Breastfeeding

My baby was born on a Monday morning and I remember thinking, “Mondays will always look brighter for me from now on.”

She rested on my chest for the “golden hour” while nurses shuffled about the room. One asked if I planned to breastfeed, which I did. She placed baby horizontal across my chest and helped place my boob for her to drink.

The amount of nurses that squeezed my boobs in the hospital is seemingly endless.

I’ll never forget that my breast was the first thing she knew in this world. It was her first connection and her first meal. 

That’s why at two years old she still breastfeeds for comfort a couple times a day and at night. How could I take away her first comfort before she’s ready? She still hardly knows this big world, after all.

I remember she screamed and cried into her second day of life and a lactation nurse told me she must be starving to cry like that. I sunk into myself. My baby had fed off of me for 45 minutes every 90 minutes. That’s 45 minutes on and 45 minutes off.

I wondered why she needed so much, her stomach was only the size of a cherry. The most helpful thing was a lactation consultant telling me to squeeze milk (at that time colostrum) into a spoon and give her that. Just 2 teaspoons would fill her up.

I wish I had something like this so I'd get a break from feeding once in a while.

I was met with a handful of lactation nurses who all told me different things in my two days after giving birth. This is why I recommend having a lactation nurse you pick out for yourself to follow up with you the whole way through so you can excuse away any random hospital lactation nurse visits. They did what they could in the two minute visit to my room, but there's just no way to personalize that kind of nursing, all they could do was give quick tips.

They gave me a nipple guard thinking baby can't latch to my nipple shape, which isn't even a thing in my opinion. I was shown a couple different baby holds which helped and the most helpful advice was expressing then giving to baby to drink.

After going home, my baby continued to search for my breast abnormally continuous. My skin became so raw that I cried every time I fed her. There wasn’t a cream or balm that would take away the pain.

I was using a pump daily because she caused so much stimulation that I was overproducing milk. When she napped for a few hours and in the night I would have to pump. Nursing pads were a must for the leaking, sometimes I'd wake up after three hours soaked in milk. 

It wasn’t until week 5 that we discovered she wasn’t able to suck properly because of a tongue tie. Tongue ties are genetic and very very common. Most adults have them and don’t know. They either talk a little different, almost unnoticeably, or they’ve compensated their speech over time.

My baby would do her best to eat, but ultimately waited for a let down of milk naturally. Let downs only happen once every 10 minutes or so. Seeing a personal lactation consultant outside of the hospital ones was most helpful. The ladies in the hospital gave me a lot of theories, but none really had an answer specifically for me and my baby.

We ended up going to her first pediatric dentist visit when she was just 6 weeks old. There they numb and clip the excess skin under the tongue (the tongue tie). It took a couple minutes and 3 weeks of healing with tongue movement exercises that we had to work on her 5 times a day.

Aside from my baby’s struggles, I had no idea what the right pump was supposed to be. Pumping was a little painful too and it wasn’t supposed to be. I ended up with mastitis two times.

Mastitis is an infection of the breast when the milk isn’t draining properly. Essentially it’s a clog. Mine turned into an abscess and warranted a couple hospital visits. Mastitis is like the flu on steroids which is why I wanted to take a minute to talk about breast pumps.

I received a hands free one free from insurance. I won’t say the brand, but hands free pumps are very expensive so this one being free should say enough. I thought a pump is a pump, right? Well not only does the machine need to work well, but the attachments need to fit just so. There’s even adapters for the attachments to custom fit.