Weening

So we have decided to ween Sofia and get her on formula. Sofia's eating/nursing habits have been getting progressively worse. Now she will only nurse for 3-5 minutes at a time but she wants to eat every hour or more. She is never satisfied and constantly hungry. Since she only nurses for short periods she never gets the hind milk. Her weight gain has dropped off and pretty much come to a stand still. At four months she was in the 10% for her weight and now she is only in the 2% at five months! I've tried everything and I feel like I've exhausted all my resources and our only choice now is formula. I'm really sad to stop nursing because for the short time period that she was nursing well, I loved it! But its become tiring for me. So I am actually looking forward to having her weened. I may come to a point where I'm feeding her mostly from a bottle and with a little breastfeeding. However, I'm leaning more toward full time bottle. Nursing has been such a stressful experience for me that I think I need the emotional and physical relief.

We started with a little formula on Sunday and she was pretty resistant. That night I felt sick to my stomach about weening her. I was so worried that she would never take a bottle, but Josef gave us both blessings and our family has been fasting and praying for us. I am very thankful for this because she has been doing so much better! At first she would only take a couple ounces at a time, but today I guess she decided that a bottle isn't that bad. So far today she has had 8 ounces of formula in addition to whatever she gets when nursing. This is the most she has ever taken from a bottle in one day. I'm hoping that we will have her mostly, if not completely, weened by the end of next week.

Her poor eating during the day is affecting her sleeping at night. Lately she will sleep for one stretch of 3 or 4 hours and then wake every two hours after that. When she was younger she was such a good sleeper, aaah those were the days. Once we have her firmly established on the bottle, I want to try some new things with her that will hopefully help her (and me) get more sleep at night.

Her lack of weight and sleep hasn't seemed to affect her other areas of development though. Yesterday she discovered how to roll over from her back to stomach. So now she can roll both ways. This afternoon I was testing paint colors on our wall, so I put her on a blanket on the floor with some toys. Every so often I would glance over to see what she was doing and every time she would be further and further away from where I had put her. Pretty soon I heard her crying and I looked over and couldn't see her. She had rolled herself right underneath the ottoman and got stuck. She rolled a good 3ft or more! She continued rolling all over the place for the rest of the afternoon. She's such a cutie!