A Mommy Story

We have a slight situation here at Casa de Mommy Story. You already know Mira has teeth. Two sharp bottom ones, to be specific. She’s chewing on anything she can with those two new teeth. Including me.

I’ve been trying to use the advice people have given me. When she bites me while nursing, I yelp, hoping to startle her and make sure she doesn’t do it again. It’s a good theory, and it worked the first time, but now my screams of pain are countered with laughter. She thinks it’s funny. Not sure who she got that sense of humor from.

I also tried putting her down and stopping the feeding session when she bites. She gets mad and screams her head off, as expected, but it doesn’t seem to do much to discourage her from biting.

Another bit of advice was to push her head into my breast when she bites, making her unable to breathe and then she’ll let go and associate biting with an unpleasant experience. However, Mira is a bite-and-release girl, so it’s hard to catch her in the act. By the time I feel the bite, the damage is already done and she’s pulled off, smiling at me. (I told you she had a sick sense of humor.)

I even tried buying a nipple shield to give me a thin layer of silicone between us, but she refuses to nurse with it. Re-fus-es. Completely. Like it’s some kind of abomination of the natural order and using it would be akin to admitting there is no God.

We’ve come to a breaking point, though. Yesterday Fang (my new nickname for her) bit me hard enough to draw blood. I have three small gashes on my right nipple and one on my left. I tried to nurse her again overnight, and she bit me hard enough that I worried she bit through my nipple. (I checked, and she didn’t – but at 2am when you’re half-asleep, you jump to those conclusions from the pain.) I’m too sore to nurse on one side, and also too sore to pump.

To all of my hardcore lactation readers out there – I want to know how you survived biting? What did you do to discourage it? If we can’t stop this, I think weaning is in the near future. I don’t want to wean – bottles and formula are such a pain, plus formula is expensive. And when she’s not biting, I like having the ability to breastfeed her. But I can’t let her turn my nipples into hamburger.

Any advice is appreciated.

(And it’s not like Fang has a lack of teething toys. Anything is a teething toy to her.)