Cheatsgiving: My Exclusively Breastfed Baby Is Getting Formula On Thanksgiving

My exclusively breastfed baby is getting formula on Thanksgiving. If you ask me, it seems like the perfect time to introduce it.

She’s going to be days shy of six months old when the holiday arrives. She was born at the beginning of June, which meant I was pregnant through the entire holiday season, my fortieth birthday, and my Brooklyn going away party. Every festive event was spent not feeling great and stone cold sober.

This year, I live near my family who I haven’t spent the holiday with in over a decade. I also haven’t sat down to a Thanksgiving table in that long either, as I was a server/bartender in Brooklyn and worked every single year that I lived there. To put it mildly, I am excited for the holiday. Sitting around a table with people you like and talking and eating for hours is pretty much my idea of Nirvana.

Now, about this child who has been suckling off me for the last six months. She hasn’t had any solid food yet, but man is she interested. My son never seemed to notice food before we shoved that first bite of pureed avocado in his mouth. He was unimpressed. This little girl? Not only does she notice food, she tries to intercept anything that is consumed around her. I’m starting her on some solids this week.

This brings me to the breastfeeding. I love it, I really do. It’s just getting to the point where it is really hard to keep up with. I broke my expensive fancy electric pump, and although the manual one works fine – it’s become a total pain in the ass. I don’t yield enough milk with that thing unless I’m pumping while breastfeeding. Tedious. Now that I have been promoted and I’m in front of a computer six to seven hours a day – it’s becoming impossible to keep up. I’ve known for a while that supplementing with formula was on the horizon.

So, Thanksgiving seems like the perfect day to start. I’ll pump as much as I can before, but the child will be feasting from a bottle so mom can sip wine luxuriously and hand the childcare duty over to relatives who are happy to hold an infant all day.

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(photo: Tumblr)

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