Back in December, I started giving Lydia soy formula for a couple of feedings and continued to nurse her for the other two. She took bottles very well and I quickly scaled back to one nursing session before bed. By the beginning of January, with our major transition period beginning, she and I were both ready to make a clean break. I nursed her on a Saturday evening and that was it. She could have cared less! As long as she got a bottle 2 or 3 times a day, she was good. As we adjusted our schedule to take some training classes, she went down to 1 or 2 bottles a day. In the meantime, her top and bottom front teeth pairs were getting lots of exercise as she tackled more and more table foods. She LOVES to eat and even though she isn’t very big…barely 20 pounds at 14 months…she can really pack it away. Lydia’s faves are bananas and vienna sausages and she “sings” to just about anything she eats. You always know when she’s eating and enjoying herself because she just hums away (our friend, Holly, even nicknamed her the “num-num girl” for the cute little sounds she makes to her food).
But I digress… She was down to just one bottle before bed by the beginning of March. This was a little distressing to me because she wasn’t (and still isn’t) a big fan of soy or rice milk in her sippy cup, even though she practically chugs water. She can’t get calcium from the standard sources and at this point we’re trying to give her dairy-free foods that happen to have calcium because she decided over the course of an early March weekend that she was DONE with bottles. It may or may not have been related to an ear infection/cold, but she started getting very upset and crying when you went near her with a bottle and she wouldn’t drink any of it. We tried several times over a few days, but her mind was made up and she was sleeping well and acting normally. It took us a little bit to catch on, but she’s fine. A dr. friend assured us that, whatever the reason for her initial refusal, this was the perfect time to leave the bottle behind. And he was right! She has done just fine without it and continues to grow way too fast!!
I still worry about her getting enough calcium, and I do admit to missing the snuggle time a little bit, but it so neat to think back on how she has changed just since Christmas. She knows what she wants and is learning to express herself…sometimes a little too assertively…and I wouldn’t have it any other way:)