My milk seems to have officially dried up this past week. I'm 15 weeks pregnant and DS is almost 22 months. I've been trying to decide whether to wean him for a while. He has always been an incredibly demanding nurser and I wasn't sure how I could keep up with a newborn baby. When my milk started to go this month, and with some pushes from my end, DS was at a point where he was nursing 2-3 x in a 24 hour period and he seemed content with that, and I was much happier with this pace.
Now I'm feeling no let-down whatsoever, so I think it's safe to say the milk is gone. Since the milk has been disappearing, on a few occasions DS has woken up super early in the AM and could not be consoled, so DH found a bottle in our attic we used when I pumped, and gave him some whole milk we had on-hand out of desperation (he has never taken any sort of milk from a cup, only a bottle, which we weaned him from soon after he turned 1).
Now, his entire focus is on the bottle. He will still ask to nurse, but it's all dry-sucking, and he asks for the bottle more. I am concerned about the bottle for many reasons, but I especially don't want it to become a full-blown substitute for the nursing. I have a small stash of frozen BM we've been given him, but that will be gone in less than a week at the rate he is going.
My overall concerns are: a) over the weekend when my milk dried up, DS's total focus is now on milk in a bottle and he suddenly won't eat much food, b) he is tiny. His pediatrician is not concerned because he has always been small since birth, but I'm worried now that the lack of BM will impact his growth. I wouldn't say he has ever been a giant eater, but he would eat, especially what we were eating.
DS now wakes up and asks to eat, and I'll take him to the fridge and let him tell me what he wants to eat in the hopes of encouraging motivation for eating...lately he has picked out pickles & dried ginger (from my morning sickness days). I have to bribe him with crackers so he'll eat cheese, and he won't eat much of anything substantial we offer him. The one victory we had this weekend was when he asked for scrambled eggs, and he ate yogurt once or twice. He will eat fruit, but even that is inconsistent lately.
I am not sure what to do...should I keep giving him a bottle of BM and then cow's milk (despite my reservations with both the bottle at his age and cow's milk?) Or should we just keep trying to get him to eat and hope this phase will pass?
Edited by LHcj2008 - 10/9/12 at 9:38am
Otherwise, keep trying different foods, and focus on the fatty ones like avocado, etc. Sneak in calories where you can, like butter on the crackers under the cheese, etc.
Follow Mothering