Heart vs head stopping breastfeeding

[NorthernDuck]

My baby is just over 9 months, I am back at work and have been breastfeeding along with pumping at work and a top up bottle a day of formula. He is allergic to dairy, egg, soya, peanuts, treenuts, beans, lentils, chickpeas and tomatoes which I have been eliminating from my diet for almost 6 months now.
Unfortunately I’ve been ill and my milk supply has tanked, we are having to top up almost every feed with between 30-120ml of formula (which he drinks with strawberry nesquik).
I guess I have 2 options:
Heart - really work on the supply, hope it comes back, I really wanted to make it to 12 months to get him onto the infant oat milk and off the nesquik 🤣 , I really enjoy my time BF and due to a lot of factors he will be my only child and I’m sad thinking it has ended.
Head - stop breastfeeding, at the moment he’s down to 3-4 feeds a day anyway and he’s nearly at the stage I wanted to wean him, it’s a pain pumping in the office, the diet is HARD and it will be very difficult to get the supply back for a baby that’s 9 months.
Almost every doctor I speak to is amazed I’m still feeding him but we both enjoy it and up until now it’s been the easier option. I guess I’m just wondering how it feels to stop and know you won’t feed a baby again, maybe I’ve already given him his last feed when I put him to sleep this evening, I don’t know.
I guess at the moment, I’m at an easy place to stop but my heart is struggling with the decision. How do you process that? Does it get easier, at the moment it is also a big comfort to him when he does have an allergy to something which also distresses me because it won’t be there if I stop.

Does it have to be an either/or? You could just do a morning and night feed if you are happy to keep eliminating stuff from your diet and ditch the pumping at work?

What ever ypu decide is OKAY, there is so much stigma attached to breastfeeding it's unreal! Do what works best for the both of you, you really won't get it wrong x

I get what you're saying. One of my DC self weaned, rather unexpectedly but very determinedly, at about 11 months ((and I'd been so sure all would be BF until at least a year, and the others were). Which was rather heart-rending at the time.

But, with the benefit of hindsight, I know now that I really shouldn't have been bothered. There's nothing magical about reaching a certain date - whether that's early days/colostrum, 6 weeks, 3 mths, 6 mths, a year, beyond. Real life can interfere with all those.

I think in your shoes I'd abandon the nesquik, and just use formula.

This. It's the logical choice if you want to keep breastfeeding but make life a bit easier for yourself.

Why not drop the pumping for formula in the day but keep up the evening feed. My dc both did that and the evenings were a great way to spend time with baby after a long day at work. But pumping is just messy and miserable.

Once I was back at work I only breastfed DD first thing in the morning and last thing at night. That lasted until she was over 2, but obviously you can stop whenever. It's just an example that even with only a few feeds and therefore a lower supply, you can keep going if you want to.

I'd ditch the strawberry nesquik either way though.

As much as I’d love to ditch the nesquik unfortunately he won’t drink the formula without it as it’s so disgusting, we tried vanilla and the peadiatrician told us to use the strawberry to get him to take it. He has about 1/4 teaspoon per bottle so at the moment not very much a day, I guess if he was solely on formula this would be about 1 teaspoon worth which isn’t great but we’ve made it this far with very little and we’ve only a couple of months until we can go onto the infant oat milk. I guess so long as we restrict sugar in his food it’s not too bad.

For me it’s sort of an all or nothing thing, I don’t mind keeping to the diet, never eating out, joining in with cakes in the office and scrutinising every packet if I’m feeding him if I’m doing most feeds, if it’s only once a day it’s really not worth the diet as it’s such a huge challenge and it’s so limiting what you can eat and missing such a huge part of my diet effects my vitamins etc.
He’s just woken for a feed and there is nothing there so DH is giving him a bottle, I think I’m going to see where we are in 4-5 days and if it’s not come back enough to do at least 3 feeds then I’ll stop. It gives me a bit longer to get my head round it, it’s not how I wanted to end, but I guess it is an easy point and I was going to try to stop anyway.

As a fellow allergy mum, I'm really glad I kept it up. I ended up doing it well into toddlerhood and I found the advantage of knowing he was still getting a lot of his nutrients from me, particularly given his limited diet, outweighed the inconvenience for me. Breatmilk continues to offer nutritional benefits as long as you keep it up, so it made me feel better about things overall. But of course these things are very individual and there is no right answer.

One thing I would say is that if he's in childcare now he is likely going to get all the bugs this winter, pretty much back to back, as most do. You might find breastfeeding helps through that in terms of immune support, and also when they're refusing to eat it's comforting to know they're still getting some goodness from you as they'll normally feed no matter how ill they are.

You have a well established supply, so I would be surprised if it doesn't come back in time. Around this point if can become harder to pump and your breasts can feel less full, but your baby will be getting a lot more milk than you think.

I would try and keep going if you can- you have come so far already, a few more months is not much compared to what you've achieved- well done.

Mine were weaned about 18 months and I regretted taking the subtle steps to reduce as both times baby just stopped and wanted the bottle I had introduced.
However I am so glad I bf as you can't take it for granted it's hard work but imo so worth it. Nothing compares to being able to watch your baby bf for me anyway *

I would say by 9 months many are down to bed time and waking bf. I would stop expressing at work

If you stop soon then my advice is to build up a freezer stash of breastmilk first to give him
When he's ill (I wish I'd been able
To do that as the starting nursery in winter viruses are awful!)

