No More Formula!

At Lorelai's 1 Year Well-Baby Check-up, we got the go-ahead to start her on whole (or 2%) milk.  We have so been looking forward to this!  We have been spending approximately $120 a month on formula for her!  Over the course of her life, that's been about $1000!  That's a lot of money!  Even if we had to buy a gallon of milk for her a day - at $4 a gallon, that equals the same amount of money.  And there's no way this girl is going to drink a gallon of milk a day!

Dr. Megow said that when we got finished with the formula that we had that we could just start giving her real milk.  I asked her if she thought that the transition from formula to milk would be hard and she said no.  Wrong!  She did let us know that her milk consumption would probably drop pretty dramatically when she went on regular milk, though.  At 12 months, LL was still drinking betwee 21-24 oz of formula a day!

When we got home from her doctor's appointment, I decided to give her a sippy with just a little milk in it to see what she'd do.  She grabbed the sippy, took a couple of big gulps, and gagged!  She tried it a few more times with the same results and then quit drinking it and refused any more.  I could tell this was going to take some work!

We decided that we would just slowly start mixing it in with her formula a couple of ounces at a time (thanks for the tip, Emily!).  We started that night with 6 oz of formula and 2 oz of milk.  She did great!  We kept doing this and dropping it a little more every day.  Once we got to about 1/2 milk 1/2 formula, we noticed that she wasn't drinking it again.  Why?  It was cold!  Once we started warming it up to room temperature, she started drinking it again!

She is officially on 100% whole milk right now! Woo hoo!  The only catch is that she still doesn't like it cold, yet.  We're still having to warm it up enough to take the chill off of it.  Our next step is to warm it up less and less so that she'll drink it cold. And she is finally a pro at holding her own sippy!  She's been doing it with her water sippes for a while, but never with her milk sippies.  Now she does!