Babies & boobies - Jessica's breastfeeding story

When I was pregnant I knew that I was going to breastfeed. I've always found it an odd concept (milk? from there?) but wanted the absolute best for my baby - I had visions of myself as this breastfeeding goddess in pretty, floating tops that gave discreet boob access for my bubs, sitting proudly in cafes around town.

When Ava was first born, the midwife laid her on my chest and she snuffled around for a while before being helped to latch on which jerked me out of my half-sleep with a loud "ouch!" Everyone looked at me in surprise and the doctor reassured me that it gets better.

It didn't.

On the second night Ava wouldn't stop screaming. She was starving. I fed her continuously for three hours (crying myself the entire time because of the pain) but she was beside herself. Finally a kindly nurse offered me some formula in a bottle. She drank 20mls in under a minute and slept all night long.

By day three I was still in hospital, had no milk coming in, no colostrum coming out, a big painful split down each nipple and blood blisters to top it all off. I couldn't wear a bra any more because the blisters would bleed and my already-sore nipples would stick to the bra. It was agony. By the time a lactation consultant could come and see me I couldn't latch Ava on at all.

On day four I went home and set up the electric breast pump and began expressing. I still had very little milk, I'd pump for twenty minutes and get 30 mls of milk so was supplement feeding with formula as well. It took three weeks for my breasts to heal up. By that point I was getting 70 mls of milk every three hours by expressing, but it still wasn't enough for Ava who lost 20% of her body weight in hospital. I began latching her back on again and SURPRISE! it wasn't too painful. Uncomfortable yes, but not like before.

I got two lovely weeks of really breastfeeding (plus some supplementary formula) and was happy to put the pump away and never look at it again. Then at six weeks old Ava suddenly started refusing the breast. We went to a lactation consultant again who said the latch was perfect (stoked) but to try pumping and make sure there wasn't a supply problem. So out came my old friend the breast pump, and I discovered my milk had dried up. I guess it's worth mentioning that my Mum's milk dried up when I was six weeks old - the same age as my daughter was.

I tried Weleda nursing tea and Fenugreek at the advice of the midwife and Plunket nurse but no success. I was really distressed at losing my milk - after all the effort to breastfeed I only got two weeks! I went to see my doctor, who offered me a script for Domperidone. Domperidone is an anti-nausea drug prescribed to cancer patients and one of its side effects is lactation. It worked a dream. My milk came back and I had more than ever before. Ava was happy and started really gaining weight, I felt like a proper mum finally and I didn't need the breast pump!

Aside from lactation, one of the other side effects of Domperidone is weight gain. After two months of taking it I found I had put on 11 kgs and was the same weight as when I was 30 weeks pregnant. Talk about devastated! I weighed up all the pros and cons and finally decided that I would stop taking the Domperidone and hope for the best. Ava was three and a half months old - I wanted to breastfeed until she was six months at least but I felt that gaining so much weight was putting my health at risk. It seemed so unfair after being pregnant, then losing the bump and fluid only to put it all back on again.

After stopping the Domperidone my milk lasted two more weeks then disappeared for good. Ava was breastfed until 4 months old, and I'm really proud of my efforts. I know I tried my absolute hardest and will attempt to breastfeed again with number two. She's now a happy bottle-drinking 7 month old.

I did get an official verdict about why I couldn't produce breastmilk - my body struggles to produce oxytocin, which is why I was in labour for 55 hours (ow!!) and then couldn't make much breastmilk. But at the end of the day, I think a healthy baby is the most important thing regardless of how they're fed and a little breastmilk at the start is still amazing for a baby's health.

Babies & boobies - my breastfeeding story

Breastfeeding. What a daunting thought. Well, it was for me. During my pregnancy I knew I would breastfeed yet I was absolutely terrified. I wasn't worried about labour. I wasn't worried about childbirth. Nor was I worried about the constant sleepless nights ahead. But when it came to breastfeeding I was a-shakin' in my boots!

