Monday, July 2, 2012

Bye bye binky, binky, bye, bye!

If anyone watches Sesame street these days they know this song all to well. Even a parent trying to get rid of a binky might know the song. Well we have not gotten rid of our binkies yet but even better we have gotten rid of our bottle nipples and finally said good bye to elemental formula! Yaaahoooooooo!!!!!!!!

The bottle nipple happened while we were traveling for work on the east coast on June 1st and the formula happened the day after big girl's birthday! I was so busy I didn't have time to be excited for either. However a few days later when things settled down it dawned on me what we had accomplished.

Go back two years when my big girl was just a year and we were in hell trying to figure out what was wrong with her. She didn't eat, she cried a lot, she never slept for more than 20 mins at a time. I was pregnant and trying to get her to meet milestones. Meaning I was thinking that she would be reaching all the "regular" milestones like getting rid of the bottle by 12-18 months along with the binky, eating food and other things. Not sure if I was in denial that these things weren't going to happen or if I just felt pressured by everyone that these type of things should happen regardless of what else was going on in our lives. I soon came to realize that I would need to throw those ideas out the window and take on a "screw everyone" mentality (for want of a better term) for the sake of my child's needs. So we did it, we threw expectations out the window and stopped trying to force her to do things that she just could not handle while in constant pain and discomfort. It was a huge weight off my shoulders and I think hers too because we didn't sweat the small stuff anymore.

Along came little man and low and behold he has been meeting all these milestones without us even trying. You see he never had to endure the pain, tests and doctors that his sister did (because we had a clue the second time around about his special needs). He has more or less been a "typical" baby for the most part and hence is very adaptable in situations like this.

The best part is we follow his lead and so does his big sister :D She refused to drink anything out of a sippy cup until he started doing it. She was over two and very resistant and he was newly turned one and though not eager to try new things he would take a shot at it. In one evening I had both kids drinking water out of sippy cups because he tried it so she followed suit. Then we learnt about the chemicals in plastic baby bottles (yup even BPA free ones) and I decided we were changing them to glass bottles (and yes we still needed bottles for a few reasons, one being we used up to 12 each night for night time feedings). I had no clue how to change big girl to a new bottle because previous attempts had failed many times. So.... I tried him first and he made the switch no problem. We quickly ran to the store to buy enough glass bottles to last 24 hrs. She followed him no problem. The born free glass bottles have a sippy cup spout you could buy to use. I started buying them to use for water and both kids were fine with it. During the day I started slowly giving them their "milk" (bone broth) with the sippy cup spout. Of course she was fine with it because little man was doing it. I tried numerous times to use the sippy cup spout during the night time feedings but it would result in screaming from big girl so we used bottle nipples at night. Then one night we only had a bottle left with the sippy cup spout and little man drank it to go to bed, so I offered big sister the same and.....SHE DRANK IT!!! I promptly told hubby that we were not turning back! We threw out the nipples promptly.

Any one who knows our journey thus far knows how much we have been through, knows that Hayls has oral sensory issues, knows she won't chew most food and we spend hours pureeing lamb and carrots to the smoothest consistency. So this is a really BIG deal for us. I am excited and proud to say we weaned from the bottle at 20 and 35 months respectively!

Now onto the formula! When we started GAPs very slowly last July/August the kids were drinking about 40-50 ozs each (per 24 hrs) of elemental formula as their main nutrition. So we started with a teaspoon of broth at a time and as we increased broth and other food we decreased formula. The reason for going very slow was to avoid any discomfort for the children. Ten months later by big girl's birthday each child was only on about 1 oz of forumla (per 24 hrs, a tiny amount sprinkled into their broth). The night of Hayls party a friend (her daughter has the same problem as my kids and is also healing on GAPs) reminded me about something. She told me that 1 oz of formula could not be "helping" the children in anyway so why even bother. That night we dropped the formula! There has been no looking back since. The funny thing is once we got the formula down to that 1 oz the kids started to sleep better and this continued when we dropped it. Sometimes we get both kids sleeping 8 hrs straight. However for the most part Hayls wakes once and little man twice but this is so much better than 4, 5 or 6 times!

So long story short we have made leaps and bounds in our little world! We are beaming with pride and happy to be making progress!