Excuse me, I got dealt the wrong hormones over here

Instead of the hormone that makes you feel all lovey-dovey toward your newborn – making you coo and engage in other types of bonding behavior – I feel nauseated every time my milk lets down.

So during each feeding I’m trying not to throw up on Silas, and I’m hoping he doesn’t throw up on me.

Woo-hoo!

Loads of fun!

Especially since I just spent the last eight months feeling this way!

And his vomiting is a little more personal when it’s directly on me. It’s not like I can just go change my chest the way I changed shirts so frequently before. And I’m thinking, “Dude, it’s not enough that I constantly reek of sour milk, now you have to add a layer of vomit directly onto my skin?”

When he first threw up on me during a bottle feeding in the hospital, I assumed we were walking down the road of another horrific year of GERD and I wondered how I would survive. I wondered how Jonathan would survive. I wondered how our marriage would survive.   (But then the doctor told us most babies do that in the beginning and we can't assume it's GERD yet.)

And I certainly wasn’t very motivated to breastfeed since it would be wait four ounces, throw up three, and have to replace that meal with formula anyway.

But something fascinating I’ve learned is that you don’t really run out of breast milk - or at least I'd have enough for a re-feed. So if he threw everything up I really could wait a few minutes for him to settle then feed him again. Who knew? We may not need much formula at all.