Things I wish I knew before I started breast feeding

[LAF77]

I had my first DS nearly 8 weeks ago. Things have gone well, but there are some practical things I wish I had known right away to have made it even easier from the start.

1. You may have been told to feed every 3 hours, but your baby will probably want to be fed even more frequently than that. DS did get jaundice and I wonder if it wouldn't have happened if I had fed him more frequently.
2. As per point number 1, when you have a newborn baby for the first time, you have no idea what is going on with them, but if they try to suck their hands, they are telling you they are hungry. I figured this out on day 3, which leads me back to point 1. You will probably need to feed more often than every 3 hours!
3. In the first week, you will probably have your first cluster feed that goes on all night. There isn't anything wrong with your baby.
4. Try feeding lying down side by side, I do it as often as I can, and it is great to relax, which is good for mother and baby!

I knew there were a variety of positions to feed in, but didn't know about lying-down feeding - that would have been great to know from the start! so relaxing! But, whether it would have done me any good...one midwife I had insisted on ONLY feeding in the typical position, saying my baby would suffocate on my boob if I did the biological nurturing positions I'd been doing for the previous 24hrs with no problems...grr!

That it's only worth it if it makes you happy.

I spent 4 months hating every minute of bf my dd. Really struggled had no one to help, tried mw ( won't help you once been discharged) hv (er no use) and nct (nearest support group 45 mins away.

I soon learnt that a happy mum makes a happy baby.

I think one of the most common and wrong pieces of advice is to keep baby on the same breast for the whole feed if baby's weight gain is an issue.
The other one is to label some babies "lazy" if they stop sucking after a short period of time whereas in fact they suck in response to milk flow and if they stop it's only because the flow has stopped or slowed down.

There is a variety of advice from midwives and some of it may be wrong for you and your baby. I'm lucky that I did have a good MW come around in my first home visit who told me that I should be expecting to feed pretty much non stop in the early days and we never looked back.

Other things I have figured out on my own. Lying down has helped both of us with getting the latch right which makes it easier to feed in other ways in other places.

That the weird empty feeling around week 6 is not in fact your milk drying up, but production switching over to a more precise way of delivering what your baby needs. Luckily I got through this stage but I think plenty of people aren't told.

Basically, Kellymom.com was a lifesaver!

I wish I had known that giving top ups of formula would in fact be the worst possible thing I could do to reduce my supply - MW started suggesting this on night 1 and continued to put pressure on both me and DH until I caved on day 5 due to weight loss of 10.9%. Meant I could never ebf my twins which I had really wanted to do.

1st time round ditto re the formula, that it wouldnt be worth it esp. as she was nearly 6months, i had come so far twas a slippery slope for me that I wish I hadnt got on.

That the weight charts arent the be all and end all.

That I'd watched/read all the dr jack newman info before even having my baby.
(Thankfully 2nd time was prepared!)

How to stop. Your doing brill OP.

Getting the latch right is so important as I thought it was fine and then a few days later cracked nipples and pain!! It for slaps get easier as you get better at it - it is a skill that you need to master - it didn't come naturally to me

That if your baby doesn't put on weight it is more likely to be a problem with your baby than a problem with your milk.

Even if the fucking HCPs insist on blaming it on you.

(bitter, moi?)

Who on earth told you to feed every 3 hours? That was appalling advice (unless it was 'make sure you feed every 3 hours even if the baby doesn't seem to be asking' which I have heard people say. Never had that problem myself!).

Not me, but lack of nipple pain does not guarantee that the baby is feeding well. If there seem to be other problems, do not be fobbed off with being told that you would be in pain if something was wrong.

1. If latch & positioning are "fine" according to every bugger that looks, but you're still in masses of pain, have an expert check for tongue tie

1. Learn to feed lying down and/or co-sleep safely

1. Ignore clocks and watch your baby instead

1. If in doubt, get one out

1. Prepare a 'feeding station' (phone, laptop, book, TV remote, cake, chocolate, water, cushions, blanket) DP at your beck & call and get ready for cluster feeding

Mombojombo - i like 'if in doubt, get one out' lol! great, I had that philosophy esp 2nd tme round!

