I decided early on that I was going to nurse. I was going to breastfeed through my daughters entire first year. Then she was born. My daughter couldn’t figure out how to latch. After not peeing for the first day, the hospital decided that she needed to be given formula. Frustrated, but wanting my baby to be healthy, I agreed. I made sure to feed her skin to skin each time that I gave her a bottle so that we could bond the same as if I had been nursing. In order to make sure that my milk supply came in, I pumped whenever she took a bottle.
After the first bottle, I tried to nurse her again, this time she latched and it hurt. The doctors told me to keep giving her the formula until she was evaluated by her pediatrician. I was happy to oblige since it gave me occasional relief from the pain.
Alternating between breast and bottle made it so that she wouldn’t get too used to the bottle. I was also going to have to go back to school and work soon, so I figured that starting with both bottle and breast was probably best anyway. Before I left the hospital, I made sure to get enough milk to last until Ellie saw the pediatrician.
Don’t Use a Bottle Nipple Larger than Size 1 until you want to Wean
The number 1 most important thing that I think I did when it came to breastfeeding: I never stopped using the newborn sized nipple. The entire time that I gave my daughter a bottle, I never went passed size 1. This prevented her from getting more milk from the bottle then from my breast and stopped her from preferring the bottle over me. Babies, like adults, want to get what they want fast and easy. If a botte has milk pouring from it and the baby has to work to get mommy’s, the bottle it is.
Dealing with the Pain
Not everyone has pain when they nurse and they shouldn’t, but I did. I asked for the lactation consultant to cometo my room before I left the hospital. She showed me different latching techniques and different ways to holdEllie (all of witch I had already learned online and at a free nursing courseat GW hospital) but nothing helped. I cringed whenever I nursed and couldn’t wait until she finished so that the pain would stop. I didn’t know how I was going to make it. My nipples were red and soreall of the time.
First thing first, I got nipple cream. This helped with the pain during and after nursing. After talking to my cousin, I ordered nipple shields. Nipple shields are supposed to help with pain during latching, help babies learn to properly latch, and help women with inverted nipples nurse. I didn’t know what size to buy, so I bought two different sizes.
When they came in the mail, I couldn’t believe what I saw. They were big and bulky, how were these going to work? My cousin told me to put them over my nipple and I would see. I followed her instructions, sure enough it worked. The nipples on my daughters bottles were “shaped like a nipple” but were in fact slanted and not at all shaped like a real nipple. As a result, she was trying to drink milk the same way that she was trying to drink from the bottle and it was causing me pain. After using the nipple shield for a while and switching out her bottle nipples, the pain went away. All of these realizations took meat least a couple of weeks. I didn’t think that I was going to make it through them, but I didn’t give up.
The Bottle
My daughter’s pediatrician recommended that I keep giving her formula until the end of her second week.
I didn’t have space or money for a rocking chair, so at night, I sat on the edge of my bed and fed my daughter so that I wouldn’t fall asleep with her while laying down and potentially hurt her. On the second night I almost fell asleep with her in my arms and she almost fell to the ground. I made sure to lay on the bed and feed her from then on out.
I also began to use the formula to my advantage. Ellie drank from the bottle much faster than she nursed. During her night feedings I gave her a bottle for that first week. This way, we could both get back to sleep as soon as possible.
Sticking to It
It didn’t take long before I was producing 8 oz of milk a sitting, per breast. Yes, I had A LOT of milk. I had so much that whenever Ellie finished drinking, my milk would squirt into her face sometimes when she unlatched. She even choked sometimes because of how fast it was coming out. There was nothing I could do. Eventually, she learned to control her sucking better and I was very quick to cover my breast when she finished to avoid the squirting of milk in her face. When I wasn’t with her, I had to pump once an hour. This made class difficult and three hour finals excruciating.
My freezer was getting more and more full of milk and I began the process to donate milk to the Mother’s Milk Bank.
My daughter grew like crazy. She was in the100th percentile in height and weight. At one point, my mom, who babysat my daughter while I went to class, decided that my daughter was getting too fat and decided to supplement a meal with water instead of milk. She didn’t tell me what she was doing, but I figured it out immediately when I got home and saw that there was an extra container of milk in the fridge. I heard about this happening with a few other mom’s as well.
FUNFACTS: All of your baby’s nutrition comes from the milk that they drink. Supplementing a bottle of milk with a bottle of water is equivalent to your baby missing a meal. If you are nursing, your baby doesn’t need anything besides your milk UNLESS you or your doctor decide that your child should have something different. DON’T let anyone else force you to do something that you are not comfortable with.
I ended up nursing until Ellie was 18 months. I stopped because my body stopped producing milk. That’s also the time that I learned that I would be deployed, so I think that stress played a role in that happening. When I stopped nursing Ellie, within 3 months she dropped down to the 80th percentile for her height and weight.
While I wanted to give her toddler formula, I had found out at 6 months that Ellie was allergic to soy. Guess what’s in every single toddler formula on the market, you guessed it, soy. So cows milk it was. It took her while before she accepted it without complaint, but now she loves it. My cousin, mom, and Aunt occasionally give her almond milk now. I was on the phone with her last week and my mom pulled the almond milk from the fridge. She immediately said, “No, I don’t want almond milk, I want cows milk.” My mom and I were both shocked, first because she knew that it was almond milk without anyone telling her and two because she knew that her normal milk came from cows. You know what they say, kids say the darndest things.
