The Difference an Hour Makes

So, my gorgeous little girl has been eating (at least) every 2 hours during the day for the past 12 weeks. This seems cute until you realize that if it takes her 15 - 45 minutes to eat (and it took about 50 for the first 2 months, until we switched bottle brands) and then some time to play and then fall asleep, you're talking about 15 minute catnaps throughout the day. I feel like I could write a novel about what can and cannot get done in 15 minutes...

you can shower and get dressed, but you can't dry your hair or put on make-up
you can eat a meal, or prepare one, but you cannot do both,
you can read your emails or reply to one or two, but not both at the same time, which means you never can remember which ones in your overflowing inbox you meant to answer,
you can take a nap or clean the kitchen (hmmm, tough choice!),
you can mix cookie dough with your 3 year old son, but you have to wait another 2 hours to get the dough onto the cookie sheets (this ALWAYS goes over well!).

You get the idea.

And all of this with a 3 month old baby who started life over 8 pounds and seems, if my scale is to be believed, to weigh 15-17 pounds now. And has only formula! She should be able to last more than 2 hours! And all the books say she should be napping more than this. But she cried bloody murder no matter what I tried.

So imagine my absolute JOY at getting Abby to change to a 3 hour schedule, including bigger naps. It happened officially 2 days ago. And it would never have happened now (I am convinced) if I hadn't been using my 15 minutes, not to clean the kitchen or read emails, but to desperately peruse some Baby Center message boards. Where I found, on the bottle-fed babies thread, a woman whose baby was just like Abby, weighing 15 lbs at 3 months, eating a ton of formula every 2 hours and sometimes in between, crying heartily as if he was starving, etc. Her ped said to try switching formula, from Enfamil Lipil (which Abby eats) to Enfamil AR (which has added rice cereal). I bought it on the sly and started mixing it with her bottles very slowly, and could see good effects, so I called our pediatrician this week and got the green light to use it, though they thought it wouldn't do much. Well, they were wrong. I mix 1 part regular formula to 2 parts AR and now we are on a three hour schedule, like clockwork. And she is so happy now in between feeds - she's like another child. She even smiles sometimes right BEFORE a feed, which she never did before. And she takes naps of 45 minutes or more.

Ahhhh. Now I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Next challenge: getting her to sleep though the night in her crib!