Hey y’all,
Boy, do I have a story for you. Well, you know how breast milk is nature’s perfect food for babies? It turns out, my infant son can’t tolerate breast milk.
He’s like me in the fact that it didn’t affect him enough for the test for galactosemia (intolerance to breast milk) to come back positive or to do him a lot of harm, but since I stopped breast milk 2 days ago, he is like a different child. He is currently playing with me and smiling at me, and he’s done nothing but cry or sleep for the last several days.
I just want to take a moment to congratulate myself. So many people and scientific blood test all told me that my son had nothing wrong with him. Both my father and my sister suggested he might just be crying because he is a baby and they do that. But despite all of that, I knew that something was wrong. And on my hunch, I stopped giving my son’s breast milk, which it’s supposed to be the absolute best thing for him. But I was right!
As followers of this blog know, I have been attempting to increase my breast milk supply. It was so low that it was in the toilet. I was pumping about a single ounce in an entire day. After a week of pumping nearly all the time, I was able to pump four ounces of milk per day, but after a couple days of my son getting this increase in milk, he began having severe digestive issues. I knew he couldn’t have cow’s milk, but apparently any type of lactose bothers him. He’s on the verge of being lactose intolerant like me. The occasional square of cheese at a party or accidentally eating something with lactose once in a while wouldn’t bother him, but he can’t be ingesting lactose everyday.
Since my son is bothered by breast milk (And no, it’s not something I’m eating. I’ve investigated that.), I am no longer trying to pump a lot. I’m actually decreasing my pumping and weaning myself off of it. I was pumping every single time my child ate. Then I went down to pumping three times yesterday, and I’m going to pump twice today, and hopefully once a day for shorter and shorter times the next few days. And at some point, I’ll just stop all together.
This is actually going to work out pretty well, because my son seems to like one of the cheapest formulas (but I can’t find it for sale online) on the market, and breastfeeding and pumping has been a rather interesting experience for me.
Anyway, I’m just so happy to finally know why he’s been so upset. I thought his tummy was hurting him, and it was, but not in the way I thought. I’m so glad to finally have a happy baby again.
Frugal Treehugger 