One month old already, and what a month it’s been! I’m not going to lie, this month has been really hard, but I’ve already written about that here.

There have been some lovely moments this month too like seeing Toby giving his brother a kiss on the head is adorable, and he often does it without any prompting. Toby has also learnt to say ‘Gabe’ now too and when he sees him in the morning or after nursery he says ‘hello Gabe’ – too cute! And although they have been a bit few and far between, those newborn snuggles are very sweet too.

Gabe is mostly still just feeding and sleeping (although mostly feeding!). We are still breastfeeding, but have introduced a bottle of formula at about 7pm so Barry can give him that while I put Toby in bed. We might have to give another bottle of formula during the day too as although Gabe is gaining weight it’s not quite as much as we would like. He was 7lb 3oz yesterday which is only 6oz more than when he was born and he has dropped from between the 9th and 25th centiles down to the 2nd. Considering the amount he is feeding he should really be putting on a bit more weight. I really do want to carry on with the breastfeeding but if he needs formula then I’m not going to beat myself up about it. I went to see a lactation consultant yesterday and she was great. She checked Gabe for any issues and basically said it seems like I’m producing quite a lot of milk but because Gabe isn’t that good at getting the milk from me yet that’s why he’s always wanting to feed and isn’t gaining that much weight. She gave me some things to try to see if we can improve matters and hopefully as Gabe gets bigger he’ll get better at feeding too.

We still think Gabe has silent reflux as well – he’s now on ranitidine (which is the same medicine Toby has) but it’s difficult to know if it’s really making any difference. We found he was starting to bring up most of the feed when we used normal formula so have now switched to anti-reflux formula which is much better.

So there have been a few issues to contend with, and probably one of the hardest months of my life, but Gabe is starting to be awake and alert a bit more now and I know it won’t be too long before he will start interacting more too. It makes the difficult bits a lot easier to deal with when you at least get a smile for your troubles!