My son is a breastfed baby.
Never has that been more clear to me than the last couple weeks. Aly has started work again, which means Connor needs to learn to take milk from a bottle, so that I can feed him while mom is seeing patients. We’ve got plenty of milk stored up from Connor’s NICU days, and he’s fed from a bottle before; in fact, they wouldn’t release him from the NICU until he could take all of his feedings from a bottle. My feelings on this policy aside, the hope was that his familiarity with it would make things easier for us.
Maybe it would have, if we had kept it up. But in the four months since he’s been home from the hospital, he hasn’t touched a bottle (or a pacifier even, except to spit it out). So last week when we started trying bottle feeding, Connor let me know in no uncertain terms: “Boobs only, dad!”
This has been one of the singularly most frustrating things I’ve encountered so far. Every session ends with a cranky baby covered in milk and a frazzled dad who feels like a complete failure. I know he knows what to do, he makes all the right motions and signals like he does when breastfeeding, but he’s not interested in actually sucking on the damn bottle. Tonight we tried again, and I came away defeated, with a pounding headache to boot (from the screaming).
If at first you don’t succeed…