Breastfeeding advice badly needed!

[DHMB20]

Hello everyone,

Just looking for some real-life advice and reassurance regarding BF please! Sorry in advance for the long post!

I have a beautiful 1 week old little girl, my first baby. Throughout the day she usually wakes to feed every 2-3 hours and feeds for about 10 minutes on one breast, then she sleeps really peacefully. I try to keep her awake and prompt her to take more, but she seems content and my breast feels softer. We have lots of wet and dirty nappies. On the next feed I switch to the other breast, unless the last feed was short (less than 10 minutes) and she wants to feed again within an hour- in which case I go back to the same breast. Does this sound alright? I have been advised to offer the other breast or do 10-15 mins on each side etc but she doesn’t seem to want or need to feed for this long during the day.

Secondly, when she latches on it hurts SO MUCH. I wait for her mouth to be as wide as possible and she’s getting plenty of areola but I still have about 30 seconds of extreme pain that tenses up my whole body. Then this goes away and it feels pretty comfortable for the remainder of the feed. Will this initial pain get better?

Thirdly: fussy nights/cluster feeding. Starting from between 8pm and 10pm at night she just doesn’t seem to settle, and this lasts until like 4-5am. She starts rooting etc and then loses patience really quickly, escalating to screaming before I can even get myself organised to feed (I am still working on finding comfortable positions for myself and need to stack pillows up etc). She gets really stressed and flails her arms about (whacking my sore nipples in the process) and we have a real problem getting her near the nipple or latched at all, never mind a good deep latch. When she does latch (ooouuuccchhh!!) she sucks for a few minutes but then falls asleep and stops, I try to wake her up and get her to carry on but she doesn’t want to know. So I put her down in her crib and then immediately the cycle starts again- fussing, rooting then screaming, stress getting her latched, then a couple of minutes sucking and she stops. I feel like people are just going to tell me this is normal and wait it out, but any advice would be massively appreciated. I’ve been in floods of tears a few times already and I don’t want my little girl to have negative associations with feeding.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Yes, I agree, the advice is to wait until feeding is established at about 6 weeks before expressing. I have to say I personally found expressing to be a chore, and only used it if I needed to be away from baby. I just found it harder to express than to feed. I think I read somewhere that a baby is more efficient at extracting milk from a breast than any pump (that's if there are no feeding problems obviously). Then again I never got into a good routine with expressing and I think you have to do this for it to be successful. The hit and miss, or as needed, approach I used was difficult and I wouldn't recommend it.

I agree expressing is utterly shit. I’ve tried it a few times and it’s tedious as fuck. I get barely anything and it takes ages. Whereas I can feed the little guy in about 5 minutes.

I think it's a good idea for baby to get used to taking a bottle as they often refuse if you leave it too long However expressing is hard work and it took me hours to get enough for one feed so much worse than just feeding direct. Not to mention cleaning everything.

Expressing is shit, I tried a few times. Can’t be arsed with it, so much faff - I get bugger all out but can feed her myself easily.

My baby turns 7 months next week so I can’t see the point really. I go back to work when she’s 11.5 months so she’ll be almost able to have cows milk by day and BF when with me. She already drinks water from a cup so we’ll never need bottles.

Everyone will have different opinions about expressing. First time I tried I barely got anything despite good supply. I brought an elvie when DD3 just over 2 months old and found it fab. I'd pump whilst I fed her from the other side in the morning, I'd then either use it that night or freeze it. I'v found the mam bottles very good, she accepted it straight away. Other people have successfully pumped for bedtime feeds pretty much straight away. Don't be disheartened if you try and get nothing the first time though as pumps are no way near as effective as baby.

I expressed from very early (week 1/2) as I had medical reasons which led us to ignore the "advice" to wait until 6 weeks. This was the best thing I ever did. I used a borrowed electric pump initially which was a faff (and I didn't get much at all so v disappointing) but then got a Hakka silicon pump which changed my life. I had a good let down and could easily have it on one breast catching that and then feed baby on the other side. I think it works best if your breasts are quite small anyway, as out of my friends the only people I know who loved it were small breasted ladies. I had this on at every feed and by the end could easily get 150-200ml per day without even trying which we initially gave in a bottle and then we started to freeze so he could still have breast milk when I had had to give it up. He also had one bottle of formula a day, because we needed him to like formula incase I had to stop feeding abruptly. You can buy the Hakka on Amazon for about £8. It was honestly the best thing I purchased for breast feeding and I wasn't even going to bother getting it as it looked stupid 😂. As I got more confident I got a manual pump and we even left him for the weekend with my mum and frozen milk at 5 months to go to a wedding and I hard core pumped whilst I was there to replenish my stocks. Pumping in pub toilets and at airports became my thing, haha.

You'll learn as a mum that you just do what's right for you and your family. Waiting until 6 weeks to give any form of bottle or to express wasn't an option for us which I think helped us to "rebel" against the advice and honestly we are literally the only people we know who have had zero issues at all with milk, feeding, bottles or expressing. I know my opinion is different to others but I'd definitely do the same if we had another baby and others are now copying our method with their next babies.

I say the above from the position of someone who didn't really want to breast feed and had no real desire to do it. I only carried on because I found it easy and ended up doing it until I was forced to stop at 10 months and he had frozen milk (with his one formula bottle a day) until beyond one when it ran out.

Oh and you're definitely right about the different positions being more of a challenge when you've got small breasts. I just held him in one arm with his body along my arm of the opposite breast. It was different to how they taught me in hospital but I didn't care.

(I have finished now!)

Everyone has given good advice so Im just here to say you are doing really well. The first 6 weeks or so we're tough for me with both my babies ( they both clusterfed for hours and hours every evening. Do much do there's a didn't in the couch from my arse) but after that I absolutely love breastfeeding. My boy is 20 months now and I'm still feeding him. Look after yourself, try and sleep whenever you can, ask for help if you need it and know you are doing a good job feeding you baby and it will get easier x

*so much so

Oh sorry about all those typos....

As others had said, ideally you should wait until 6 weeks to express or give some formula so that you don't mess up your supply. That being said, I expressed much earlier than that with both of mine. It was so painful It was a case of express or give up altogether, so it was worth the risk for me. I don't think there's particularly any truth to needing to introduce a bottle early or they'll reject it - my DD had a daily bottle every day from a few days old and still decided at around 9 weeks that she wasn't going to accept them anymore.

Just a word on feeding lying down - I let my 4mo do this because he wants boob ALL NIGHT and I need sleep, but with both my kids I've always struggled to get a deep latch in this position, so it might not be great for you at the moment. Give it a try though, just don't be disheartened if you can't make it work!