My darling baby girl is five months old, and I have decided that she will not perish if I feed her formula.
After much arduous back-and-forthing about the guilt, the routine, the difficulty in juggling tiny amounts of milk, the advantage of this over that and blah blah blah and kvetching to everyone I know, I'm finally weaning Nora off of breast milk. Veeeeerrrrrry sloooooowwwwly. As of this writing her diet is still mostly breast milk – I would say 56% if I had to assign a number to it – and the rest is the most easily-tolerated formula with the best probiotics and omegas and junk in it that I could find. She doesn't seem to care. Also, a decent part of her diet is now solid food: rice cereal, banana, squash, avocado, pear, apple, sweet potato and carrot have gone down the chute so far. I jumped the gun a month ago when the public health nurse said "you could start her on purees at 5 months" I took it to mean "start NOW!" so she's been practicing the spoon for a few weeks now. No harm no foul. My doctor said I can experiment and even jump to chicken and other meats if I want, and I do, because feeding her is a lot of fun. I can't wait to share the world of food with Nora.
When I started with our breast milk routine, I diligently pumped 8 times a day under the advice of a lactation consultant and the constant gnawing fear that my milk supply wouldn't come up. Around October I allowed myself to drop one pumping session, usually late at night, so I went to 7 times a day. That fell to 6 in November and before Christmas I was doing it 5 times a day. Now I have bumped down to three, partially for my own comfort. I continued to take Domperidone, not because I believed I had to keep my supply up, but mostly because I paid for the bottle and I will damn well get my money's worth. Today I took my last pill. Three times a day is pretty do-able – I pump in the morning with my coffee while Nora is playing in her crib, around 4 or 5 in the afternoon, and then before bed at 11 p.m. or so. That one's the kicker, because I am spoiled now and I just want to hit the sack. Nora has been sleeping through the night (fingers crossed) so when I crash at 11:45, I'm down until 6:30.
Nora grows a bit slowly. Nothing that I do seems to change this fact. She gains weight equally slowly on breast milk as on formula, though I have to say that since upping the formula amounts, I believe she has started to visibly fill out a bit and her cheeks are much rosier. Her development is not affected by this slow growth in any way, and I actually attribute the snail's pace to the fact that she is, as Dr. Spock describes it, "a wiry, energetic baby." She never. Stops. Moving. When you hold her on your lap she needs to be standing, or wriggles her body around to face whatever noise or action is going on in the house at the time. If I lay her flat on the floor, she can very quickly rotate herself around like a clock or flip over. She grabs everything in sight, including my hair, which she will take hold of and use it to pull my face towards hers, manically going after my nose with her mouth (I call them baby attacks). Her feet are going, her mouth is going, her hands are scratching at everything within reach, and she's chatty to boot. She is a little dickens already, at five months, but little she is – she is not yet as heavy as my cat, who well exceeds Nora's 14 lbs. - though she is tall for a baby, at 26 inches.
I worry about this a lot. The public health nurse who gave her her last shots told me that a baby her age should be drinking between 30 and 32 ounces a day, but I literally can't pour any more than 28 down her throat without resorting to a feeding tube, which I feel is a bit extreme. She's got chubby cheeks and a perfect little body, and she's sharp as a tack, and if I moved around as much as she does I would weigh a lot less as well. Quebec's CLSC system is pretty handy and relatively efficient but they really have to stop measuring all babies according to one standard. I have learned that babies are as different as the adults they become.
So I have decided that since she is a super-healthy baby with no medical issues as yet, she will be as healthy on formula as on breast milk, and perhaps might even pack on a bit more weight so as to shut up the public health nurses. I will not renew my prescription for Domperidone. I will wash my pump parts and sterilize everything and carefully pack them all away into my cute/handy black tote bag, and store them in the basement in case I have another kid or someone else close to me is crazy enough to use it. I will put away my femmebot bra (the black one with the holes cut into it for the pump horns), my copy of "Making More Milk" that I never really read, the extremely optimistic breast milk freezer storage bags I bought the day my doctor first prescribed Domperidone and never once used, and I will once again start wearing nice bras. Ones without clips on them. I will expand my wardrobe to include shirts with difficult buttons, put this whole weird and wacky chapter behind me and not look back. I never want to live with that sickening Medela yellow again.
I have all new equipment now – a can of formula, a thermos of pre-boiled water with a cute "Nora" sticker on it, ice cube trays full of fruit and veggie purees, a box of rice cereal, some tiny wacky Japanese bowls I bought in San Francisco when Nora was the size of a grain of rice, and some delicate little spoons that were used to feed me 35 years ago. Tonight Nora sat in a high chair beside me at dinner, and ate some of my carrots all mashed up. She loved it, and so did I.
Onwards!
