Terri's Three Very Different Breastfeeding Stories! ((Part One))
We love to share breastfeeding stories and journeys on our Facebook and Instagram pages, but we recently decided that because there is SO much more to most of our stories than a short paragraph can tell, we’re planning to open up our blog for our customers and followers to share their breastfeeding journeys. The first story comes to us from our administrative assistant, Terri. She’s had three babies, and three completely different feeding experiences! Part One is below! If you’d like to share your breastfeeding story on our blog, we’d love to hear from you!
I have 3 kids, which means 3 very different breastfeeding stories. Each one is so very different from one another. When I got pregnant with my first, I was so prepared! Prepared for birth, prepared to be a mom, prepared for breastfeeding...or so I thought. While I 100% believe you should prepare yourself for all of those things, I’m much wiser 8 years later and know that some things you learn simply from experience. So even though I attended the breastfeeding class at my local hospital, met the lactation consultant, and read a few breastfeeding books (OK, I owned a few breastfeeding books), I was not prepared for the challenge that breastfeeding would bring!
My oldest was born on his due date after a very long labor with lots of interventions and some complications. He had some issues in the beginning which caused a delay in skin-to-skin time, and that was put off even longer because my family (who had been in the waiting room for 2 days) came in to meet baby as soon as both of us were doing alright. On top of delayed bonding, he had issues with latching and would fall asleep within minutes of beginning a nursing session, which lead to him not getting much during a feeding and losing too much weight. To complicate things even more, I hemorrhaged pretty badly, resulting in me needing a blood transfusion. For some odd reason, that wasn’t done until 2 days after delivery, causing me to not produce much for my baby (as one nurse put it, now that baby was born, my body was taking care of me first and making milk for baby was not on the priority list). To say we had a rocky start is an understatement! Thankfully, I had a great lactation consultant! She helped me over and over again get baby positioned, latched, and showed us how to wake him up to continue a nursing session. Even with all that extra work, we still had to supplement with some formula before coming home from the hospital. My lactation consultant helped show me how to tape a tiny feeding tube to my breast and my husband or mom would slowly push the formula through as baby would nurse. We even did a few “finger feedings”, just to make sure he was getting enough since his latch was so poor. It was so hard! It was a lot of work and took help - lots of help! And it took an emotional toll on me. This was NOT how breastfeeding my son was “supposed” to be.
Hospital staff finger feeding baby
Coming home from the hospital only elevated the level of stress of nursing as I was sleep deprived, my nipples were sore and cracked, and, although I had my husband and my mom, I didn’t have the constant help of nurses and the lactation consultant at my aid 24/7. And baby STILL wasn’t latching well and I just couldn’t get him to latch properly on my own. I remember vividly the moment I decided I was done nursing. I had failed to get my baby to latch for probably the 1,000th time, breaking the sucking on his poor latch, only to pull him off and realized that I was now bleeding. I was crying, partially out of tired frustration, and a lot because I believed my breastfeeding journey was ending at about a week postpartum. But I remember my mom hugging me, encouraging me, and reminding me of the nipple shield that a friend (who was nursing her 4th baby at the time) had given me at my baby shower. My friend told me that she had used it with 2 of her 4 and it had made all the difference in her nursing experience. So I gave it a shot and what do you know, for the first time in a about a week and a half, my son latched perfectly! With him getting a good latch, the pain was gone, as was the bleeding! We still had to work with him to not fall asleep within the beginning of a nursing session (we would strip my son down to a diaper and my husband or mom would put a cold wash cloth under his arm when he would stop sucking), but at least he was latching properly, which gave me hope! It wasn’t much longer after we began using the nipple shield that my milk came in, which made nursing easier for baby, and he wouldn’t get as tired as quickly and stopped falling asleep until after he was really finished with a nursing session. Things were really starting to feel hopeful and although the nursing sessions were long (45+ mins) and he was nursing every 2 - 2.5 hours, I felt like I might just make my goal of breastfeeding for 1 year.
Then, right around 2 months, I developed mastitis, and it hit HARD! I had just started to feel like my body was recovering from birth… and now this! But we pushed through and kept on nursing! Then my son started cutting teeth at 5 months, which lead to biting...oh man, the biting! But again, we pushed through, this time, with the help of a lactation consultant to help stop the biting while nursing. It seemed that every time I felt like I was finally getting the hang of my son’s routine, something would change and throw it all off and I’d have to figure out our new normal. As I’ve learned, this is just an aspect of parenting - as soon as you feel like things are “normal”, something comes along and throws a kink in everything and you have to learn a new “normal”. But each time, I was determined and with the support of my husband, mom, mother-in-love, amazing doula, and other family, I pushed through and made it another month! Finally, we hit 1 year! I wasn’t quite ready to stop nursing, but he had already cut way back and slowly started cutting out another feeding here and there until he was only nursing at night to go to bed. My husband and I made the decision together to wean my son just after he turned 13 months old. While looking back now, I kinda wished I had kept going a little longer, because that time of babies really is so short, I was still super proud of myself for pushing through all the hurdles and breastfeeding my son for as long as I did!
Fast Forward 2 years later and I gave birth to my second baby, another beautiful baby boy. This time, everything was different! He came relatively quickly 2 weeks before his due date, and was still a whopping 8lbs 12oz! I had almost no interventions and immediately put baby to breast after he was born. Although I did have a minor complication that required surgical removal of the placenta which separated me from baby shortly after birth, the hospital gave me time to bond with baby before I had to be separated from him. As soon as I returned to my hospital room, I was able to nurse baby again and I realized right then and there that he was already a champ at nursing! I had no issues nursing him! He nursed so well (and often) that he was done in 10 mins! And he never lost any weight!!!! He had already gained weight at his first doctors appointment days after delivery! My nursing journey with my second son was so easy! We both enjoyed that sweet time! I made it to one year and kept going! Somewhere around 14/15 months, he went on a bit of a nursing strike. I wasn’t quite ready to end my breastfeeding journey as I believed he would be my last baby. So I took a few tips from a lactation consultant and was able to continue another few months before he went on another nursing strike, at which time my husband and I decided that (at 17 months), it was time for that journey to end. It was definitely bittersweet. He never showed interest in nursing again, so that made the end easier as it was very natural, but I was sad that those “baby days” were over. And although my journey with my second was so easy, I was still so proud of myself for breastfeeding for as long as we did! It was an accomplishment for sure!
Read part two, detailing the very different story of Terri’s third baby, HERE.