Here we are approaching the five month mark and I still haven't caught this blog up on all that's been going since Elias's four month anniversary. The past few weeks have been so hectic, I'm not sure where to begin. I tend to avoid blogging when things aren't going as well as I'd like them to, but then I hesitate to blog when something really positive happens for fear of jinxing it. But then, what else is there to blog about? Say what you will about babies, but dull they most definitely are not.
So I'll give you the good news and the bad news. How 'bout we start with the bad news, or rather, the developments I haven't been necessarily eager to report. In short, Elias is now on formula, super-hypoallergenic Neocate to be exact. After a couple of weeks of vacillating between (and trying out) various formulas and always going back to breastfeeding, without much success on either front, we finally managed to get Elias to take a bottle. After a particularly spitty weekend and still more blood in his stool, we decided to wean the boy. As upsetting as it was to abandon breastfeeding eight months earlier than I'd originally hoped, I finally felt making the switch to formula was the right thing to do. And I'd just barely met my revised goal of continuing to breastfeed until sometime between four and six months. So ends the chapter on breastfeeding. I'm glad I stuck it out as long as I did and if it weren't for the poopy diaper situation, I think I would've kept at it a bit longer.
How did we get Elias to drink the stinky formula, you ask? I'm kind of hesitant to admit it, but basically, we flavor the stuff a little like you might flavor strong coffee. After reading this book, I ran the author's suggestion of adding vanilla and/or sweetener by our pediatrician and got the green light to proceed as long as it was temporary. We're down to a drop of vanilla and one packet of Splenda per batch of three or four bottles. I recently tried a few bottles of Neocate straight up and it went better than those early attempts, but there were several ounces of formula left when he spit out the nipple. Sheesh, after all this feeding craziness, prescription meds, gas drops, etc., the occasional chicken nugget in years to come isn't looking so bad.
Anyway, the switch seems to have finally cleared up his poo, which is great, but the spit up has increased a bit, I think because the formula hangs out in his tummy a lot longer than breastmilk did so there's more opportunity for it to travel north. He also seems to be teething, though, which is compounding a lot of our existing issues, I'm convinced. There's more saliva floating around, he's likely a little extra cranky, and it can't be helping with the changes in his feeding routine.
I feel like I could go on since the last couple of weeks have been jampacked with downright craziness, but it's getting late and mama's getting tired. The good news is that sleep does seem to be slowly but surely getting better again. Elias has been pretty consistently taking a morning nap that lasts about an hour and a half or two. The afternoons are still hit or miss, but even one nap a day is a huge improvement from a month ago. And over the past couple of weeks we've been mostly successful at getting him to bed before or right around 8:30. He's still waking up once or twice and at random times, but last night he slept straight from about 8 p.m. until about 6:30 this morning. I know blogging about it after just one night is seriously tempting fate, but whatever. I certainly wouldn't go calling it permanent even if it had been happening for weeks because if I've learned anything over the past four months and three weeks, it's that things change, for better or worse.
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