Over the past month as I have been serving as Mr. Mom, we have settled into a pattern in which Beckett gets one bottle of breast milk a day and we visit Jeanne for one feeding per day. However, last Thursday, Beckett and I had a min-crisis in which we found ourselves without any breast milk and with no mother scheduled to be available for several hours. So I decided that it was finally time for Beckett to have his first non-breast milk food and pulled out the can of formula. I had some misgivings about this. The diapers of breast-fed babies don’t stink, so I was leery of crossing the stinky diaper Rubicon (should I say, Poopicon?)—knowing that you can never go back to those faintly pleasant-smelling diapers. I contemplated just letting Beckett survive off his cheeks—I'm sure he could go several hours just metabolizing his second chin. But I had a starving baby on my hands, and didn’t want to use up his reserves just yet, so I forged ahead.
Meanwhile, the day before, we had explained to our pediatrician that Beckett was refusing to take his vitamins, and he had advised us to add vitamins to his daily bottle as a way of supplementing his diet. So I decided to add vitamins to Beckett’s first day of formula. However, Beckett took about two sips and decided to let us know that he is preparing to be as snobby of a culinary gourmand as his parents think they are, because after those two sips, he resolutely refused any more. I tried all sorts of tricks to get something down him. I wondered if the problem was that formula is thicker than breast milk and therefore it wasn’t coming out of the bottles, so I put the formula in a sippy cup and tried to pour it down him, but I had no more success than with the bottle. I tried comforting him and starting over twenty minutes later, but still no luck. Finally, in the middle of all of this, Jeanne called and it turned out that her five hour commitment had gotten over with in two hours and she could actually come home, so we got rescued from our mini-crisis and Beckett happily guzzled straight from the font.
Next day. We are back on track in terms of having breast milk, but I don’t know what the real problem was the previous day—it could have been the thickness of the formula and thus that the hole in the nipple was too small and he just couldn’t get anything out and got frustrated, or it could have been that he doesn’t like formula. So I prepare the bottle of breast milk and mindful of the pediatrician’s advice, dropper in .5 ml of vitamins. This turns out to be a mistake. Beckett turns his nose up at the vitamin-laced breast milk just as obstinately as he had the vitamin-laced formula. Now, losing six ounces of formula is no big deal, but seeing six ounces of breast milk go down the drain hurts. Because the way you get that breast milk is by hooking up Mom to a milking machine—which I gather is not the most comfortable way to spend 15 minutes of your afternoon, although I haven’t actually had the guts to try it out to see what it feels like. But at least we figured out what the problem is—Beckett can manage the bottle just fine, but what he doesn’t like is the vitamins. OK—no more vitamins via the breast milk. Back to trying to give them to him during the bath and having him spit them into the bath water so we have the healthiest and most expensive bath water in town.
Weekend—Jeanne (aka mom/wife) is home with us, and so she tends to Beckett’s culinary needs the old-fashioned way—skinship. She also gives Beckett about a half ounce of rice cereal—since now that we have started with the solid food, we figure we might as well keep it up, and Beckett has been staring at us with intense interest during meals times.
Monday. Beckett refuses the no-vitamins bottle. Just flat out refuses. No amount of cajoling, no tricking him with a sippy cup, no success waiting for a hour to let him settle down and trying again. What was a mini-crisis officially turns into a maxi-crisis, because if Beckett won’t drink from a bottle, dad is going to be traveling back and forth to Jeanne’s office two times a day, and Jeanne is going to have to be sneaking out of meetings all the time, and you can just throw the idea of a baby-sitter out the window. Dad comes up with the bright idea that since we started Beckett on rice cereal, he will just feed Beckett some rice-cereal mixed with formula. That way, Dad and Beckett can still be somewhat independent of mom even if the bottle refusal goes on. This works great. Beckett is by now starving and ravenously gobbles down the cereal—and gets a lot on his clothes as well. Dad is happy to know that his son isn’t starving, and happy to know that he won’t be making numerous trips back and forth to Jeanne’s office every single day for the next semester. Beckett seems happy because he has something in his tummy.
