Ryan - Just wanted to say that it's great to hear from you again! Glad to see that Christmas went well at your house. Good idea about the savings bonds instead of toys. Sometimes I wonder if there's a toy out that that isn't in our living room.
Poohangel - Not sure if I said it before, but wow, Faith has grown so much! And she's so adorable!!
My feelings on the bf/ff stuff is that it's important to have an LC who is totally okay with dispensing formula. With Madison she lost a lot of weight because my milk took a very long time to come in. Her ped had us coming in for daily weight checks and told me I could see the LC in the building (unrelated to the ped, just happen to be in the same building). I did and she gave me one of those SNS things and poured formula in it and my 5 day only baby sucked it down and fell asleep. I felt terrible. Until then she had been screaming and sleeping all day and night and it was because I was starving her. My LC was a super nice woman who flat out said that some women just don't make enough milk and I might always have to supplement, etc. To make a long story shorter, I ended up having double mastitis a couple of days later and pumped nonstop to alleviate the pain and solely bottlefed Madison (both formula and pumped milk). I gave up on that SNS after about 2 days and despite being bottle fed the first 2-3 weeks of her life, she easily went back to BF and went on to nurse till 21 months. But without that formula and the LC making me use it I don't know what would have happened cause it would have been a long time before Madison got any BM out of me.
With Henry we had to bottle feed in the beginning for a different reason. He had really bad jaundice that didn't clear up completely till he was over 2 months old. This time my milk came in by the time I left the hospital (3 days) but he just was too sleepy to nurse. The jaundice made him sleepy and not eating anything was making the jaundice worse, so he was sleepier, etc. I actually asked his ped about giving him formula cause I know it's easier to force feed them with a bottle than my breast. She said that was fine but didn't want to suggest it in case I thought it might disrupt his nursing. I didn't care as long as he got his bili levels down cause they were way high. Once we got home I pumped and mostly gave him that in a bottle, but purely for my own comfort cause otherwise I was in a lot of pain. We also almost had to stop the BM for awhile to see if that was causing the jaundice to not go away. Ended up not doing that only cause he was gaining so well that the dr figured he was okay at that point. He's strictly bf now, again without any problem from having a bottle as a newborn.
So my only thing is that a lot of LCs seem to push that if your kid has a bottle or pacifier in the early days then they'll never bf successfully, you won't produce enough if you use formula, etc. And those are things that I find even the most professional people say without realizing the effect it can have on moms. That day that I came home from Madison's 1st weight check I cried for about an hour thinking I failed her as a mom and I wasn't even set on BFing her to begin with. I can only imagine how I would have felt if the LC or ped had said I had to use that SNS with pumped milk cause a bottle would wreck my chances of BFing successfully or anything about formula not being the best. So those biases need to be really neutralized before doing anything like LC because they can definitely show even when you're trying to be as neutral and helpful as possible.