I think I'm a breastfeeding snob.....

It's not that I judge people for the choice to formula feed as opposed to breastfeeding. Some people just aren't into it. Some people want to be able to take turns sleeping through the night. Some people just thing breastfeeding is gross. Some people truly have a hard time with breastfeeding (I should know since I was one of them!). But I think when people tell me it just didn't work for them I think that they just didn't try enough and I try to offer my two sense and my experience with breastfeeding. I had a hell of a time starting out breastfeeding.

In Dominic's first 2-3 weeks I think we went to the lactation consultant 6 times. He was a sleepy eater and would just fall asleep before he was done and would take forever to eat and it seemed like he was permanently attached to my boob. On a good day its hard to get anything done with a newborn. But when there's this little person attached to your boob for 45 mins every couple of hours its nearly impossible to do anything but that. We started out with the lactation consultant because he didn't seem to be gaining enough weight. Turns out because he was falling asleep and I wasn't waking him up to finish eating. So they told me to supplement with formula for a few days with a feeding tube that attaches to the boob. Great. He gained weight like a champ but then because even though the feeding tube is slower than a bottle he was still able to eat way faster with it. So he didn't seem to be up for the work of just breastfeeding alone. So they got me to eventually try a nipple guard. Great. He started eating really great and it was less and less difficult to get him to latch on. I would say for the first month though at least once a day I wanted to give up breastfeeding and was constantly worried about him getting enough (doesn't help every time he made a sound my partner and his mother would tell me he's hungry and we should give him a bottle).

But every day I got more confident that he was doing fine and every doctors appointment when they saw how much weight he was gaining and how quick he was growing was even more assurance that I made the right choice. After a month my doubts got less and less and I only felt like giving up once a week !  And after about 3 months I think I was completely confident that we were fine. I just kept saying one more week we'll stick it out until eventually all my doubts were gone. Now we're almost at 5 and a half months and going strong and looking into introducing solids in a couple weeks. With that though comes the dilemma over what to introduce first. Rice cereal (my doctor), Oat cereal (my aunt who worked for a pediatrician), or vegetables (Naturopath)??