I am stuck home with a very virulent contagious eye infection, because of which I cannot go near babies or any other humans for that matter and now that I have tons of time to read Lactnets, there are almost none.....where is everyone? First of all, I am ready to move to the hospital in Atlanta that has 24 hour lactation coverage. My hospital, 9500 births/yr has only moi and Carla's situation is more like the one I am in. As long as I am there, I manage to help as many moms as I can and the minute I am not, AIM reigns, and the next morning, I am faced with breastfeeding rehab and lots of frustration. Babies who are doing the "bottle-mouth pucker" and moms who are telling me that all their lives they have wanted to breastfeed and that they came all the way from the north of the country to deliver in this hospital because they heard about me. But she delivered on Friday and I go to the beach on Saturday, so by Sunday morning when I return, of course she has been convinced that she has no milk, nipples that are incompatible for breastfeeding, breasts that are too small, a baby who is too "tired/weak" to breastfeed, and that it is not the end of the world if her baby gets Simiyuck until the LC comes on Sunday. The AIM reps roam the dept giving lovely gifts to all the staff and warning them that if an infant dehydrates, their job could be on the line.......need I continue? You've all seen this movie!! Now the point of this letter: I have a big problem with babies who sleep and don't eat the first 24 hours. By day 3, the day that they are due to go home, they are doing one of two things....either losing too much weight which results in a panic on the part of the docs, nurses and not to mention the parents, and may even result in the mom being sent home and the baby staying one more day ( I encourage the moms to camp out on mattresses on the floor of my breastfeeding room.) This usually totally undermines the mom's confidence because someone has succeeded in convincing her that her baby is in grave danger because he has lost so much weight ( we are usually talking about an 8-10% wt loss). The other problem is that if the baby sleeps all of day 1, what does he do all day on day 2? He makes up for lost time, which is great if I get to the mom first and explain what he is doing , but this unfortunately always happens in the middle of the night and the night demons tell her that of course she has no milk. Now isn't it interesting how these babies who are marathoning on day 2 all do the same thing? They have this great feeding frenzy for 3 or 4 hours straight and then if someone pops a bottle in their mouths, they take about 5 cc's and go to sleep for a few hours. The mom is then really sure she has no milk unless I am there to explain that the baby took one taste of that disgusting stuff and decided that rather than continue to feed he would rather escape into the safety of sleep for a few hours than risk getting another taste of that!! Or I tell them that what they don't realize is that after the mom went to sleep, the baby regurgitated every drop of the offending liquid!! These two scenarios prompt me to encourage moms to wake babies with spoon-feeding a few drops of colostrum.....I call that " marketting" and it always works. After about the third spoon they are ready and willing to feed. By the way, staff were given several in-services, and immediately after there was an improvement, but the AIM lady became much more aggressive and things went back to what they were prior to that. I am workng on getting non-AIM funding for a full course for the staff, however, the AIM lady is stronger and has more money than I do and I am afraid that in the end they will let her run the course instead of me. Esther Grunis, IBCLC Lis Maternity Hospital Tel Aviv, Israel mailto:[log in to unmask] *********************************************** The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(TM) mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html