Who knows why? Perhaps it was due to the fact that as soon as that wee fleck of a heartbeat started squirming around in my belly my boobs felt like they'd had a run in with a baseball bat and my nipples felt like they'd lost a long battle with sandpaper. I couldn't even bear to touch them let alone have a gaping human hoover hone in on them! Also, I just figured that it was going to be hard. How would baby know what to do? And more importantly, how would I? There's only so much "training" one can do in this situation!

Once Redford popped out though it was a different story. Having spent the first four minutes of my sons life watching him struggling for breath whilst tubes were shoved down his throat and oxygen masks hovered over his tiny, squidgy face my motherly instinct kicked in and all I wanted to do was cheer him up with a sweet boobie/face plant move.

And face plant he did. Little Red turned out to be the child you hear about in ante-natal class. You know, the one that picks himself up with superhuman strength and somehow, in one deft ninja move, goes from snuggling under your neck one moment to headbutting your boob the next and then suck suck sucking away. Needless to say, I was all new mother naivete and thought "Sweet! No hard work required, the boy's a pro." Oh but I was wrong. 

Pumped up with new found hope and the belief that motherhood was going to be a cinch I pleaded with the hospital staff to let us go home the next night and, somewhat reluctantly, they consented. Obviously, I don't know better than the midwife. Within two hours of being home the little peanut chose to exercise his lungs at full volume and his hunger at full capacity. My colostrum was OK - it did the trick for half an hour or so, but this child wanted milk and he wanted milk now. I have no doubt that our neighbours were counting the ways to murder us in our sleep (sleep? what sleep?) for the noise that was reverberating from our bedroom. Thus began the infamous late-night dummy run. I figured that after about 45 minutes bubs was getting fed up with trying and simply comfort sucking to fall asleep so a dummy wouldn't go astray in this situation. So....

12.30am: Baby Daddy Nick gets sent out to buy dummies.
1.20am: I call Nick to see where the heck he is only to find out that he's made his way out to Lower Hutt in a desperate attempt to find a supermarket still open.

*Note to self: win Lotto and start up a 24 hour baby supplies store.

1.45am: Nick calls me, "Um, I'm just at the petrol station looking for some but I'm pretty sure the attendant thinks I'm either shoplifting or on drugs...."
2.00am: Nick returns with empty hands, apologising profusely. Oh dear.

With snippets of sleep here and there, we manage to get through the first night with a visit from our midwife growing thankfully nearer. Hoping for a magic answer when she finally arrived we were a little let down when she told us to hang in there, my milk would come through soon enough. So we waited. Then the night came around again and if I thought it couldn't get any worse I was wrong. At 11.30pm I began the 9 hour feeding marathon. This consisted of me sitting in bed with the boy permanently attached to my boobs (both of us drifting in and out of light sleep) until 8.30am when the midwife returned again and we waited for yet another magic answer - we were told again to hang in there, my milk would probably come through tonight and if not we could look at topping bubs up with formula.

Thankfully the midwife was right and my sanity was saved (not that there was much left after the whole 14 hours of sleep I'd had since going into labour 4 days earlier). I still remember the feeling of the milk letting down: all of a sudden there was a warm tingling sensation and within 20 minutes my boobs had gone up a cup size and looked like mini versions of Pammy's melons. Finally, with a little effort, Red latched himself like a pro once again, he got a belly full of delicious milk and we got a half decent night's sleep.

The next 6 weeks were full on. Little was a hungry tyke and when people suggested I get him into a routine and feed him every 2 hours I smiled and nodded but never took heed. This boy needed to be fed on demand and there was no two ways about it. He was also a lazy feeder, unlatching before the hind milk got flowing so he was only satiated for a wee while. My midwife recommended feeding him off only one breast each feed which helped immensely and a friend of mine also suggested bottle feeding him before his longest patch of sleep at night so out came the breast pump and by around 8 weeks we finally had a baby that slept well, averaging 6-7 hours a night. This was a lifesaver, even if he was still feeding every hour to hour and a half during the day. 

