My breastfeeding journey (so far)

Breastfeeding is hard. No one ever tells you quite how hard until you're trying to do it. Before I got pregnant I thought it was natural and your baby just knew what to do. I never thought it would be such a steep learning curve for both of us! Also who knew that they had to get pretty much your entire boob in their mouth!?! 

For the first few days she just wouldn't feed from me at all... Every time I picked her up she just fell asleep. The midwives didn't seem too concerned, fairly normal for the first 48h as they have reserves from the placenta and C-section babies can be particularly sleepy. 

We started hand expressing into syringes and giving her very small amounts. I couldn't seem to do that myself but Kris could get the colostrum to absolutely fire out of me 😂 I guess the love hormone really does exist! 

I was still trying to feed her from the breast but she just seemed to either fall asleep on me or get really angry at my nipple. Sometimes she would latch on but then not do anything and just fall asleep. 

I woke up at around 3am on day 4 with rock hard boobs and in a pool of milk. My milk had come in - maybe now that there was a proper supply she would start feeding... But no 😕 A midwife suggested I try pumping just so I could feed her and to make me more conformable. She brought me an electric pump and I expressed 10ml! This seemed ridiculous after we had been feeding her like 0.3ml at a time from the syringe. But she polished off the whole thing! It was so amazing that I was providing food for my baby! But was disappointing that it was from a bottle and not my breast 😕

I had a way to feed her so that meant we could go home! Day 1 at home was a bit chaotic... We got the pump but it didn't come with any steriliser and it had to be sterilised before every use, this meant my mum trailing round supermarkets at 9pm trying to find something we could use as boiling everything every time was just not going to be feasible. 

I was pumping every 3 hours and Kris was feeding her from a bottle. I was still trying to breastfeed her at every feed but she just wouldn't do it. It was exhausting. But she was being fed and she put on a bit of weight... She had lost 9.9% of her birth weight by day 3 but by day 5 she was only 8.4% below 🥳

When she was a week old, we had a midwife visit who suggested using nipple shields.... They worked!! She latched right on!!! I should have been ecstatic but I felt a bit down, as hard as it was pumping, we had got into a routine with it and I felt like I knew what I was doing and knew exactly how much milk she was getting at every feed. Feeding from the breast I didn't know if she was getting enough! It also felt like I was cheating... Yeh she was feeding from me but I had to use an aid to get her to do it. 

The next day we went to see a lactation specialist, she was amazing. She made me feel so much better about everything. She said it didn't matter that I had to use a nipple shield as long as she was feeding and that I was doing an amazing job. She helped me with Morgans position and watched me feed and said she was happy with what we were doing and just to continue. It didn't matter if we had to use the shields for all of our breast feeding journey, all that mattered was a happy fed baby. 😊

The following day we had a midwife visit... Morgan had put on 60g in 48h! Even further reassurance that she was getting enough milk 😁

After about a week with the shields, Morgan knocked it off my boob and before I could put it back on she had latched on properly and was feeding!!! It was such an amazing feeling!! A couple more days and she was feeding every time without any shields at all! 

 She seemed to grasp it very quickly on the left boob, and even started squirming down my body herself and latching on but it took a little longer on the right. It was really painful and I didn't know why 😢 it looked like she was latching exactly the same as the left but it just hurt when she fed from the right. It's so difficult to know what to do in this situation when you don't know why it's hurting! So much conflicting advice! If it's hurting because she's latching wrong then you shouldn't continue feeding because it will just make it worse but if its hurting because of a blocked duct then you should feed through the pain because she can help unblock it! I decided to just not feed her on the right side for a bit and hopefully give it chance to heal a bit, I continued to pump from that side but just fed her from the left. After about 12 hours she fed so much from the left and still wasn't settling so I had to put her on the right. It hurt to start with but soon settled down. I still think the left is her favourite but feel like we're in a really good place and things can only get better as we both continue to learn 😊

Writing this has made me realise just how far we have come in such a short space of time!! She's only 3 weeks old and she has been fed exclusively breast milk in 4 different ways!! She's a little superstar! 

Got a midwife appointment tomorrow so hopefully she will be back above birth weight 🤞