I remember being at the hospital helping a mother whose baby had been ill but was now recovering. Staff felt very strongly about doing pre- and post- feeds test weighings. The difficulty was that this mother (like many of the mothers I know!) believed in nurturing her baby at the breast, and we could never really figure out when a feeding began and ended, because the baby - like many babies I know - nursed on and off much of the time. She'd nurse on one breast for a few minutes, then take a break for maybe 5 minutes, go back to that breast, take another break (maybe dozing off for 10 minutes), nurse on on the second breast for a few minutes, fuss a little until mom picks her up and burps her and then she goes back to the second breast, nurses a few more minutes, fills her diaper, mom changes it and then she takes the first breast again... and so on. The staff were constantly frustrated because the could not figure out when was "before" and when was "after" as the baby came to the breast quite frequently around the clock. I think one of the hazards of the test weighing idea is that it suggests babies SHOULD breastfeed in discrete "feedings" (ideally separated by several hours, I suppose). In fact, observations of tribal societies and of babies when they are permitted free access to their mothers' breasts, suggest that the natural tendency is for babies to eat this way - coming to the breast very frequently. I did also work with one mother who had the resources to buy herself a scale and who weighed her baby before and after every feeding. While I would not have recommended this, it was interesting for me to see how much the feedings varied - the baby would take a large amount at one feeding and a much smaller amount at another. Same mother, same breasts, same baby. It made me wonder how useful a single test weighing would actually be, especially if the person interpreted this as being representative of all the baby's feeds. Just some thoughts about this issue - who knew scales would be so controversial? Teresa Pitman *********************************************** To temporarily stop your subscription: set lactnet nomail To start it again: set lactnet mail (or digest) To unsubscribe: unsubscribe lactnet All commands go to [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(R) mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html