Please can anyone offer some hope or positive stories to me? I need a ray of light as I am feeling increasingly down about my chances of breastfeeding. My baby is 4.5 weeks and she has been unable to latch since day 2. Day 1 she had a lovely long feed the evening she was born. We then had a very traumatic experience in postnatal and to cut a long story short, it meant that she wasn't able to breast feed at all the first night or next day (I fed her antenatally expressed colostrum through a syringe which I luckily had brought with me for emergencies). Her latch never recovered and though we have practiced regularly and done lots of skin to skin she hasn't picked up the knack. So I have been expressing milk and bottle feeding, and topping up with formula as I can't seem to express enough or sometimes find the time to express as many times as needed to make the supply what with looking after her and feeding her. We had a lactation consultant who said she had a borderline tongue tie and so we went ahead and had that snipped. Since then she has almost been re-learning how to use her tongue and often accepts the bottle under her tongue instead of on top, and this causes her a lot of frustration. I've had countless people watch us trying to breast feed and have been told my hold and techniques are perfect, so it's all about her way of latching.
The consultants say plenty of women pick up breast feeding this late or later still but I've yet to meet one! Everyone I know seems to have found it a breeze. The constant pumping and feeding is a hell of a regime. I'm trying to envisage keeping this up for 6 months, which is the minimum I wanted to breast feed for, and I can't imagine! I really really wanted it to work and for my baby to have breast milk. The breast feeding would also be so much quicker and easier.
I get sad sometimes that it always looks so easy, and in nature every mammal can seemingly pick it up just like that, but it's been so hard for us. She is always rooting around at my boob bless her and definitely wants to do it, but she can't get my boob latched properly and then she cries the house down bless her. I've tried nipple shields, skin to skin, bathing with her, relaxation, hours lying on the bed together, you name it, but it's not happening.
Is there anyone who successfully started breast feeding this 'late in the day'?