Dear Friends,
  How does measuring the plain intake diagnose oversupply? Do we know for sure which amount within a feeding is *too* much, for this baby at this moment to digest? The same with low intake: who is going to decide what and how much is ''not enough'' for a given baby at a given time.
  My biggest concern is not the way ''my'' mothers or other mothers produce milk or not or how much or how much baby is getting in. My concern is how important it seems to be to ''exactly'' know the grams or mililiters of milk a baby is consuming. Does it really make a difference to know if a baby took in 40 or 44 grams of milk? And does it really matter if we 1:1 convert that to 40 or 44 mililiters? And that, in making all these numbers so very important, it can be so easy to not see the baby, the person him/herself. 
   
  In this whole discussion I more and more conclude that it's not about ''to weigh or not to weigh'', but about how we see our profession. 
   
  Warmly greeting,
   
  Gonneke, IBCLC, LLLL, MOM, grandma2B in southern Netherlands
  
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So, I'm actually thinking that Gonneke's concern is probably due to the fact that she may see a 
clientele more like my own because we may be dealing with a higher proportion of mothers who 
get out of sync with scheduling feedings, overpumping, and other iatrogenically induced ways of 
creating an oversupply. I'm not talking about the normal variation in supply where one mother is 
copious and another mother must put the baby to the breast very frequently to maintain growth, 
but the mothers that get themselves into the state where they are packing it into the freezer.

Again, I will state that in the case of oversupply, any observation of intake, be it listening for 
swallowing with or without a stethescope; watching the pattern of the jaw dropping, ears moving, 
bullfrog throat, or the feel of the baby pulling at the breast, or using the scale will be subject to 
the same variation. 

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