8 months and mom's going back to work :\

[kung_pao mama]

Okay.. so. My son is 8 months old and it has become necessary for me to go back to work full time. (I have been working only about 20 hours/week since he was about 3 months old.) He is quite attached to me and still breastfeeds a lot. My husband has been complaining about bfing from day one. He says that it makes things way too difficult for him or anyone else to care for LO while I am away. He often refuses bottles, is only soothed by the boob and wants to nurse to sleep nearly all the time. My hubby says he sometimes cries and cries until I get home or until he falls asleep. Its breaking my heart.

He has been eating solid foods for a couple months now and we expected his dependancy on nursing to decrease as he began to get nutrition elsewhere. This is not so.

I want to breastfeed until he is at least one year and I don't want to cut him off before he is ready, but I need him to be able to stay with other people without getting so upset. Im torn. I want a solution that works best for all of us. Do I switch to bottles alltogether or would a gradual change be easier on him? How do I go about this?

 

[Maxy1]

I went back to work about the same time with my first and put him in daycare. We sent formula along to daycare (3days a week). DS was as AVID BF'er and would not take a bottle ever (from about 8 weeks old) and would starve an entire day rather than take a bottle. We had introduced food at that stage but well over 95% of his nutrition was BF.

He was fine, took to the bottle at daycare on the first day. Who will you be leaving your LO with?

Do you do the offer food first then offer BF? I didn't do this, but apparently it works well. When we finally did make DS eat first to get milk (formula or Breast) his food intake went up quite significantly.

 

[kung_pao mama]

Depending on the day he will be staying with my husband, his parents or my parents.

And no, I don't always offer other food before bfing. I will try doing that more often. But I do know that most of his diet should still be formula/breastmilk and I just don't want to overdo it with the solids. He eats quite a lot already... I think a lot of the time he nurses just because its comforting. Some days I feel like he is a newborn again and wants to eat every minute of the day.

 

[Maxy1]

Grandparents are great. They have a bit more experience with getting a bottle in there!! DS remained very adamant that he would not ever take a bottle from my DH but my mum could get him to take a bottle pretty easily if we were not there.

For us DS didn't actually eat that much, literally relying on BFing for everything until he was about 14 months old.

DS did take to a sippy cup a lot easier than a bottle, have you thought about going straight to a cup, rather than a bottle.

 

[fieryphoenix]

I second going straight to a sippy cup, my lo wouldn't take a bottle when I went back to work at 9 months, but he liked the sippy and drank out of it just fine!