Somewhere around the time Callie woke up to the world, she became impatient breastfeeding. She seemed frustrated waiting for my letdown, and then she seemed to get overwhelmed with the sudden flow of milk and would cough and choke. She would pull off and look around and get fussy and want to sit up and visually explore her surroundings. Breastfeeding just stopped being a pleasant experience for both of us, so we started bottle feeding more often. Callie was calmer with the bottle and would eat for longer sessions. I could sit her up more, and turn the bottle with her when she turned her head. She is still absolutely insistent when she is done eating - she'll push the bottle away from her face and turn her head - but getting her to eat is less of a struggle, and when she tells me she's done eating, I am happy to drop the matter instead of pushing her to latch again and eat longer and having us both get more and more frustrated.
And it's probably a good thing we switched to bottle feeding rather than push breastfeeding longer. She GAINED weight percentiles between her 6 month and her 9 month check up. It makes me wonder if perhaps we'd switched to more bottle feedings earlier, she wouldn't have dropped weight percentiles so drastically. But I kept hearing that breastfeeding is best, and that breast milk has so many more nutrients and benefits than formula, so I pushed it longer than maybe I should have (cue mommy guilt). Ultimately we started just paying attention to our daughter's cues, and she told us what she needed. And if there wasn't so much noise in the background about how breast is best, and mommy shaming for introducing formula, we may have paid attention to Callie's cues a little sooner. (No one I actually know has been unsupportive. The mommy shaming is my own self-inflicted issue from reading the forum sites whenever I googled anything baby feeding related. Google just makes you feel worse!)
I noticed a drastic drop in my milk supply when I started my period again, when Callie was almost 6 months old, which also made it hard to keep on feeding breast milk exclusively. Yes, I could have put more time/effort into pumping to keep bottle feeding her breast milk. Yes, I could have started drinking mother's milk tea, and making lactation cookies, and taking fenugreek supplements to increase my milk supply. So yes, part of it is me being lazy, but man-oh-man I hate pumping! And we did our due diligence on the research, and I can't find anything really convincing that says the benefits of breast milk outweigh formula past around 6-7 months of age. This article on the Timeline of a Breastfed Baby helps ease some of my mommy guilt for not pumping as often anymore. We actually made it almost 8 months of using exclusively breast milk in her bottle, which is longer than 99% of mothers who start off breastfeeding. My husband wasn't breastfed at all, and I was only breastfed for 6 months, and we both turned out just fine! (Better than fine even, considering we're decently smart people with Masters degrees. And when I consider what a friggin' genius my husband is, it kind of throws all arguments about formula out the window...)
So it is with extremely mixed emotions that I say adieu to our breastfeeding journey. I know we're doing what's best for our daughter, and I see how she's growing and thriving with formula and the solid foods she's getting, but I can't help feel a twinge of regret that things didn't go according to plan. Callie is not the type of baby that is content to hang out, relax, get some good mommy cuddles in, and breast feed for an hour at a time (if you've met her, and seen how active and curious she is, you probably could have surmised that yourself!) She's got shit to do! Stuff to see! Things to chew on! So I'm listening to her more, and accepting her for who she is, and realizing that it's OK for our journey to be a bit different.