My milk supply has always been, and still is, a mystery to me. Sometimes I seem to have gallons stored away in there and other times I literally have to sit there milking myself to get even a drop. This plus the fact that he got used to feeding via bottle and is hideously impatient led me down the top-up-with-formula road which I had originally wanted to avoid. At first I felt horrible about doing it, that my milk wasn't enough for him and that everyone would judge me but in the end I figured the most important thing was keeping peanut full and happy and if anyone had a problem with it then it was theirs alone.

So now, at 5 months, I feel like we're finally in a feeding routine. He breastfeeds every 3-4 hours during the day with a bottle at 9pm before bedtime and usually wakes at around 5am for another feed. I love breastfeeding him, I adore the closeness and strong bond we have and how feeding time is just Mummy and baby time. We've just started him on solids which he's slowly getting his head around - watch this space for foodies blogs! - so aren't needing to top him up so much with formula.

All in all, I feel I've had a good run with breastfeeding. For something I was so terrified about to begin with I think Little Red and I came out the other end OK. When it comes down to it, it's such a special time and to be honest, I'll be pretty bummed out the day he stops for good!

Babies & boobies - Ruth's breastfeeding story

My little one was born with a very strong suck and very hungry! She fed and fed and fed for the first twelve hours after she was born which was great news for us.

Unfortunately, she was born not knowing how to manage the natural gape reflex - the tongue down action that all babies "should" instinctively do which meant that she caused a lot of damage to my nipples. She was checked for a tongue tie but didn't have one so I had to adopt nipple shields to be able to keep on breastfeeding.

I found that feeding got harder, rather than easier, over the next few days. Firstly, my little one got jaundice and lost too much weight so we had to stay in the hospital for a few extra days, force feeding her to get her weight back up which proved a challenge as she kept falling asleep at the breast and it was a struggle to finish a feed - such a contrast from her first few hours! 

Because of this, when we got home I became incredibly engorged and she still wasn't feeding strongly so I was in a lot of pain.... unfortunately, it turned into a breast infection.
This necessitated antibiotics which upset my little one even more and made her fussy during feeding, just as she was starting to get back that strong suck she was born with.

We had a lactation consultant come see us and were told that she wasn't getting enough milk when she was sucking because of the nipple shields, but due to the way she places her tongue I just couldn't stand the pain of feeding without them.

After a few weeks of anxiety over every feed that she wasn't 'getting enough milk' she regained her birth weight and started growing like a weed, gaining over 400 grams in one week! 

I am still using the shields as we have not yet worked out a way to get her to learn to put her tongue down when she feeds, despite visits to the Plunket Karitane Centre for help. I tell myself that the important thing is that I am still breastfeeding and I should count myself lucky as there are many women who aren't able to do it at all. 

I have hope that eventually we will be able to feed without any of the paraphernalia!

Babies & boobies - Huia's breastfeeding story

Just recently I met a woman about to have her first baby. We got chatting and I asked her if she was planning to breastfeed, “Of course!” she exclaimed, as though there isn’t any viable alternative. I remember being that woman. Our baby is now four and a half months and has only ever been fed breastmilk but it's been one hell of a roller coaster ride! Here is our story....

The decision to breastfeed was an easy one. All the research indicates that breast milk is by far the best thing for baby, designed especially for him and modified constantly to meet his needs. I needed no convincing.  

Wanting to be as prepared as possible we enrolled in Mama-licious' breastfeeding classes. We took notes, actively engaged in class, discussed what we’d learnt afterwards. We also attended antenatal classes, of which one whole evening was dedicated to breastfeeding. I read books, talked to women about feeding - I was prepared to feed our baby and I knew what to do. Yet all the preparation seemed somewhat pointless once he arrived. 

Soon after our little boy was born we attempted the first feed to extract the most divine of all breast milk, the colostrum. He wouldn’t latch. Or couldn’t. He didn’t know what he was doing. And, somewhat surprisingly, nor did I. Despite the reading, the classes, the research, when faced with our own reality things didn’t all fall into place. I will always remember the midwife hand expressing my breast to extract the precious few mls of colostrum with a needle-less syringe: “3 mls - that’s fantastic!” she’d exclaim. 

