At the weekend, we bought a doidy cup [or as Pete prefers to call it, a doody or dudey cup; he isn't clear on the spelling].
This is a small plastic cup with insubstantial handles, sloping sides, and a wide rim. It is supposed to be an alternative to the sippy cup sported by small children when they start to drink ribena and their parents don’t want to spend what money they have left after paying for childminders on new carpets.
The packaging, and the breastfeeding support forums, state that this is much better than giving drinks in a traditional feeding bottle or in a sippy cup; it is better for the development of their jaw etc, and for learning normal cup behaviour – i.e. how to put a cup down, albeit a strangely sloping cup which looks a bit odd. I keep trying to put it so that the sides are vertical, and then it falls over. Bernard has the advantage of having no preconceptions about how cups are supposed to work.
This afternoon I offered him the cup with a very small amount of cooled, boiled water in. He was in a flappy mood, so wasn’t prepared to sit primly in his high chair and sip from the rim of the cup. He would prefer to fling it and its contents across the room. So I held the cup, and tipped a little water towards his lips, just as we used to do back in the day when we were cup-feeding expressed breastmilk.
Mostly he turned his head away, while emitting an alarmed grunting, grumbling sound. Then he accidentally got quite a lot of it in his mouth [this was my fault entirely], gagged horribly, and threw up half his last milk feed. I cleaned him up and tried again; he gagged, and threw up the rest of his last milk feed. At this point I called it quits, so that he doesn’t just learn that the Doidy Cup is the thing that makes him gag and throw up.
As he has never had water before, I don’t know whether it was the near-drowning or the taste of the non-milk that caused the gaggage and the vomitage. Nor am I sure how to proceed.
Remind me to write down my thoughts on giving solids, as well; we’re hoping to try that for the first time a week on Friday.
Doidy cup sounds like something that a Chicago gangster might say.
Why, you doidy rat.
Anyway, we started giving Tom water at a very early age and it seemed to work fine – mainly because we were advised that he’d need it on hot days. Now he gets grumpy if he doesn’t have water with his (solid) tea.
As for solids, our experience has been that organic baby rice is a sure-fire winner to begin with, yogurt can be mixed with everything and pureed roast butternut squash will always be eaten.
A breastfed baby doesn’t need anything other than breastmilk, even in hot weather, not that it will have done Tom any harm.
It’s just exactly that sort of misinformation, though, that messes up women’s supply of milk – if the baby is taking anything other than breastmilk, the boobs don’t get sufficient “make more milk” messages via the baby’s stimulation, and it’s all a slippery slope from there.
At this stage, the doidy is just for fun and practice. I’m looking forward to our experiments with organic baby rice a week on Friday, and hopefully Pete will be around to photograph the mess for your viewing pleasure.
Sorry, should have made clear – water was introduced after we went over to formula. In hindsight, a lot of our problem was that Tom wasn’t actually fed much from the breast, but from expressed milk. I think that really confused H’s boobs, but given the problems she was having with mastitis, it was the less-painful option. Wise after the event and he seems to have thrived on it.
Pete makes compost in the garden, doesn’t he? We found that butternut squash seeds from the kitchen survived the composting process and, when the compost was spread on the garden, duly grew to be butternut squash plants. Consequently we had 17lb of gorgeous 100% organic home-grown butternut squash to harvest, several of which have been sliced down the middle, had the seeds scooped out, wrapped in foil and slow roasted for an hour or so. H loves it, I love it, so I guess it isn’t surprising that Tom loves it. And we found that squash are dead easy to grow – once they come up, just leave them alone (the odd bit of water on a hot day does no harm) but be warned that they make enormous plants that might reach out and eat any small child left nearby, Triffid-stylee.
Yep, expressing will do it; I had the same thing. Now that I’m totally demand-feeding things are so much nicer – I just wish it had been easier from the beginning. I found with mastitis that the best remedy was to feed feed feed, even though it was painful, because nothing clears a blocked duct like a baby’s sucking. Applied warmth is good, too.
Since moving house we no longer have a compost heap, sadly. Nor do we have time to do any gardening, which is a shame because we have a marvellous garden. Hopefully the next year will bring more opportunity.