Jinger Duggar’s breastfeeding journey with her baby boy, Finn, may come to an end sooner than she expected.
The Counting On alum, 31, revealed why she’s debating switching Finn to formula at 5 months old during the Wednesday, August 27, episode of her and husband Jeremy Vuolo’s eponymous podcast.
“I was just at the pediatrician with Finn, getting his little checkup. It’s funny how, as parents, you always think your kid’s so much bigger than the average child,” Duggar said, with Vuolo, 47, interjecting, “I’m pretty sure, on this podcast, we could probably do a flashback of me when [I] was born, like, ‘He’s the biggest guy ever.’”
“He is a chunk,” Duggar said of Finn, who was born on March 29. “But I think it’s because our girls were very skinny, and it’s different. I nursed him the same as I did the girls, which is another thing.”
Duggar and Vuolo also share daughters Felicity, 6, and Evangeline, 4.
The mom of three also explained that they did address a health issue at Finn’s pediatrician checkup.
“He is having an allergy, apparently, to dairy and soy,” she continued. “So I was just talking to the pediatrician and she was like, ‘You could either cut out dairy and soy, or you can just put him on formula.’ So that’s the newest, the latest with Finn.”
Duggar admitted that she was “going back and forth” with the idea of switching Finn to formula because she had wanted to follow the same nursing plan as she did with her daughters.
“I wanted to get them to at least a year of nursing or a little bit over that,” she explained. “But with Finn, I’m not feeling like I’m gonna be able to do the whole cutting out all the things to see if it works. So I might just do the formula, which is hard for me.”
Vuolo told his wife that he’s OK with “whatever works” for her, and encouraged Duggar to do what’s healthiest for both her and baby Finn.
“I’m at the point where I just don’t know if I mentally can go back to that place of, like, cutting out everything in my diet. And he’s 5 months [old] already, almost 5 months,” Duggar said.
Vuolo pointed out, “And he’s a strong boy.”
“He is a big boy,” Duggar responded. “And so that’s the side of it where I’m like, ‘OK, we’re doing great.’ [The pediatrician’s] like, ‘This is a great time. Like, if you decide to go that route, go for it.’ So we’ll see.”
Duggar previously revealed that she was unsure if she would be able to breastfeed Finn at all due to her past struggles with postpartum depression.
“We have a four-year age gap between Evie and this little boy because I was not ready,” she said on the April 2 episode of the “Jinger & Jeremy” podcast, which was filmed prior to Finn’s birth. “I think postpartum, for me, with Evie was hard. It was really hard. Once, I think, I was about 14 months or so, I was still nursing and it was something that I just felt, like, I was in a dark hole and I didn’t know what to do.”
Duggar revealed that her friends and pediatrician advised her to stop breastfeeding Evangeline, which immediately helped. However, during her pregnancy with Finn, Duggar feared that she would go “back to that dark place.”
“I never want to be back there again,” she said. “Of course I want to be able to nurse this baby, but if that doesn’t happen [and] if I need to pump instead and that’s just what I have to do to not [go] back into that postpartum depression then that might be what I need to do.”
