, but which may come to be thought of as normal because of their
frequency of occurrence.  (Hint:  think how breastfeeding was managed in
hospitals in the 50-60-70s during the era of nearly exclusive
bottle-feeding in many western hospitals)

Whew--oxygen depletion occurring from height of soap box.  Gotta get down!!  :-)

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Kathleen G. Auerbach,PhD, IBCLC (Ferndale, WA USA) [log in to unmask]
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