Sorry, we had unexpected visitors last weekend and were out of town this past weekend. And a child which has decided there’s no reason for to go to sleep at night before I do. All of which means no free time for me.

Thank you for the feedback. It makes me feel badly as I haven’t written a word since this was posted…

Patrick – I have to admit, when I first read your feedback, I was a bit insulted. I don’t think either my husband or I are stupid (and I think most people who know us in RL would agree), and yet much of this, as Carol mentioned, was autobiographical.

But I’ve since remembered more of those first few days and realized that my experience was quite likely very different than yours. I won’t go into details, mainly as I’m not sure how many of those will end up in the story, but I have sufficient evidence that our experience was not the norm and generally nursing goes better than this.

What I forgot to do in this story is explain that Lois and Clark have done all the reading, attended the breastfeeding classes, etc. All of which my husband and I did as well. I’m not going to say those things didn’t help – when the nurses were little help, it did bring back some of the information on the way to hold the baby and things like that. However, it didn’t fix the fundamental problem that my DD didn’t want to eat. I did a lot more reading the first few days at home (both books and internet), talked to everyone I knew who had nursed their kids, and got no where else very fast. Long before I left the hospital, we had tried every suggestion there was that we could find and nothing worked.

That’s still a couple of days away yet for Lois and Clark, and I have to admit that perhaps it seems like Lois and Clark are idiots here. But it wasn’t until right about the moment they are at now that my DH and I realized we had been doing anything wrong. The nurses at the hospital kept saying if she wouldn’t wake up, she wasn’t hungry, and aside from trying every few hours, as we were doing, there wasn’t anything else to do.

To be fair, to Evelyn’s point, my DD was very small at birth which made all of the weight lost stuff more alarming, and I decided not to saddle Larissa with that since she has her odd parentage to deal with. A lot of what I read and heard (some of this from Carol who has experience with small babies) seemed to suggest that my DD’s small size may have contributed (she did act a lot like a preemie, but she was also smaller than many but the most severe preemies), but I’m sure there are normal size babies, and even large babies who have eating issues as well.

That may or may not shed some light on what is going on. Perhaps the next chapter (whenever I write it) may help. Or maybe not. Maybe Clark and Lois will continue to seem like idiots to you.

Thanks, Carol and Evelyn!

And Evelyn – yes, Ellen knows, as does Sam and Lucy and her husband. Also Perry and Jimmy. Everyone close to them found out in the last story.

And as for Clark sleeping through Lois’ crying, she’s being very quiet and he’s exhausted. Even for a super man, it’s hard caring for a newborn, particularly now when Lois isn’t able to help that much.

I hope to get some writing done this week, but don’t expect much, so it will probably be sometime next week or so before the next time I post. Sorry!