Namechanged for this...sorry if it is a bit long.
My son is 13 weeks old. He is my second child. I breastfed my daughter for 2 years- she was a real boob fiend, refused bottles or dummies and required me to nurse her down to sleep every night. My son is different- maybe because I didn't want to repeat the experience of having a baby solely reliant on me, we introduced the dummy and bottle of expressed milk pretty early. He likes the comfort of breastfeeding but he's happy with a bottle or dummy too.
Most of the first 3 months were one long screamfest with colic hell-he had terrible, terrible wind after every feed. My husband and MIL kept muttering about how my milk was possibly "poisoning" or "injuring him". MIL in particular kept voicing concerns about the "quality" of my milk. It was clear I had enough, since I was able to express easily and in fact often times it was spraying out across the room. I cut out all dairy/wheat from my diet for 6 weeks to see if that helped- and it didn't really seem to make too much difference. In the last couple weeks, he seems a lot better and I've reintroduced all the banned foods- and he's fine.
When he was born, my son was on the 75th centile for weight- this then dropped to 50th but the HV wasn't too concerned because he was proportionate for weight. At the last weigh-in, he was hovering about the 25th centile. Despite this, he's happy and seems quite content- a big contrast to his former misery. The HV forgot to measure his length. But on the whole, she thought he seemed and looked OK- though she wanted to weigh him again in a couple of weeks.
My husband and MIL are, however, horrified. They are really worried about his weight and wellbeing. It's now led to immediately supplementing with one bottle of formula a day. I wasn't at all keen on this- since I know all about the issues of supply/supplementation. But my husband really felt like his input as to what was required was not being taken on board, and so I agreed it was fair enough to try it.
However, meantime, I am stilll getting lots of comments from MIL about how he's not thriving, he's "meant to be a big boy and he's not now" etc etc. It's frankly driving me crazy.
Here's the thing- I don't want to ignore possible issues of failing to gain weight. etc. I'm not an idiot and of course I want my son to get fed by one means or another. But I really don't believe that he's falling off the chart because he's somehow "meant to be bigger" than he is. I thought at his birth that his relatively large size was kind of a fluke. I am a quite finely boned, slim petite woman, just under 5'3" and my husband is 5'9" and also slim. The idea that we were meant to be producing this strapping rugby player of a child is to my mind a bit bizarre. I'm also probably taking it a bit personally, but it's hard to constantly hear that somehow I'm not giving him enough, I'm not doing it right, my milk is not good enough etc. I'm at the point where I almost want to throw up my hands and hand over a bottle and let someone else get on with feeding him.