She's a biter

I breast fed my daughter for 6 months. I would have liked to have kept feeding her, but she just wasn't getting enough from me. Not that I didn't have more than enough milk to fill her belly, she just seemed to never be full.  Since it seemed I was always feeding her, we decided to switch to just formula. I shouldn't complain too much about switching to formula, if I was at all concerned about my well being I would have stopped nursing when she was about a month old.

But of course I don't look at it the way other people do. I have a high tolerance for pain and I guess sometimes I seem to enjoy putting myself through some sort of pain, maybe it makes me feel alive but I don't really know.

Well, the reason I should have stopped was because Lily was born with teeth. She had one humongous tooth in the front of her mouth, one small one inside the front next to it and another small one towards the back. So needless to say, she was a biter from the beginning. I kept reading articles that said that the soreness from breastfeeding should go away after a month at the most, and because I only breast feed for less than a month with Tyler, I needed to read up.

We noticed something on her front gums that we thought was a tooth, but come on, there was no way a baby could be born with teeth, right?  Wrong! It was a huge tooth that, as she grew, it grew.And grew, and grew (just like she did, the chubster). Well let me tell you that at two months old she already knew how to crunch with this big tooth and it HURT. But I dealt with it because I regretted that I didn't nurse Tyler for longer (even though he had an allergic reaction to meds I was taking).  And I have a high tolerance for pain, as I said before.

Lily was a really smart baby, she realized very early that if she bit down too hard it would hurt me, so she learned not to bite... unless of course I made her wait too long to eat, then she would give me an extra hard bite that would make me scream. That would be my punishment for making her wait too long.

But even though she had that sharp little tooth and she was not getting full off of my milk I still feel like I could have done more for her. That if I just sucked it up and just let her nurse all the time that she would still be nursing now. I know some people will probably think I am crazy, or that I at least nursed her for the recommended time but that's not what it is about. Nursing her was special, it was our time together.

Now she is big enough that she holds her own bottle and doesn't need me to help her with a lot of stuff anymore, and she is always on the move now.  It's hard to get cuddle time in when she's always going. So sometimes I just wish we had those few moments to share together like we used to because they are growing up to fast and I am not liking it!