vent - stop telling me she is OK
I just need to vent. My baby is a little one. My milk was late to come in and I have had to supplement her with formula for the first three weeks of her life. Having to do that felt awful; it is not nice to feel like you can't nourish your baby well enough. After those first few weeks we established a really good breastfeeding relationship. She feeds often but that is totally fine with me. At her 6 week appointment she had dropped from 15th to 3rd percentile in weight and the GP was still ok with that as she seemed to be feeding just fine.
Since then I started noticing that she wasn't growing a lot. We are still in clothes made for 1-2 months old and I started expressing that I was worried about that. Everyone around me kept brushing it off and kept telling me that she was doing just fine. Almost as if I was judging her for not growing or something. I'm here all by myself without any family or friends near and rely on my inlaws a lot. My MIL is almost militant about breastfeeding and was extremely unhelpful the first time we had to supplement. It made me super insecure.
We now just had her 4 month check up and she had indeed fallen off the chart. She is still gaining but not even close to what she should be gaining. She is a happy little critter so it's not as though she is malnourished or something but she is really fucking obviously not getting enough from me alone. I'm really happy I made my husband come along to the GP so that he could hear it firsthand from a professional. We have now been referred to a paediatrician and lactation consultant to figure out if she needs more than just supplementation with formula.
Even now my MIL keeps saying how she's just fine and just growing in her own pace and even my husband is still on the fence about having to give her formula. I can't wrap my head around it. I would love to be able to exclusively breastfeed her. Trust me, I feel awful enough about not being able to nourish her with my milk alone. I need support. Not people questioning me and my instincts every step of the way. She Is Not Growing Like She Should. That's not an opinion. That is plain fact. I'm so sick of having to justify my worry on a daily basis every time I reach for her extra bottle.
Hopefully it will just be a matter of continuing to supplement her breastmilk with a few bottles of formula and it's not something more serious than that.
Vent over. Thanks.
PS please no breast vs formula vs fed debate. That's not what this is about.
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