Like Mother, Like Daughter

Phoebe is moving up in the world. Upright, anyway. She likes hanging out in this fancy contraption (modeled by Bruce when he was 9 months old). Good thing she's cute: she is getting up three times a night lately. Scott and I feel like zombies pretty much every day.

Phoebe decided a few weeks ago that she prefers drinking out of bottles instead of breastfeeding. This came at an unfortunate time since a week before the beginning of her rejection phase, I got fed up enough to quit pumping altogether - a sort of breastpump rejection. We had about one glorious week of normalcy before she started turning her head away from me and shrieking when it was time to eat - breast rejection. I succeeded at tricking her into breastfeeding for a few weeks - I had to feed her when she was waking up but not fully awake. But then she got too smart for even that. Now she has a tantrum if I even fiddle with my shirt.

I'll admit that I am a total believer in the "breast is best" theory. Even the can of formula that we have says "Breastmilk is recommended" on the side! However, I was losing my marbles pumping for three hours a day and telling Bruce I couldn't do this or that with him because I was tethered to a pump that I didn't even like. So formula it is.

I whined to Scott about my breastmilk bias and he informed me that Phoebe will only lose three IQ points from being formula-fed. Three points too many, I lamented. Then he said he was kidding and cited a bunch of inconclusive studies.

Breast rejection is very common in preemies since they are bottle-fed from birth, but I never had this problem with Bruce: he always drank whatever came to his mouth in whatever method it came. Bruce was a rare specimen in many ways though. Bruce stole the camera for a few minutes and snapped some pictures. This is the only one that came out focused enough to put on the blog. Since this whole post is about breastfeeding, I'm not going to put any scandalous photos up to illustrate the text. I'll use these random photos instead. :)