Formula I started about eight weeks as well, about nine weeks.
And this was infant formula through a bottle?
Through a bottle, yeah.
And he hadn't anything before that?
He had, no, no formula, nothing at all, but I did try expressing but the burning pain was there and it was just taking too long, it took me an hour to express about an ounce.
And were you doing that by hand or was it a pump?
Electric pump.
Electric pump.
Yeah. It was just too hard, too difficult and the pump it was very painful as well, that's another thing I thought buying a pump, spending so much money on it would make my life a lot easier but it wasn't at all. So that was no good, but with the milk that I collected from the breast pump I gave it to him in a bottle which he took straight away. So seeing how quick and easy it was to feed him from a bottle, it just made things worse really, so to take a break I bought some formula, well the first time I went to buy the formula, I picked it up from the shelf and I had to put it straight back down I just felt that I was betraying him, and I just couldn't go ahead with it, so I went home and I cried again [laughs], but then I finally gave up and bought some formula so I was giving him formula twice a day, just at night time and in, and during the day I think it was just to get myself a bit of break. So the pain went away and we were happy but then this little one here started getting very lazy, and because, what he was doing was he was breastfeeding but only the foremilk, so when he had to put the effort in he didn't want to, so I had to top it up with the bottle which I assumed was okay, but then his poo started going green and that's when I gave up, I thought he's not breastfeeding, he's not feeding properly from my breasts and it's not doing him any good at that point, and so we gave up and he was ten and a half weeks. I regretted it, I regretted putting him on the bottle because I thought if he hadn't been on the bottle he would've still [pause] been able to breastfeed. I felt really, really bad about it, I don't know why, I just felt as if I was letting him down. |