The happiness is short-lived. Mom comes home and when she finds out about the solution, is of course bummed that six more ounces of her milking-machine milk got wasted, but also worried that you are supposed to start out a baby on just an ounce of rice cereal but Dad kept feeding Beckett until he quit eating, and finds it hard to be precise but estimates that he could have fed Beckett anywhere up to a third of a cup of cereal. Most people think this probably won’t kill Beckett, but Mom does raise the possibility of constipation. We will let you know the next time Beckett poops, but it could be a month or so before it happens.
Today. Dad has spent a while looking on google for solutions to not taking the bottle and come away from his search with hundreds of ideas—new bottle nipples, new positions, feeding the baby right in that sweet spot when he has become a little hungry but is not yet cranky, mixing bananas into the milk, faking like you couldn’t care less whether the baby eats or not under the analogy to the dogs-can-sense-fear approach by which you assume that reverse psychology will work on a four month old, starving the baby into submission, etc. Meanwhile, Jeanne has a few ideas of her own. She has read about a guy who solves his problem by trying to fake the baby into thinking that he is actually eating from his mother’s breast by stripping off his clothes and holding the baby close to his chest. So, Jeanne leaves behind a smelly nursing tanktop that she has used several times and that must be full of nice comforting breast milk smell and associations. The idea is for Bruce to wear this tanktop while feeding Beckett.
Crazy, you say? Well maybe…, but one of the things I have learned about parenting is that you will go to extremes you never imagined possible. Of course there is the story of a parent getting an adrenaline rush and lifting a 2000 pound car off a baby, but that is only the inspiring Reader’s Digest half of the story. There is the other half as well, that no one prints up in Babies-R-Us Magazine. If someone tells you that you can get your baby to fall asleep by standing on your head in platypus dung, you’ll be out the door hunting down platypi in two seconds flat. Parenting includes that kind of day.
So, Dad doesn’t think twice about re-introducing the bottle in parental drag. Our cross-dressing Daddy pulls on the gray nursing tanktop, and looks down to see how his pecks measure up. Then begins preparing the bottle with more care than ever. He even squirts out droplets onto his wrist to test the temperature. In the entire month of bottle feeding, he has never done this before. He just shook the bottle and if it felt not-cold or a little warm then it passed quality control. But today is different. He gets the breast milk reheated to precisely 98.65493 degrees. He takes Beckett to the nursing chair mom always uses right before bed. He cradles Beckett in his arms, as if he is handling a fabergé egg. Then he introduces the bottle as if it is a potential date. Remember, you are supposed to act as if it is a matter of complete indifference whether or not the baby takes the bottle. “Beckett, here is your bottle. You might find it interesting or you might not. You can have some if you want, but if you don’t want any, hey no problemo amigo.” He brings the bottle close, but doesn’t shove it right in Beckett’s mouth. He lets Beckett reach up for the bottle and grab it. Beckett has been putting everything in his mouth, so dad is just playing along. Beckett puts just the end of the nipple in his mouth and chews on it for a bit. He has been acting as if he is teething, so maybe he is just teething with the nipple of the bottle as well. Beckett plays with the bottle. He runs it along his gums and chomps down hard on it. At some point, he is getting a little milk. Dad worries that maybe he will learn the wrong way to suck and crush mom’s nipple later on in the day. But then suddenly, the bottle slides to the back of the mouth. There is a suck, and another, and then suddenly the tell-tale bubbles of air rising through the milk. Ahh. He’s taking the bottle again. There is hope for the future. We can get a baby-sitter someday and go out for a romantic candle-light dinner. All is right with the world. Well… mostly. He still hasn’t pooped. Like I said, we keep you posted about that.
Update (Jan, 30th): Beckett pooped twice today.
