Lactation, Difficulties With, And Associated Asshats

Waffles tend to disintegrate rather than chunk off. We don’t give them to him unless we are holding it for him. Our ped. actually suggested it. It’s actually a very common practice, especially in day care centers. The last 2 day cares I worked at kept frozen bagels and waffles on hand in the infant room to give to teething kids of all ages. It was so generally regarded as normal and safe that it wasn’t even mentioned to parents. So if this is a big deal to you and your kid is in day care, you might want to check with them about it.

As for egg allegy, that would already be a risk from vaccinations because of the albumin used as a base in many of them.

Human milk contains lactose, so a child with lactose intolerance will already have issues in general.

Luckily, ours doesn’t. :slight_smile:

It is for domperidone specifically. This can be gotten in the US from a compunding pharmacy.

It’s available, obviously. It isn’t an illegal drug, nor is it a controlled substance. It simply isn’t FDA approved, which is entirely different. Herbs aren’t FDA approved. Nor vitamins. But they are prescribed legally all the time.

Actually, I’m surprised there are still compounding pharmacies willing to dispense domperidone. The FDA has sent out warning letters to several compounding pharmacies telling them to stop doing so. On the other hand, obtaining it through a Canadian pharmacy with an American doctor’s approval is entirely legal, although of course frowed upon by the FDA and American pharmaceutical companies (to whom, since this is the Pit, I offer a hearty “fuck you.”)

Herbs and supplements are not regulated by the FDA, but they are bannable by the FDA (ephedra) or the DEA (marijuana) as each gets a bug up its butt. Herbs and supplements are somewhat regulated under DSHEA, which is in very real and urgent dangerof being repealed, with the possibility that you might need a doctor’s prescription to get that Vitamin C and zinc pill for your cold. Call your senator, etc.

I just :rolleyes: every time I read that letter. How much do you think the formula companies paid the FDA to make that decision? The ONLY serious side effects I’ve read of occuring with this drug are associated with large IV doses. I would venture to say a large number, perhaps even a majority of, nursing women who work outside of the home have milk supply issues. When nothing else works, domperidone almost always makes it possible for a mom to continue feeding her baby, with a minimum of annoying side effects. Like Inkleberry , I go GRRRRR.

inkleberry, I’m sorry for your sad and your grrr. We’ve been lucky but the first week or so was loaded with anxiety and frustration.

I also want to commend you for continuing to do all that you can for your baby despite the pain, frustration and abuse. I know that encouragent from a stranger is probably meaningless to you, but I think that your dedication is wonderful and wish you much success.

Pardon the hijack, but I’m a bit confused. Our baby girl is six weeks old and she rarely eats more than 4 ounces during a bottle feeding (We started introducing a bottle of pumped milk once a day a couple of weeks ago to get her used to switching between breast and bottle for when my wife goes back to work). 8 ounces per pumping session seems to be quite a lot.

You know, I didn’t even notice that, but you’re right. That’s about what I could pump when I had oversupply so bad I probably could have breastfed Chloe from across the room.

Also, for the edification of those embarking on breastfeeding (not to get on **EJsGirl ** in any way), pumping is a notoriously poor indicator of how much the baby is getting. I can’t even pump an ounce now, but last week I got a good look at how much milk Chloe has been getting (she had the stomach flu), and there is quite a lot of milk going down that child’s gullet.

Ours eats 6+ ounces per meal (with smaller 2-4 oz snacks throughout the day), and he is 12 weeks. By 6+ months, most children eat 8oz per feeding.

Except that EJsGirl didn’t seem to be talking about a six month old and she said that she made "almost no milk the second time around. " And while the needs of each child are certainly different, I’d be very surprised if 8 oz per pumping /feeding wouldn’t easily satisfy them for a while at least.

I suspect that it was just an error and she meant something like 4 ML each per pumping. That would be a very small amount once past the colostrum only phase (and I just checked the newborn bottles that came with the pumping kit - they’re marked in ML).

In all fairness to the people who try to offer what they hope is advice…none of us can possibly know everything that’s been tried. It’s like when the baby starts crying, and you go through your list: diaper, check, not too hot, check, not too cold, check, hungry, check, bored, check…eventually, if you’re lucky, you find the one thing you’d missed. If nothing’s been missed, then sometimes you can’t fix whatever the thing is. But you always have to go through the checklist. It’s not meant to insult, or offend, it’s meant “just in case”. And because sometimes, people don’t know about certain tricks, or have forgotten them in their new-baby exhaustion.

I believe you that you’ve tried everything. God knows, I did the pumping thing myself with one of my twins, and while I was fortunate enough to produce for the pump at first, by the time she was older, I could pump umpteen times a day and get nothing. Then I quit. And I’d nursed my oldest until she was 5 (and the other twin went on to nurse until 3 1/2).

I’m sorry your breasts aren’t working right. It’s awful to have your body let you down, expecially when you’ve done everything you can, and it isn’t enough (that was me in L&D so I really do know a little of how it feels). I think you deserve a gold medal. Two, actually - one for each breast - for the effort you have expended. You could tell people they’re for “courage and determination”. I think you’re amazing.

