@melissa112 Hope you and George are alright. You're in the best place and I'm sure theyve kept you since George is so new and for your reassurance anyway. Try not to panic, get some rest where you can and take care of yourself as well.
To those introducing formula, as everyone else has said, don'ts beat yourselves up. I persevered with breastfeeding my first for 11 weeks and ended up with PND, sobbing every day, he sobbed every day, he stopped gaining weight and we were all in a real mess. Switched to bottles and never looked back - he's happy, healthy, smart (If I do say so myself!) And you'd never know which method he used for food, of course.
Thanks to everyone for the tongue tie advice. The thread has moved so fast for me to update as I wanted to do so when I had 2 hands available but I've decided that might not be for years at this rate 😂 Matthew had hardly any wet or dirty nappies on day 2 so we called the midwife in a panic. It was the same one that had visited us the day before - she advised to express 8 times a day, 10 mins a side to get my milk in and to feed baby by bottle at least every 3 hours, making sure he had at least 0.5oz every time.
DH spoke to her on the phone as I was too busy crying and when he got off and told me the advice, I cried more because I didn't feel I understood whether I should be formula or expressed feeding or how bringing my milk in was going to magically fix his tongue tie or latch or whatever was causing our issue. Also, at the end of the call, she took our name and laughed when she realised we were the people she'd seen the day before about tongue tie. When someone calls you in distress about their newborn not feeding, I couldn't see why laughing at the fact that we'd met before made any sense so I was fuming.
Anyway, I expressed a couple of times and got barely half an ounce in total which felt so disheartening but I decided to ignore the midwife a bit and kept breastfeeding instead and offered the expressed milk at the end of the feed. He took a drop but wasnt really interested so I took that as a good sign that he was getting enough from breast.
He got a few more wet and dirty nappies before the (different) midwife arrived the next morning so I was reassured. She told us that breastfed babies can sometimes take a day to hydrate enough to produce the right number of nappies - basically they have their first 24 hours of wet and dirty ones from what they had in the womb then take a while to process the breast milk on day one and expell it. She weighed him and he's only lost 2.5% of his birth weight which is amazing so he's definitely getting his nutrients, she was very kind and complimentary about me carrying on feeding and I felt a weight off my mind when she left.
Tongue tie clinic had a cancellation so we got in Tuesday morning, they assessed the mildest score for TT and snipped it for us, although it was up to us as she said it might not even be affecting BF, it's still early days so could just be latch and getting used to it. He cried once, got passed back to me and then wasn't even bothered by it enough to wake up properly for a feed before we went home!
I think there's less pain when feeding lately, not since TT was cut but just generally so I don't know if he and I are just finding our feet and that's all there was to it. He's opening his mouth wider now than before and apparently that's something that can take some babies a week or two to learn. So although BF is instinctive to them, they still have to learn how to latch well which is something I hadn't considered.
Ok, ramble over!!