The next weeks of feeding every 3 hours during the day and every 4 hours at night (from the start of the first feed to the start of the next) with feeding taking at least an hour and attempting to latch him - sometimes successfully (and if not, feeding him expressed milk extracted with the aid of breast pump) - was exhausting. Thank goodness for our midwife Annie, Ann at the Plunket family centre, and a midwife friend - with their support, knowledge and encouragement, baby and I were learning the art of feeding. Not being able to latch baby and feed him “properly” was great self-flagellation fodder. But we did learn to latch and we survived that learning curve.

Unfortunately the next hurdle was just around the corner. In all my focusing on trying to latch baby I hadn’t been focusing on my own comfort... so while baby was learning to latch he wasn’t doing so in a way that was pain free. However, people say to expect “discomfort” so how was I to know that my discomfort was the beginning of a rather huge crack in my nipple? 

The pain of a nipple crack is extreme. My toes would curl as I put baby to my breast. I began to fear feeding time. So it was back to see Ann at the Family Centre to help with my technique and now I needed to take Panadol in advance of feeds (fearing feeding was bound to affect not just my body’s ability to let-down the milk but also, perhaps more importantly, the bonding with my baby). I was prescribed antibacterial gel for my cracked nipple at the risk I would get an infection in the gaping fissure which bled as he fed. 

The only way to fix the crack and keep feeding was to get the latch perfect every time. It was suggested that perhaps I could give that breast a break and express off it and feed baby the expressed milk but I didn’t want to - I just wanted to feed my baby “naturally”. After about ten days the crack healed, yay! I think nipple shells really helped on that front and the nipple shields probably did too, although I found them very hard to use as they seemed so slippery.

Our next hurdle was weight or rather the lack of it. Regular weigh-ins with Plunket to ensure his growth saw him, worryingly, at the bottom of the chart. I think perhaps it was during this hurdle that I came closest to stopping breastfeeding. Mainly out of worry and fear that my milk was not good enough for him, that my milk couldn’t sustain him in the way that he needed to grow big and strong. Feeding my baby was feeling like too much responsibility - what if my milk, all he consumed, wasn’t the perfect potion? If my milk wasn’t good enough, perhaps I wasn’t good enough to be his mother? It was at this stage that breastfeeding became a bit of a head fuck - those bloody charts! Our man is growing. He isn’t a big boy but he’s our long man.

Then came the thrush. I never knew you could get thrush in your nipples! It was in my nipples and his mouth according to the private lactation consultant whom we deployed to assist in baby’s inability to stay latched. He’d latch, suck, and pull off screaming. This cycle would continue until we were both sufficiently traumatised and realised that something wasn’t right. 

The lactation consultant was great - well worth the $75 per hour, but... why is such breastfeeding support not publicly available? With all the research clearly indicating that the “health outcomes” for breastfed babies are so much better, why is there not a gaggle of lactation consultants on magic carpets ready to come to your aid? Better funding is needed to support women in feeding their babies. It seems completely wrong to me that, in order to get the support that I needed, we were compelled to turn to a private consultant. 

The thrush in my nipples is now under-control after 9 delightful days of having to put gel in the dear boy's mouth after every feed (kind of like trying to medicate a cat) and, after vinegar rinsing my nipples, gel on those bad boys too.

Breastfeeding has been bloody hard and I can completely understand why women don’t persevere. I want all women to feel supported in feeding their babies whether that be with breastmilk or formula. Happy mama = happy baby. 

I’ve thought a lot about why breastfeeding is so hard and what could be done to make it easier. I think it all comes down to the way that society is now structured and it's lack of exposure to breastfeeding. We don’t see women feeding and when we do it's seen as rude or impolite to really watch and see what’s going on. Breasts are seen primarily as sexual objects not as feeding vessels and this is were I think a big part of the problem is. We need to see breasts as amazing milk creators and I love that my body can make milk for my baby - I love that my breasts are fulfilling their natural purpose. 