He’s been at nursery since he was about 10 weeks so I’m not too concerned about the bugs as I’m not sure there are any more for him to get 🤣

I can see the point about continuing to BF to sleep etc but I just don’t think I’m prepared to compromise my diet for so long. If he only had a couple of allergies then I wouldn’t be hesitating but it is so restrictive, I think also the peadiatrician would prefer it if I wasn’t BF because we are never 100% sure if it’s something I’ve eaten he’s reacting to or something he’s eaten.

It’s interesting to hear it gets harder to pump because I’ve gone from getting 150-180ml a session to 30-50ml so that was stressing me a lot. Im going to see how I go for the next few days and reassess later next week. I feel like I’ve done really well and given him the best possible start and if nature has decided it’s time to stop there isn’t much I can do to alter that.

Also to add - is your baby under the care of an allergy clinic to reintroduce some foods into his diet? There are many things now that can be done to lessen the impact of all the allergies.

@parietal yes under the allergy clinic, I think we are a long way off introducing allergens at the moment as we are still identifying some and unfortunately he has been hospitalised a couple of time with them. We’ve been given information on joining the Natasha study using immune therapy to treat dairy allergy so that might be something we do in the future but for now we’ve been told to strictly avoid all allergens for 8 months and then at 18 months we will look to test again.
There is no way I will still be feeding him at 18 months, as I’m excluding such a large part of my diet, my milk is coming back a bit though so we will see how it goes.

My daughter has 20 allergies and she didn't accept the formula until I stopped breastfeeding. I breastfeed until 10 months when I ended up in hospital with terrible physical and mental health. I had to stop breastfeeding cold turkey and two long days later she was formula fed and never asked for another breastfeed. She went on to be formula fed until 2! It took stopping breastfeeding to get her to symptom free too as there were still foods she was reacting to in my diet which turned out to be alliums and I would never had made the link with onions and garlic and her symptoms. Managing two diets was a nightmare!

My daughter also has a nightshade allergy - it might be worth looking at other nightshades given the tomato allergy. It was when I replaced tomatoes with red peppers that I went down the rabbit hole of food groups and found she reacts to all nightshades except potatoes!

She was almost exclusively formula fed until 13 months when she ate her first meal. She was 18 months before she accepted oat milk and 20 months before she ate enough to reduce the formula.

I think for now I would keep the bits you enjoy and bits you don't look at adding in more formula.

💯 I did this to a T too. Worked well. I'd also ditch Nesquik (sugar, additives etc)

@Superscientist I think you get it, managing 2 diets whilst working full time, pumping and all the hospital appointments is exhausting, my physical health is suffering, despite taking vitamins, any scratches take an age to heal and I’m getting a few sores on my skin popping up, the Dr is looking into a B12 deficiency.

for everyone saying to ditch the nesquik it is extremely unhelpful to someone already struggling and feeling guilty about adding it to the bottle. I’ve explained why we need to use it, it is standard recommendation by the experts to get the baby to drink the formula and the low quantity he has is fine. I haven’t asked for advice on adding 1/4 of a teaspoon of nesquik to the bottle I asked for help/ support in coming to terms with a hard decision on stopping BF my baby.

I think you have to remember you've had a really hard time with all of this, and if you're stressed and feel that your restricted diet is impacting your ability to relax and have some time off (I'm guessing that every bite is pretty stressful at the moment), then there's something to be said for weaning and taking pressure off yourself. I am still bf 20 month old, but I've always said that I'll wean when it starts to feel like it doesn't quite suit us anymore. A child's happiness is directly related to its mother's wellbeing, so be kind to yourself.

As for the nesquik, no judgement from me. There's more sugar in an Ella's Kitchen pouch of prunes than there is in what your DC is getting.

Whether you are ready to stop or not is such a personal decision, and I appreciate how difficult it is with the allergies, we had to deal with that too (though not as many!).

I needed to boost my supply a few times though, and took fenugreek to help. I also used a great cookbook, The Contented Calf, not sure who wrote it, but it has lots of lactogenic recipes.

There is nothing wrong with declaring yourself finished though. Just do what feels right for you.

@NorthernDuck we were under a dietician and she was a lot more concerned about my health than my daughters! I had lost 16% body weight and was very underweight. The day before I stopped I collapsed in the mother and baby unit. Thankfully with drs and nurses around. My blood sugars were low and my BP was ~80 /40. I was struggling to eat on the ward as I could only have lamb casserole or a plain jacket potato with lettuce and cucumber. I was too unwell to work at the time so at least I didn't have that to worry about. My daughter had a pretty awful bottle aversion caused by her gp being incapable of reading ingredients and prescribed a formula with coconut in which is one of her allergens. She only had an oz but she screamed for over 8h and couldn't even look at a bottle. She had to go home to dad with no other option to get her to accept it again
I'm a member of a parenting children with allergies group in South Manchester and they were and still are a great source of support.

Breastfeeding my daughter was one of the hardest things I have done. Stopping was a close second! It took until my daughter was 3 to even contemplating doing it again!