It is day 5 of my cold and I am holding my breath that baby doesn’t get it. He had his first cold when he was 6 months old and it was pretty bad. I was up holding him for most of the night because he was so congested. Poor thing had a horrible runny nose and cough. I was writing on a parent forum asking if anyone had been lucky enough to not pass their cold onto their baby and the majority of responses were “if you’re breastfeeding, it’s unlikely baby will contract the cold because of the antibodies….etc etc”. Then the old familiar guilt-ache that starts in my stomach and moves up towards my throat presented itself. It said “it’s too bad your baby doesn’t get to benefit from your magical breast milk”.
Before I got pregnant I didn’t think I would be interested in breastfeeding at all. I actually thought it seemed unnatural if you can believe it. So strange for my child to suckle on my boob! I thought it was even stranger when women would gush about how much they loved the act. Well, I won’t say that I loved it, but I did grow to appreciate it on many levels. I liked how I felt bonded to baby during this time together, I liked how convenient and inexpensive it was (the price of formula is outrageous) and most of all I liked the health benefits it offered baby. Unfortunately, due to what I believe was stress and lack of sleep, my supply began to diminish. Baby started to reject me probably because I wasn’t giving him enough or it wasn’t coming quickly enough for him. I tried medication, teas and pumping, but nothing seemed to help. Once baby started losing a bit of weight I knew it was time to switch to formula. This happened when he was about 4 months and it really triggered the fear and sadness from when he was starving in his first week. All my emotions flooded back and I knew that I needed to be able to measure how much he took in and see his weight only go up on the scale.
Baby is now 8 months and in addition to formula he is eating solids. I am so much more at ease with the situation and can really appreciate how happy and healthy he is as a formula fed baby. The whole cold situation just brought back some lingering feelings. I love how I presented this blog as an opportunity to offer support and advice to those in need and meantime here I am using it as my own personal therapy session! I suppose you don’t really know what direction a project like this will take until you dive in.
Thanks for reading….
loving hearts, rough starts 