Thought I'd do a bit of an update. Background for this post is that my DS1 had a mild tie that made nursing painful in the beginning. With that in mind, I cannot believe the difference between nursing a child with tongue/lip tie and nursing a child without it. Night and day. We expected that DS2 may be born with a condition affecting his ability to nurse. After dozens of extra scans, we went ahead with a home birth and had several specialists on standby to assist. We anticipated finding out for sure when he was born, but
physically his condition is so mild that we had to wait on the blood work. He just looks like a weird looking kid, rather than being someone you'd look at and immediately know had Downs. He has had zero difficulty (little to no floppiness, no palette abnormalities, his suck is sufficiently strong) and is bf beautifully.
On the tandem front, I'm actually incredibly grateful that we decided to tandem nurse. I think it's really helped DS1 adjust, as he always has ample time to retreat to his safe space and recharge emotionally when he's been feeling emotions that don't feel good. I can't personally feed a toddler and infant at the same time. Too few hands to support all
my floppy bits, lol. And the sensation of two nursing off-time with each other activates both my aversion and some latent OCD I wasn't previously aware of. So they take turns except in very rare occasions.
I couldn't keep my head on straight enough during the first few days pp to pay attention to putting baby first or which breast which kid went on, so we don't have any organized system like others do except that we make it clear that if DS2 wants to nurse, DS1 gets a last letdown and then DS2 takes his turn. There's only been one meltdown about it so far and we just explained that DS2 can only eat milk and "can't have yummy things like x, y, and z yet" (and I've been keeping his favs in stock). Just the past couple days, DS1 will readily offer "Mommy Nuk" to DS2 if he wakes up or grunts while DS1 is nursing, so he seems to accept how that's going to work. I've been kicking myself for not having just a few more months of age gap-- just a step more of comprehension on DS1's part and things will get a lot easier.
All the things I thought might be hard with tandeming and having 2 in general are all pretty easy actually. It's really just been an emotional struggle, worrying about whether DS2 will meet 'reasonable' milestones (and getting angry at pediatricians for arbitrarily determining what is reasonable without a real basis behind it, but knowing if we don't meet this made-up version of realistic, he might have some unnecessarily stressful intervention later on) and crying because I know I missed so much of DS1's first year while he was in daycare and then crying again because my attention is so divided I wonder if he wouldn't get a better environment in daycare during DS2's first couple months.
My supply is bonkers again this time around. The only thing I can really complain about is that there are times I'll be extremely engorged and DS1 isn't sympathetic. He'll want to build a tower with blocks instead. So I get a song from the world's smallest violin if that's my biggest problem. All in all, I shouldn't have worried as much as I did. Just going with the flow has worked out to the best we could have hoped for.
You've done so well, though! I think it's fine to introduce some whole cow's milk at this age. I do understand, though- I pumped at work until DD was nearly 20 months. It was, however, a relief to stop after all that pumping!
