It's All About the Flow

Why did no one tell me this 3 years ago?

At age 4 months, Laylee suddenly quit taking a bottle. Period. End of story.

Magoo at age 3 months. Same story. In fact, I wrote about this cold-turkey experience in my second blog post.

I love nursing but it is so frustrating to feel like you can never go anywhere for more than 2 hours because your child is completely dependant on your appendages for their nourishment.

Now Magoo has 4 small, sharp, pointy, jagged, fangoreous, razor-sharp, pincer-grasping (did I mention sharp?) teeth. He's chewing the heck out of me right now and I'm in a ton of pain. It hurts way worse now than when I started nursing him.

I wanted to go a full year, but yesterday I was right on the edge of giving it up. The problem, folks, is that he will not take liquid by any other means, besides my tattered and extremely painful breasts. I felt that if I "weaned him," he would shrivel up like a raisin and die.

All of a sudden I got this thought, "Hey, maybe he doesn't like the bottle because the letdown from the breast is so much faster. Maybe I could punch a bigger hole in the nipple." So I did. He drank it. I've been pumping and bottle-feeding since yesterday afternoon with great success and I'm starting to heal.

Maybe I'm the only dumb kid on this slow bus, but it didn't occur to me until yesterday that they sell nipples with different flow rates for an actual reason and that my kids might be "out-growing" their flow level.

So I thought I'd make a public service announcement.

When the lactation consultant says, "Have you tried all the different bottles and nipples?" she also means, "Have you tried all the different flow rates of each individual nipple? Do this and you may be able to get out once every few months or so."