ALWAYS have a drink to hand. God how thirsty I got while feeding :)

discrete Tue 15-May-12 21:14:02
"That if your baby doesn't put on weight it is more likely to be a problem with your baby than a problem with your milk. "

Same here. Noone had ever told me that you could do everything according to the book and still fail because of something to do with your baby. "Babies are born knowing to feed", "babies are meant to breastfeed", "it is all natural to them". Ha! 10 years later, when it had transpired that walking and eating and sitting upright weren't exactly natural to dd either, I stopped beating myself up.

That breast pads tend to look ridiculous under most outfits, so you've just gotta roll with it and accept the "Wagon Wheel" effect (until someone actually designs clothes that make the breast pad bump into a feature - would make good cartoon eyes, for instance).
That if your baby has a favourite side, it can make life a lot easier just to stick to that side. It can however make you lopsided for quite a while afterwards. But I considered a shriveled tit a price worth paying for a quiet life.
That you should do it with confidence, anywhere you need to. It pains me to think of the times I denied my firstborn a feed because I was too self-conscious. Pains me also to think I did it in toilet cubicles rather than out in cafes. I wasn't like that with my second, and it made things a million times easier and happier.

That the longer you carry on breast feeding, the more reluctant your baby (or 2 year old) will be to give it up!

Cory - round here (France) they say 'if in doubt, blame the mother'. As if we needed help beating ourselves up for anything that goes wrong with our children!

youllaugh the MW may very well have said that I needed to be sure to feed every 3 hours even if baby doesn't ask, but I had no idea that babies could want the boob every hour for the best part of an hour at the beginning. No one told me that was how it could be. I was in such a fog after a long tiring labour.

I also didn't know that DS putting his hands in his mouth meant he was hungry. It makes me sad to look back on his first day at home and see the photos I took of him and he had his hands in his mouth and I didn't know what he was trying to tell me.

Now,like mombo says, when in doubt, I get it out.

That a newborn baby can get a full feed in 10 mins even if all your NCT pals are feeding for 40 mins+. The fact he gained 2 lbs in his first 2 weeks should have given me a hint that he wasn't wasting away and did not justify a panicked trip to a+e with my 'starving' baby who wouldn't bf for long enough.

It was not necessary for me to set an alarm in the night for every 3 hrs to wake me up to feed him.

Ha! How to get a PFB with breast refusal to latch on. To always have drink, sarnie, phone and telly remotes available when sitting down to feed. And finally, when same PFB was 15 month, how to stop! All much, much simpler with dc2!

Agree with having drink to hand as the thirst was incredible.

Wish I'd known that (in my experience) letting your child feed to sleep is a great tool to start with but creates problems later when months down the line baby still wakes up every couple of hours not for food but for comfort/resettling. Next time round, I'm going to do my utmost to not let the boob-sleep association become established. How, I don't know.

But feeding to sleep is a normal behaviour - and it is also normal for it to continue for months.

Very hard to fight against it without upsetting the baby and upsetting yourself :(

You certainly wont make life easier in the short or long term not 'permitting' your baby to fall asleep with feeding when he/she is very young...honestly, it's easier for most people to accept it, and work on forming different habits when the baby is a lot older :)

ooh, that has reminded me of another 'I wish I had known'.

I wish I had known that cutting night feeds might not make your baby sleep better. Around 7 months I tried flowing all that advice about cutting out night feeds so they would learn it wasn't 'worth' waking up. In my case, it was total bullshit. She still woke up every 2 hours for another 5 months, but once the 'nice feed and go back to sleep' association was broken, she was impossible to settle back to sleep, whether by feeding or otherwise. This time I routinely feed back to sleep. DD2's sleep patterns are almost identical to her sister's at the same age, but we all get a lot more rest and I have never felt the deranged sleep-deprived desperation I had with DD1 (except on the odd night when she had been unwell or whatever)