Boobies versus bottle: The ultimate showdown

Well, mamas, after two and a half months on the elimination diet in which I could not eat wheat, dairy, soy, nuts, or eggs and still seeing no improvement in baby’s symptoms, I decided to give up breast feeding and switch to a prescription elemental formula. For those who aren’t familiar, the proteins in an elemental formula are broken down into amino acids so that they are easier for baby to digest.

Although I was committed to breast feeding, a few things propelled me over the edge. First, I lost so much weight that I didn’t need to undo my pants to take them on and off. Second, not only did I feel nutritionally deprived on the diet, but also emotionally deprived. Sometimes a girl just wants pudding or a mug of hot cocoa, you know? Third, I had zero energy, and fell apart easily. And finally, the simple knowledge that the food I was providing for my son was causing him discomfort, although heartbreaking, was the kick in the pants I needed to make the switch. 

The doctor said the switch from breast milk to formula would take two days. Hahahaha. How little she knows. 

Our son knew we were trying to pull the wool over his eyes and wasn’t about to let us get away with it.The switch took three weeks. First, we had to train baby to take a bottle. That transition took about three days. We tried and he screamed, and this went back and forth for a long time before my husband took baby out on the porch. Why the porch, you ask? Because the baby had never eaten on the porch and therefore did not associate it with nursing. As an added bonus, baby could watch the leaves falling outside, which was a nice distraction as we snuck the bottle nipple into his mouth. Victory!

The second step was to start adding formula to the breast milk bottles. We tried Neocate, which  smells like lovely, freshly peeled potatoes. We started with one teaspoon of Neocate per five ounces of breast milk and worked our way up from there. It was two weeks of pumping my breasts five times a day to fill eight five-ounce bottles. However we did not have enough bottles at the time, so I spent most of my day standing at the sink washing pump parts and bottle parts. My husband did lots of math to figure out the percentage of Neocate to breast milk we needed each day, and when we finally got to a 50/50 mix, we went for it--we gave baby an all-formula bottle, and he took it! Whew! The days of dieting and pumping were over. 

Thankfully, I had rented a hospital-grade pump for the month to help us transition and to help me wean. For anyone who has ever weaned before, you understand me when I say Holy Mother of God does it hurt. Even a gradual weaning can leave you begging for mercy. It hurt to wear a shirt, to pick up the baby, to reach my arms over my head. Once the initial engorgement was over, it became more tolerable. If I were to chronicle the evolution of my boobs, it would go something like this:

Prenatal: Happy, perky playthings

Pregnant: Much bigger happy, perky playthings (yay!)

Postnatal: Baby fueling station, handle with care

Weaning: DO NOT TOUCH ON PUNISHMENT OF DEATH

Post weaning: Um....yeah, that's disappointing. Let's call them "deflated."

But all in all, the transition has been good for me and for our whole family. You know the saying: “If mama ain’t happy, ain’t no one happy.” I had to properly mourn the loss of breast feeding because I found it a beautiful and intimate way to bond with my baby, so I allowed myself to cry and to talk about it with others. One friend put it in this light for me: breast feeding isn’t a competition. If it is, then I will applaud as someone else gets the breast-feeder-of-the-year award. A good mom does what is right for the family, and sometimes it’s something mom doesn’t necessarily want to do.  

Thankfully, I have a circle of great friends who listened and talked me through it (hugs!). Although my husband is wonderful at listening and telling me that I'm a great mom whenever I doubt myself, sometimes you need another mom to say "It's okay to stop breast feeding." And I did, and I'm thankful.

So, to summarize what I’ve learned through this ordeal, it’s that when we have baby #2, if the doctor says to me “Let’s take out dairy and soy and see what happens,” I’m switching to elemental formula. I’m not putting myself or my family through this again. Breast feeding is a beautiful experience that I wish I could have had for much longer, but it’s not worth the torment of trying to figure out exactly which foods are causing baby distress. Now that I have been through this, I think it is wise for any breastfed baby to receive a bottle or two of formula every few days so that if you do need to transition to an all formula diet eventually, it won’t be that big of a deal. My little guy was so stubborn that the switch was exhausting, but if we had introduced him much earlier, it might have gone more smoothly.