The figures you’re quoting are for bottle fed kids. Most breastfed babies that I know including my dd will not take more than 4oz at a time and she only just started eating 4oz at a time (she’s 13 months)…she used to eat no more than 3oz at a time til she was about a year old. It is very easy to overfeed a baby with the bottle and the temptation is always there to get them to finish the bottle so bottle fed children’s tummies often stretch more than their breastfed peers.

I mean by bottle. I have no idea how much she takes when she breastfeeds :slight_smile:

Thanks for the support.

But FYI, he isn’t so little- he’s now a whopping 3 months! And he sleeps through the night (6-9 hours at a go). So there is less exhaustion than one might fear.

And meanwhile, my breats have been on strike for 12 weeks now. Which is a very long time. The bastards.

sigh

I am quoting what he eats exactly. He pushes the bottle away when he doesn’t want more, and has been for months now.

We don’t actually care whether he finishes a bottle or not-regardless of what’s in it.

Our son also has kidney problems that make him compulsively thirsty- eating 40oz/day is not unusual. This is actually an improvement over his eating at 6 weeks, when he wanted to eat 2-3 oz every hour. Until he was 9 weeks, we had to measure his intake to the ml for the doctors. So we know how much he eats exactly. That is also part of why I was pumping more than BF, because you can’t measure when the kid nurses.

Anyway, we know our kid. We know what we are quoting. Yours was different. That’s lovely. Please stop telling us what we are doing or quoting. You have very little info about the entire situation.

Oh gosh, inkleberry I didn’t mean you and your baby specifically. But you did say that most babies take 8oz at a time by the time they’re six months. I was just saying that most bottlefed babies take 8oz at a time by the time they’re six months…most breastfed babies don’t. I wasn’t saying that you make the baby finish the bottle, I was talking in general with bottle fed babies. I apologise if it came off sounding like I was accusing you of anything.

And btw inkleberry, I find you tend to react incredibly defensively to totally innocuous posts. You did it with Lordvol’s post earlier in the thread, which I didn’t read as accusatory at all and you have just done it with mine which on reread I still don’t find accusatory either. I am not trying to tell you how to feed your child, I was just trying to clear up a little bit of misinformation about bottlefeeding vs. breastfeeding and backing it up with an example of my kid and other breastfed kids that I know. If you want a cite, here ya go:

and

http://www.kellymom.com/bf/pumping/milkcalc.html

This is my pit post. It is full of my snark. It is distinctly not a request for information.

Grrrrrrrrrrr.

Grrrrrrrr.

I go ‘grrrrrr’ because it is the pit.

I don’t care about other children and what, if anything, they eat.

I just come to grrrrrrrrrr.

Fear my grrrrrrrr!

Ok, you made me laugh…I apologise for the hijack…and grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr back :smiley:

IANAD, etc… Abbie Jr. was bottle fed, she probably had about 3 bottles of breast milk before I gave up. I might add, too, that she never gets sick (so suck it, LLL!).

Genuine question here, no snark intended: why is breastfeeding so important to you? I’ve listened to horror stories from Milk Nazis before about how hard it was to get going (shots, screaming from the pain, cracked nipples, never getting any sleep, you name it) and I remember thinking that they seemed to place more importance on the experience of nursing than they did the results. I honestly think some of them wouldn’t have cared if the baby would have been better off on formula — they would have nursed anyway just so they could say they nursed, ya know? I’m not saying you’re doing this … you’re obviously NOT thinking this way or your son would be starving to death. What I’m saying is that some breastfeeders build it up so much to potential and new mommies that we become convinced that anything less than 100% breastfeeding makes us “lesser” somehow, or that we’re not having a “real” Mommy experience. They make it an all-or-nothing thing.

Many women don’t produce enough milk to nurse at all, and others don’t produce enough to exclusively nurse. This is not a big deal and has no bearing on whether or not anyone is a good mother or a “real woman” or “trying hard enough” or whatever else the Milk Nazis throw at you. The kid’s already 3 months old. He’s gonna be ok, even if you quit nursing tomorrow. Whatever antibodies you had to pass on to him are already in his system. Sure, we’d be screwed if we were still cavewomen, but today we have alternatives, thank God.

You sound so tired, sweetie :frowning: You’re wearing yourself out! He’s not going to be a baby for very long and I worry that you’re going to look back on this time and not have happy memories. This is so not worth your sanity or your tears!

The idea is a healthy baby, right? Whatever works.

You have done everything you could. Even if you hadn’t even bothered to try, you shouldn’t feel a shred of guilt for doing what’s best for you and the baby. This is truly one of those issues that doesn’t have a right or wrong answer.

kudos for the pains you have been going through … any mother who cares so much about their kids welfare is a great mom in my eyes!

FWIW, my brother was a serious preemie and spent a month in hospital and was a bottle baby from the get go. He is 6’2" strapping and healthy as a horse. I was a bottle baby and I spent most of my childhood being sick…I have always gotten pneumonia every winter since I can remember. I had all the usual childhood diseases, including the seeming ability to get strep throat from looking at the fuzzy stuffed strep bug-teddy online :smack:

Do what you think best and tell them to shove it. You are obviously going to do the best you can, and no matter what, that is what counts at the end of the day.