Go read the Disclaimer again. I am not a doctor. This is not medical advice. Seriously.
When Teddy was nine and a half months old, shortly before we were due on the East Coast for a long-planned trip to see family, friends and for Teddy's father to attend his 20th college reunion, Teddy went on nursing strike.
It started simply enough. He bit me, more than once. That hurt, and I was shocked. I thought we'd worked all this out at four months, before he had teeth. I took him off the breast after jumping. Said no biting and handed him off to his father. He didn't do it when he was sleepy, after a nap or at night. He'd ask to nurse during the day, though, and chomp down. And then he'd bawl. It started to be real hard to even think about nursing him.
I pumped, and at first I figured he couldn't be that hungry, or he'd eat. We offered him teethers -- frozen rags, frozen plastic teethers, teething toys. He seemed dissatisfied, and was shoving them way back in his mouth. He was also really stuffed up.
The previous week, he'd had a little of his papa's banana at breakfast every day, keeping it down consistently. And he hadn't pooped.
After day two of the nursing strike, and pumping during the day, I started to panic. Teddy had never had an artificial nipple; getting any quantity of milk in him was hard, as it tended to spill some from the cup. He was regularly squatting down and pushing, but nothing was happening. And he was still stuffed up. I had quit reacting to biting, and focussed on getting as much nursing in at night and during and after naps as possible.
I decided that there were several problems. First, Teddy really was constipated. I decided prunes or prune juice was in order. Second, he was probably having allergies, as his papa was also. Sometimes they'd be fine, a breeze would come through the window, and they'd sneeze nearly simultaneously. A lot of health care providers say this is impossible before kids are a couple years old. I feel confident in saying this is yet another area in which they are completely wrong. Liquid benadryl seemed like the best choice here; using it would be convenient, in that it would be our backup plan for the plane flight as well. Third, his teething was a lot worse than I had initially realized. Baby tylenol was not fixing it. Clove oil was not fixing it. Teethers were not fixing it. I wanted low-allergenicity (no wheat, no dairy) teething biscuits and I wanted something stronger than clove oil for his gums.
First stop was a drugstore, where I got an Avent sippy cup. This was to get the milk I'd pumped into him faster and more reliably. I had no idea if he figure out to suck on it, but I was hoping I could make it pour. The valve pops right off from inside, so that worked out great. It worked to get the prune juice in him (1+ Tablespoons diluted in a small bottle of water, per the Sears web site). It worked to get the pumped milk in him. One success. When Teddy and I took a bath together later that day, I had to get him out in a hurry when he squatted. That was some fast acting prune juice. Once he was done with that, he looked a whole lot happier.
The drugstore also had baby orajel (benzocaine) and liquid Benadryl. The Sears web site supplied dosing information for the Benadryl. That seemed to clear up the stuffy nose almost completely. I have never seen anything work quite so fast as the orajel. He made a small face, moved his tongue around, and then played, visibly less unhappy than I had seen him in a couple days.
Second stop was a natural foods grocery store, Madison Market. They had teething biscuits. They had organic prune juice.
By late afternoon, when I was giving him a bottle of milk with the modified sippy cup (a few days later, he'd figured out how to suck on the sippy lid, and we left the valve in after that), he turned his head away, and took the breast for a moment without biting, before returning to the bottle. This was the point at which I really started to believe we were going to get through this.
Despite solving all these problems, I was still very panicked while packing for our trip. For one thing, since just before the biting started, throughout the nursing strike, and continuing after, Teddy had been biting himself on the wrist. I put a teething bracelet on his wrist to give him something else to chew on, but he always took it off as soon as he could wiggle out of it. I was very worried this self-biting was a sign of major stress and potentially other emotional problems. I called the Group Health Nurse's Hotline, and talked to a nurse who had had six children herself. She said to keep him in long sleeved shirts, and that the biting was normal; most of her children had done the same while teething. She agreed that what we had done was reasonable, and that we should not cancel our trip. I talked to her Wednesday night (so the nursing strike had not fully ended), and she seemed to think it was about even odds whether he'd ever go back to nursing at the breast during the day, which I found a little discouraging, but realisitc. She was very supportive and I felt a lot better after talking to her.
The day before we left on our trip, Teddy nursed without biting throughout the day. The strike and the biting did not return during the trip. The biting did resume after the trip; it is a reliable cue that he's teething. He did break two new teeth (the ones on either side of the two in the middle on the top -- his fifth and sixth teeth) while we were traveling.
I have consistently planned to primarily nurse Teddy until he is at least a year old, with other foods introduced only when I'm not around, or for fun. This incident with the banana made me very paranoid about feeding him anything other than breastmilk. When we went in for his next shot at ten months (we're doing one shot per month, rather than the usual schedule), our family practice doctor, a third year resident at Group Health, was no longer available. We did have her suggestion for a second year resident who has her own daughter on an alternative schedule, so we went to see her instead. She was very supportive of our approach to vaccinations. She was very annoying about our feeding strategy. She told us a tall tale about how solid foods are necessary for the mouth to develop so babies can talk. Please. I spent several hours pursuing this hair-brained idea before concluding that she was just full of it. The fact she advocated rice cereal should have been enough to just know she was wrong.
Teddy had actually had a wide variety of food (including some meat, some grain and a lot of vegetable and fruit, mostly purees, some table foods), usually receiving food from child care while I was at martial arts (twice a week). Certainly I don't feed him solid foods daily; that strikes me as biologically insane. I realize that world wide it is currently common to offer foods daily between six months and a year. I also realize that a lot of babies get sick and are constipated. A lot of what is getting into them is not particularly nutritionally good (the rice cereal, applesauce, banana trinity, for example).
In the wake of the nursing strike, and then the doctor's insane emphasis on regular solid foods, I did a lot of digging to find out what weaning strategies have been used across time and culture. This is a hot research topic right now, analysing certain isotopes in baby bones and teeth to determined when they were weaned.
While I am by no means finished researching this topic, my current plan is for child care to continue to feed Teddy when I am gone, but increasing the variety slightly. Bananas are verboten (as is applesauce). Prune juice diluted with water is to be given in a sippy cup with the food, unless the food includes prunes. We'll try this for a couple weeks and see what happens.
Copyright 2006 by Rebecca Allen.
Created June 12, 2006 Updated June 21, 2006