I want to breastfeed DC3 but couldn't with 1&2

[Kyrptonite]

To be honest I didn't put a great deal of effort in with DS. He was born after 2 hours, had to have medical care as my waters had broken 3 days before he was born and I was in shock.
The next day when we were still in hospital I asked a midwife to show me how to breastfeed him and she said I was only doing it to stop my boobs hurting and wasn't much help.

I managed 4 days with DD but she wasn't getting enough milk. I expressed what I could but felt like a failure.

I want things to be different now I'm pg with DC3 but I'm worried I won't have enough milk or won't get any support. Is there any way I can increase milk supply if I don't have enough again?

OP at 4 days who told you there wasn't enough milk? At that point your milk is only just coming in, before that it's just tiny tiny amounts of colostrum. My NCT teacher showed me a great picture of the amounts, will try to find one online.

I'm sure someone else will be along to point you to the correct support network.

Good luck this time - it is very worth it if you can do it!

It sounds like you had a rough time and terrible breastfeeding advice/support with DC 1 and 2

Firstly, I suggest looking for some good Breastfeeding support before your baby is born. Your local children's centre should have details of local support groups and/or contact details for your hospital's infant feeding coordinator, who should be able to advise on breast and bottle feeding.

Secondly, there is a lot to be said for having confidence that your body can feed a baby. You say in your OP that you didn't have enough mill after four days - but it is cometely normal to have no milk at 4 days. You will be producing a clear/yellow liquid called colostrum, which is enough to sustain your baby even though there are very small amounts. Your baby's tummy is the size of a small marble when they are born, increasing to the size of a large marble at about 4 or 5 days and the size of a ping pong ball by about 10 days. It doesn't take much quantity to fill a tummy that size! Your baby will likely suckle as if she's starving for the first week, but that's not because she's not getting enough colostrum/milk, it's because that's what she needs to do to make you produce more milk. It might be as long as an hour for each 'feed', starting every two to three hours, so it will feel relentless. But this really isn't because there's not enough milk or because its not good enough.

If you can get to a Breastfeeding support group and talk to some mums who have just come through the early weeks, I think you might get the confidence to give it a good chance (even if faced with bad advice again :( ). It is very very rare that a mother can't produce enough milk if she has the right support to feed often and long in the early days. That could mean organising help for the house/other children in advance so that you can concentrate on spending one hour in every two (literally), snuggled with your newborn, offering your breast.

I have made Breastfeeding sound like it'll take over your life. In all honesty, it might feel like it has in the early days, but a lot of that time would be spent cuddling/soothing a bottle fed baby anyway. It is easy to blame the relentlessness of caring for a newborn on Breastfeeding, when it is just the reality of caring for a newborn.

I really hope you can make this happen for you and your baby. There is lots of great (and not so great ) advice on here, and I hope you get support from a real life group too. Good luck :)

The health visitor told me it might be better to switch to bottles so that I could see what DD was getting. DS has always failed to gain weight so I thought that they might be worried that DD would be the same.

Midwife sorry. Not HV!

This is the diagram I was thinking of.

It's highly unlikely you didn't have enough milk. What happened with your dd? I say that as someone who had a lot of breastfeeding issues with my DS and stopped due to his weight loss, so I know what it's like to feel like a failure.

The number one factor to make breastfeeding successful in my opinion is a good effective latch. If you are worried, seek help before you have your baby, so that you can get support in those first few days. Midwives in hospital sometimes don't seem to have enough time, or specialist knowledge about breastfeeding and grabbing a handful of your boob and trying to shove it in baby's mouth doesn't usually establish a good latch (in my experience).

Nobody should be advising you to switch to bottles so you can see what your baby is getting. The way to tell that is to look at the baby- are they alert, lots of wet and dirty nappies etc. in the very early days there won't even be many wet nappies as they are taking in so little fluid at a time.