Flanagan Clan

I took Liam to the doctor on Monday for his first visit. Our pediatrician took a good look at him and then afterwards he had a state-required blood test taken. He was 6 lb, 14 oz and 21 inches long at the Monday appointment, and the doctor said he looked great. We won’t have to go back again until Liam is a month old. On Tuesday I took him to see a lactation consultant because things seemed a little off. Well, I’m not sure it’s every day that you stump an LC and a pediatrician, but Liam did. Apparently he has an extra flap of mucus membrane under his tongue which prevents him from sticking his tongue out very far- the LC said it was probably in the same family but not exactly similar to being tongue tied. She said in her 30 years of doing this she had heard of this, but had never seen it. She ended up calling in one of the pediatricians from the practice to take a look, and he had never seen it either. So… she ended up taking pictures of it, which she wanted to send to some LC’s at children’s hospitals in Tacoma and Seattle who specialize in this sort of stuff.  Hopefully they will come back with some advice on how we should handle his mouth situation. The unusual flap shouldn’t effect him negatively other than if I want to continue to nurse, so I’m not sure what we’ll do and at what point it would make more sense to switch him to a bottle. We’re just waiting to see what the experts advise. For tongue tied babies, they actually clip something under their tongue, which sounds painful, and I would hope that they wouldn’t want us to do something like that for Liam. Anyways, it would figure that Liam would find a way to be unusual and stump the doctors. The good news, though, was that between his appointment on Monday and his visit to the LC on Tuesday, he had gained weight! He weighed about 7 lb, 1 oz at the LC… so he’s definitely growing and he hasn’t had a bottle once despite his unusual mouth formation :-P.