No substitutes

We attempted to do the daycare thing today, and Will refused to take a bottle from them. Again! Grrr. Just when I thought we had this worked out.

This whole thing was supposed to allow me to have more time to revise my dissertation, but so far it has ended up causing me more stress and having to do more work (like pumping every night, to make sure he has enough milk for a bottle he won't take).

Will had gotten up and eaten around 5 this morning, and then he went back to sleep until 8:30. It was great because I got some extra sleep (to make up for the fact that his snoring and intermittent waking kept me up half the night!), but it did put us a bit behind schedule. He had soiled himself, so I had to give him a bath, and then I fed him, and was trying to get both of us ready to go. We ended up heading out the door at about 9:35. It takes about 15 minutes to get to the daycare, plus a few minutes to get him settled in and chat with the nursery staff, and then another 15 minutes back home. I finally got to work on my dissertation around 10:15. Then I had to leave again at 11:40-ish so I could get there and collect him on time. In the end, I got about an hour and a half to work on my dissertation, during which I missed him so badly that I could barely focus.

When I got to the daycare to pick him up and they told me he would not eat, my heart sank. His refusal to eat/take a bottle when he is away from me is not a step in the right direction. If he truly wasn't hungry during that time, sure, it would be fine. But he is hungry, and he gets frustrated and furious. The boy just accepts no substitutes.

He just had this sort of shell-shocked, wide-eyed look of terror all the way home, and as soon as I got him inside, he threw his head back and wailed like a banshee. His poor sweet little face was all red and covered in tears and snot. The bottle they had attempted to feed him was still warm; I heated it up a little bit more and thought we'd give it a try... just to see what happened. I put the bottle to his lips, and he clamped on, sucking it down without even so much as a moment of hesitation. The little stinker!

As soon as he drained the bottle (all 5 ounces), he started looking around for more. So I put him on the boob and he sucked ravenously, grabbing onto my neck with his free hand just to make sure I didn't get away. When he finished that side, he moved straight onto the other and finished that one too. Such hunger!

Got to go pump, so we can try to do this all over again.