Anyone else enjoy breastfeeding? Positive stories?

[Flingmoo]

I was only sore for the first week or so, and with a bit of Lansinoh even that wasn't too bad. I winced a little at times but never hated it.

I love breastfeeding my baby and I feel sorry for those who don't find it so easy. I do think there are far too many blogs, articles, etc. out there which just portray the difficulties of it. I know it's best to prepare new mums for difficulty but maybe the negativity is setting us up for failure.

Example: at the supermarket I was in the baby aisle and a heavily pregnant lady stopped by the formula milk and told her partner they needed to buy some to bring to the hospital in case breastfeeding was too hard. I just think its sad that this expectant mum wanted to breastfeed but had almost given up before she even started, due to the reputation of breastfeeding being difficult/unpleasant.

I don't want to start a BF/formula debate, I'm not a judgeypants and don't have any problem with formula feeding, but wanted to see if anyone else finds breastfeeding easy and has some positive stories - it just depresses me how many "breastfeeding sucks" stories there are out there!

(Similar with bad birth stories. Seems like you often only hear the scary ones. In the end birth was very hard for me but I always appreciated hearing the positive birth stories more than the scary ones!)

I loved breast feeding - but I stayed in hospital for serveral days initially as they wouldn't let me go until I was established. I went to hell and back with it, hand expressing a drop of milk every other hour until he learnt to latch. I did buy a couple of formula cartons to take the pressure off me to bf, but I didn't use them - but it was a confidence boost to know I could feed ds if I couldn't persevere with bf. I was lucky I had the full support of the hospital team from cleaner to mw to dr. I bf for 2 years.

DC1 - struggled massively with BF, sleepy baby, not much milk from me due to huge blood loss, mix fed to seven weeks by which time he was basically FF anyway. Thereafter completely FF.
DC2 - BF easily from the word go. She's 11 weeks old now and while it's time consuming, I haven't had any issues like cracked nipples or blocked ducts. I'm completely shocked how easy it's been.

Had ELCS with both.

Basically, even if you haven't had any joy for any reason with previous babies, it doesn't mean you won't be able to BF successfully in future if you want.