Another financial option, if he isn’t gaining weight, and must have formula, might possibly be insurance. I babysat for a family whose children were adopted. The first daughter thrived on the regular stuff from the store, but the second was both lactose intolerant, and allergic to soy. She ended up at the children’s hospital on donor milk for a few days, before they got her on elemental formula, which you can’t get without a prescription, so their insurance paid for it. It was really fould smelling, but the baby ate it until she was about six months old. At that point, the parents started making their own, with goat’s milk, rice starch, Karo syrup, and liquid vitamins (IIRC-- I only watched once). Now, they’d probably be able to give her lactose-free formula, but this was like 1981.
Another family I knew had formula paid for by insurance because the mother had post-partum complications that prevented her from nursing.
It’s worth asking. I think mainly you need a doctor’s order to feed x-amount of formula per day.
Don’t be surprised when you want to deface the “breast is best” ads at the bus stop or get kicked off every Mommy Board in existence for telling the breast nazis to SHUT UP. Myself, I thought back when my teens were little that we’d reached critical mass…the people that are going to at least try to breastfeed are going to, and PSAs and breast propaganda aren’t going to bring the ones who won’t at least try along. So what it ends up doing is help those that want to and it doesn’t work out feel miserable - when you have someone who is already suffering from PND, we really don’t need to add “failure and guilt” on top of it for the small benefits of breastmilk.
(In addition to my adopted son, my daughter is bio and took a week to start nursing - and I had raging PND - PND killed my grandmother - so it wasn’t a great time).
Costco’s Kirkland formula is definitely way cheaper than Enfamil or whatever name brand one they sell there. Nearly half-price if I remember correctly.
We don’t have a Costco, but the Target store brand stuff is about half what the name brand is. I guess I need to investigate if Sams has a good enough deal on it to a) justify a membership, and b) make me go there, ugh.
And if you have a friend or relative - get what we call a “Costco Buddy” in your case a “Sam’s Buddy” - one membership - but you split the bag of avocados or ten pounds of hamburger…Warehouse stores aren’t a great deal on everything, but eventually you will think huge boxes of fruit snacks and tubs of animal crackers justify the membership.
The thing is, going to Sam’s is just incredibly unpleasant. It’s a particularly bad parking lot in a particularly bad shopping center, it’s Evil Empire (same shopping center as Hobby Lobby and Chik Fil A, too) and just a really unpleasant experience. It would have to save us a TON of money to make it worthwhile. (And we’re doing good with the cloth diapers so that’s not an added discount there.). It’s a tough math to do.
You know, when I was a kid I remember a very early Christmas where we had tinsel on the tree. I never remember us doing it after that.
We moved from that house to a little house for a while, and then a condo, and then a bigger house, and then a few days after this damned nightmare C-section my parents moved into the old folks home. I opened their piano bench today and found an errant piece of tinsel.
