Even though I am no longer breastfeeding, I still enjoy giving Belén her bottle at the end of the night and the mood and moment feels pretty much the same even though she is not latched onto my nipple.  When Andy feeds her in the mornings, it is quite different.  As I am getting ready in our bedroom, she will waltz in like an expert walker, holding the bottle up and mutitasking at the ripe age of one.  Andy doesn’t have the sentimental attachment to feeding her that I do.  He makes her a bottle and gives it to her to drink however she pleases.

Tonight, as I was feeding her my last bag of frozen breastmilk mixed half and half with cows milk, my sentimental milk-provider, mommy brain started wandering and why should it not end up at the cow at Reed’s dairy (I like to think her name is Bessy) that provided the other half of Belén’s nightcap?

I don’t often ponder specifically where my food comes from, but for some reason, tonight, I wondered if the cow who provided the milk had a name and if she understood why she was a milk cow and I wondered if milk cows give birth more than once in order to continue to produce milk.  And about this time, I realize I know nothing about cows.  I even wondered if male cows could produce milk.  That would be ridiculous but there has to be a bull involved to breed a milk cow, right?

Then I thought about wet nurses.  If I was a wet nurse, I likely would have been producing milk for both Belén and a queen’s baby as well and perhaps more children.  So even if I weaned Belén, I would have other children, not even my own, clammering to get a piece of me.  Was being a wet nurse (I use past tense but perhaps there are parts of the world were they are still in existence, I base their existence off of a fantasy series I read [it's fantastic by the way]) a full time gig or were you a wet nurse and a personal assistant or a maid or something all at the same time?  

Yes, I really think about these things. 

Anyway, back to milk.  When we got back from vacation, I was in a bit of a panic.  We let both the daily schedule and the development schedule slide the two weeks we were gone, partially because it was vacation and also because I didn’t want to introduce something new to her diet while we were in a foreign country.  I read a blog entry about introducing sippy cups while I was in the hotel from the all-mighty baby advice goddess, Amalah and I started to panic a bit…specifically over this quote, “Something like, on average, every month past 12 that a child continues to use bottles equals one cavity by three years old.”

Belén has been playing around and extracting some water from a sippy cup for months, but she wants nothing to do with drinking out of it full time especially if there is milk in it.

So basically, once we got back from vacation, in my mind we needed to:

#1. Wean her from breastfeeding

#2. Wean her from breastmilk

#3. Wean her from formula

#4. Wean her from bottles

#5. And get her drinking Bessy’s milk from a sippy cup

Or else she is doomed to cavities before age 3 even though I myself have never had a cavity in my life.

Oh and I also thought she was supposed to be feeding herself 100% by age one as well so add that to the list. (#6)

When we took Belén in for her urine analysis last week I asked our doctor if she share with me her expectations around cows milk, sippy cups and feeding oneself by age one.  It turns out that #1 & #2 are in my own time.  She didn’t seem too concerned about #3 but she said if she doesn’t take cows milk immediately (she didn’t) to start by mixing half and half (it’s working great) and then gradually decrease the amount of  formula.  For #4, #5 and #6 we need to be fully there by 18 months. 

Phew!  Crisis averted.

Being the overachiever I am, we are working hard on all six vectors.  I used to strive to do things like get my MBA and become a project manager and run a 50K.  Now I strive to drink from sippy cups full time. Funny how that is.

Belén likes the Nuby sippy cups we have been using for awhile now, but she doesn’t love them and they most often end up on the floor fairly quickly.  This weekend while grocery shopping, I bought two new types of sippy cups at the grocery store, a taller version of the Nuby and a Dora sippy cup with a straw (Amalah and others recommend the straw kind for oral development.)

B was really excited to see Dora on the cup and she seemed to pick up on sucking out of a straw pretty quickly as well.  Here is a video clip after she had been playing with the cup for awhile.

Believe it or not, this is progress folks.

Oh and I promise I will stop talking about milk and boobs and breastfeeding soon!

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