It's been a busy week in the Fussy dojo.
It all started out with some great news. As anyone that has spoken to/emailed/been within 25-yards of Kitty in the last 6-months may recall, she was supposed to return to work last week after a short 8-week maternity leave. Her company was not granting her credit for her previous 3 years of employment, and was only considering her current 9-month run in declaring her ineligible for FMLA protection. A recent court case, in which a plaintiff in a similar situation had sued and won, resulted in a surprise change of heart. Sweet, right? As a result, she now does not need to return to work until July 7. She could have stayed out until August, but then the reduced income would have forced us to cut down on the number of organic vegetable boxes we receive each hour, and that just wouldn't do.
Kitty's mom, MeMa, had come into town to help Kitty with her anticipated transition to working mom (read: follow her around with Kleenex) and since we didn't want her to feel like her trip had been wasted, we made sure to make the most of her time here. Let's put it this way, fatherhood is far less forgiving of a hangover than I had anticipated. A sunny Memorial Day weekend is not a great time to have a free babysitter. A little too much going on. But back to the point, having Dot here was a huge help -- even if she spent the entire time whispering plans to Finn about moving back to CT under cover of darkness.
On Tuesday, the headache was (mostly) gone, and Dot was headed back home. That morning, we had our first meeting with the Occupational Physical Therapist at Children's Hospital. This was the latest battle in our longstanding war with breastfeeding, and at this stage in the game, it's safe to say that discouragement is beginning to set in. I won't recap everything we've tried, since I've already rambled on about that enough, but Kitty counted 15 different visits to different specialists in the last 8-weeks. Forget about the co-pays, that's like $1,000 in gas.
We were hoping (naively) for a silver bullet solution. Something that we could put into action in the parking lot and would have fully resolved all of our issues by the time we pulled into our garage. Of course, the prognosis was not quite so simple. We did get some new exercises to try, since apparently his sucking muscles aren't working properly (insert your own joke here). But that could take weeks to really make a difference. So that bummed us out.
Today, we had another appointment with the tongue clipping doctor. We had finally, and nervously, decided to go ahead with the deeper cut. The first cut hadn't made much of a noticeable difference in his ability to extend his tongue up or out, so to try and address both his feeding issues and any possible future speech/mouth issues, we agreed to do it. This time around wasn't quite as traumatic (for him; for us, still not so good) and he was smiling and on the bottle again immediately afterward. Unfortunately, it will take a little while to determine whether this is going to fix the problems. So we're still trudging along this slow, and increasingly discouraging path.
"Why do it then, you idiot? Why not just go entirely with the bottle?" That's a really good question. I'm not going to go into the benefits of breastmilk, because this isn't a New Age hippie blog. Though those benefits certainly play a part in our decision, the biggest reason that we keep fighting this thing is because we're tired of paying $30 for a little can of powdered pre-vomit. As the saying goes, why buy the formula, when you can get the milk for free? I'm certainly not high enough in the Church of Scientology to free bottles of Suri's formula (I'm only a Level IV), so we're gonna keep at this thing until it works.
Or until there's simply no more funny to be had. At some point, $30 starts looking like a pretty good price to pay.
After all, I think that's only one organic vegetable box, and I can definitely do without that.
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