SPD and Weaning

When I was pregnant, a good friend of ours who happened to be a doctor advised me to breastfeed my baby.  Hubby and I were naturally agreeable to that, and I spent many weeks during that time studying and learning everything I can about it.

I read up and watched everything I could get.  From Dr. Jack Newman's breastfeeding videos, to On Becoming Babywise by Gary Ezzo.  I will comment on the latter some other day as it's really long and might cause controversy.  Suffice to say that by the time R was born, it wasn't really of much help to me.

I'm thankful to have given birth in a hospital that is breastfeeding-friendly, to also have an obstetrician and pediatrician who are both so supportive of breastfeeding.  That said, R was born at 35 weeks and 5 days gestation.  He had to be placed in the NICU, developed some jaundice that lasted over a few months.

My aunt bought me a Medela Pump In Style Advanced and I started pumping as soon as I got back to work a month later.  I didn't know it then, but I was using a flange size too small for me.  I only discovered that when R was four months old and I developed some plugged ducts, and my breasts never really felt empty after each pumping session.

I had the backpack version of the Medela PISA

By then it was too late, my supply had been compromised.  R was taking three bottles of milk a day.  I was pumping only enough to make enough milk for two.  It made me very unhappy to do this, but I had no choice but to mix feed R formula to make up for it.

But I continued to pump milk during the day for a year and nurse R during the night (we're still doing this).  By the time he was a year old, we were encouraged to stop buying formula and give him regular milk.  At times we also give him almond milk I make myself.

Homemade almond milk.  Recipe here.

As time went by and the older he got, the more we noticed that he was chewing on his bottle teats a lot.  This was part and parcel with his sensory issues , but back then we didn't know it.  We just started noticing little things, like chewing his Avent teat down to shreds, and refusing to take milk in anything other than his Avent bottle.  We tried it on a sippy cup.  No dice.  

Because he was breastfeeding, we never got beyond the newborn teat.  We use it to this day.

Avent Classic Bottles

It was later on that we learned that speech therapists do not recommend sippy cup use for language development.  By then we were concerned about his speech delay but we did not have the SPD diagnosis yet.  I tried placing his milk in a straw cup, but R wouldn't have it either.  And he would fight me with that straw bottle and insist on his Avent one.

And so this went on for a while until we found out from our speech therapist that this was part of his SPD diagnosis.  Raising a Sensory Smart Child by Lindsey Biel and Nancy Peske state that many children with SPD "continue to thumb sucking or using a bottle or pacifier much longer than other kids do".  I can't stress enough how helpful said book has been to us in helping us understand what R (and inadvertently me) is going through.

Thus we began OPT.  For a while, the chewy tubes worked in satisfying his need to chew that his bottle chomping diminished.

Chewy Tube Red from TalkTools

Chewy Tube Blue from TalkTools

But recently he got tired of the chewy tubes, so R started gnawing on the bottles again.  And the teats weren't lasting for more than a week.  And to top it off, our speech therapist recommended that we start weaning him off bottles to facilitate speech development.

So we decided to try milk from a straw bottle again.  We dusted off the Playtex Lil Gripper 9 oz straw cup and filled a quarter of it with milk.  He fought me a bit and whined, but this time we managed to get him to take a few sips.  And we kept telling him to finish the one in the straw cup first before getting the bottle (because he was asking for it).

Playtex Lil' Gripper Straw Cup 9oz

He had pretty much chewed off the tip of this straw as well back in the day, but thankfully Playtex Baby Philippines has a Facebook page.  They are also available in SM Department Stores' Baby Company.  I ended up buying replacement straws that can fit any Playtex straw cups, and they were pretty cheap compared to buying Avent teats.

So far that's our foray in weaning.  I will update you on how our progress goes.  For now, taking it a step at a time, putting R's SPD into play and considering what we need to do for him.

UPDATE (11/05/15): R has since been really good with his evening milk in terms of the straw cup that it's almost no trouble to get him to drink!  It has since reduced the chewed out teats.