Bottle-feeding blues

I fed Savannah tonight. I went up at like 10:30pm and she was wide awake. When I walked in, the nurse had her sitting on her lap, and she was playing with her arms, because I guess preemies lose muscle mass in their arms frequently. Anyway, Savannah was looking around, and looked right at me when I came in. It was so cute. I scrambled for my camera but the nurse told me to put a gown on so I could feed her her bottle.

I don't think I did it right. I couldn't seem to get the nipple into her mouth, which is something that I get the feeling is a rookie mistake. Several times I had to ask the nurse for help, and she came over and squeezed Savannah's pudgy cheeks, like the bad guys did to that fat kid in the Goonies, (does anybody know what I'm talking about?) and I sneakily stuck the bottle in. She was going strong for the first 10 minutes, but seemed to poop out (literally and figuratively) on me during the last 30 ml's of the bottle. I think I ended up getting 4o-something ml's of the 63 ml bottle into her. So, a good first try on my part. Then I burped her, and she is getting so big that it is more easy to manuever her around when you want to move her. She let out several burps that I could only compare to ones I've heard from large truckers. Then she looked at me as if to say, "is this all you've got?". So I held her and sang to her until 12:30. I wasn't sure what to do with her when she is awake like that. Do I talk to her? Sing to her? Cuddle her? wiggle her arms and legs? Not sure, so I did all of the above. I'm not really sure what I was supposed to have been doing. Oh well.

When she was finally peaceful and asleep, I laid her gently in her crib, at which point the nurse came over, woke her up, and stuck a foot-long piece of tube down her throat, gagging her. How nice. Life is rough when you can't feed from the bottle.