We need to watch women feed, we need to talk about feeding problems, we need to feed our babies around women who have feed theirs not so long ago, because our mothers fed us 20+ years ago and can’t be expected to remember! But the most important thing we must do is really share experiences and discuss breastfeeding. I am so grateful to all the wonderful women who have supported me.

PS. Having our darling boy hasn’t all been hard. He is beautiful and my heart melts in a way I could never have imagined. I would do anything for one of his twinkly smiles and my heart has grown tenfold in love. Our breastfeeding experience has been hard but having a him in our lives has been a delight.

Babies & boobies - real mothers, real stories

Apart from childbirth itself, breastfeeding is by far the most intense and stressful part of having a baby. Along with my own story, I will be posting accounts from some other mamas that took time out from their busy schedules to very kindly write about their own experiences to share with you all. Keep an eye out for these heart-grabbing, inspirational tales....

Mamas & society - breastfeeding bigotry

So, babies and boobs - they just go together, right? Like gin and tonic, men and rugby, Gaga and ridiculous shoes. Why then, are Mums sometimes made to feel less than comfortable about breastfeeding their little bundles in public?

I've only breastfed Little Red a couple of times in public (I generally express a bottle for when we're out and about - 1. It's easier as he takes his sweet time and has a rather embarrassing habit of leaving me high, dry and floating in the breeze while he takes in the sights mid-feed and 2. Sadly, I do sometimes feel uncomfortable about breastfeeding in public). Luckily when I've breastfed, I've been in baby-friendly places and usually with family, friends or other Mamas so haven't had much trouble. But I certainly have heard some horror stories!

Jessie, a fellow mother from coffee group who's gorgeous wee girl is a week younger than my boy, was recently the unlucky recipient of what I like to call "breastfeeding bigotry". Spending the afternoon in Wellington's Central Library, she found a quiet, comfortable couch to feed her hungry baby on. Harmless, discreet and justified, right? Well, not according to one awful gent (gent? Antagonistic ass hole, more like) who had the audacity to remark "Oh, I didn't realise I was in a buffet bar.... you could have found somewhere better to do that". I have no doubt that your eyes are bulging out of your skull right now as you think, why on earth would someone say a thing like that?! I know that's what I thought (among many other things that aren't fit to write on this page) and so did all the other mothers in our coffee group.

Ruth, another proud coffee group mother to a lovely little girl, also found herself victim to a breastfeeding bigot when she asked a waiter at local coffee shop, Fannie Mae, if she could feed her little one to which he answered "Yes, as long as you don't expose yourself".

As well as these two incidents, I've heard stories of Mamas feeding in public and being met with either stony glares or downright stares and the odd "ahem". I've even been told by someone, in person, that they "find it offensive" when Mums breastfeed in public! Yes, yes, of course there are plenty of places where you're met with loving nods and knowing winks but what I want to know is, why shouldn't it be like this everywhere you go?

Babies have been breastfed for, well, forever! How else are they going to get the nutrients and sustenance that they so deservedly need? So why the stigma? Why this need to over-sexualise breasts and feeding? No, we're not going to get our boobies out in your cafe and shake them around for all to see. We're not in some schoolboy fantasy or some overtly sexual, breast obsessed, Oedipus porn parody with middle aged men running around in over-sized nappies crying for their Mummy's and begging to be punished - because let's face it, it's generally the male race that has the issue and aren't we, as Mums, simply doing what we were given boobies to do? How do these men think they were fed when they were rolling around in diapers? Via an elaborate maze of straws? Do they think they came straight from the amniotic and sunk their gums (!!) into a nice juicy steak? Ah, no. I guarantee the majority of them had mothers just like us who had them attached to their breasts at some point.

So, I say let's quit the bigotry against breastfeeding in public and be supportive of Mamas and however they choose to feed their babies. Because after all, who wants to stand in the way of a hungry baby? It's only going to end in tears!