Solo Parenting and Bottle Feedings

Aaron's home with Georgie now and I'm at a cafe, working. But now taking a break for blogging. As we wrote about before, we were going to do bottles earlier, asked the lactation consultant who visited our apartment about it, but she convinced us that it was more "natural" not to do bottles. That fathers weren't involved in feedings for centuries, and babies turned out just fine; that fathers had their own special ways of bonding with babies, etc. We were new to parenting and wanted to do things as "naturally" as possible (whatever that means). Plus, I was a little complacent (i.e, lazy) and didn't want to deal with figuring out pumping. We're now irritated with the LC -- rather, with ourselves, for listening to her. All that she said may be true, from one perspective, and there is something nice about exclusively breastfeeding, and I did feel a little sad the first time I saw her attempt to take a bottle, but.....

Aaron's having a good, special time with Georgie, and (as he just told me over chat), it's different than when I'm around and he's taking care of her. It's good for Aaron, it's good for Georgie, and (I suppose) it's good for me. This is the first time I will be gone from home for more than about 1.5 hours (although we've been out, with him shopping or whatever with her for longer, with feeding breaks where he brings her to me while I work.) Aaron could have done this much earlier if we'd done bottles at 5-6 weeks, when it's recommended you introduce them. He could have helped more with night-time parenting when he's home on the weekends (not that I have any complaints about how much he's helped ... he'd get up just to change her diaper even when I was already awake). And, also important, I could have gotten more than 2 or 3 hours of sleep at a time in the first 3 months.

So that's the rant. And I miss my daughter.

Update: I was gone for only about 1.5 hours again today, when Aaron sent me a chat saying, "Please come home. Tears in eyes." Bottle feeding still isn't going that great. The problem was that Georgie wasn't so much hungry as she wanted to nurse to sleep ... something that's much harder to do with a bottle. We're gonna keep at it -- trying different methods (wrapping the bottle in my shirt), different nipples, etc. We may also have another LC (making sure she's bottle friendly, beforehand) come by to help us. The bottle struggles are not very fun.