DD cut his first tooth around a month ago, struggled to cut the second but it’s through. Suspect the next two are very imminent as he’s taken to biting… a LOT. Like every feed. Sometimes at the start of a feed when he’s been giving every signal he wants a feed, turns out he wants to clamp down hard with razor teeth. Sometimes at the end despite me being vigilant to the change in sucking. The big problem is at night, he’s a feed to sleep at bedtime baby but tonight he just bit and bit instead, so got swayed to sleep by his dad. He’s fed on demand throughout the night but has a tendency to brief split nights where he’ll wake, feed, poo, then hang out awake a while doing more poos before finally whinging and asking for sleep. But there’s no way of knowing which feed-to-sleep is actually a feed-to-poo… until he BITES. Last night he got me so hard I screamed and sobbed and had to have paracetamol. Same tonight at bedtime.
I’ve done the calm no and putting him down. I’ve done the screaming - never on purpose or at him, but fuck me it hurts and I’m already at a low ebb because his sleep is so awful. (We’re working with a sleep consultant starting at six months.) I’ve done pulling him towards me so his nose is covered and he lets go. He just laughs every time. It’s been 3-4 days and dozens of bites and nothing is working, probably because all the biting advice seems to be for older babies who know their arse from their elbow.
If he’s anything like DD he’ll now be on a mission to get all his teeth asap; she was onto her molars by eight months. She never bit, though. I don’t know what to do! DP keeps saying “formula!” as if it’s a magic bullet where we can just present the baby with formula and everything will be fine, and I keep having to explain it’s a long process dropping a feed at a time to prevent mastitis – and that’s if we can get DS to take a bottle. And what do I do at night? He’s used to cosleeping and feeding back to sleep multiple times all night. I have no idea how many night bottles he’d need and I don’t relish the thought of bottle feeding at night, plus going from one to the other feels quite brutal. And how do you get the buggers to go back to sleep without a breastfeed? I don’t want to rock him every 90 minutes and I don’t want to do cry-based sleep training.
I don’t really want to take on the faff and cost of formula either – breastfeeding is so portable and free. Though I planned to give up at one this time because I’m touched out and tired.
I have no idea what I’m asking, really.