I have been thinking a lot of breastfeeding lately, not so strange maybe. But I think these last 8 weeks or so I have learnt more about it than I ever thought possible. Like how important it is to keep on feeding, even when you think there is no milk as it works as a supply and demand situation. Miss out on a feed or substitute it with a bottle and you are missing out on a demand and hence get less supply. I wish I fully would have understood this back in week 3 when I gave in to supplement with a bottle.
As fore substituting the feeds with expressing, well it is all good in theory, but the machine, or a hand pump never does as good a job as a baby. A wonderfully helpful lady passed a long a document that was a protocol with a few points to follow if you had a baby with bad weight gain, first one is to correct the latch on. You would think with the human race being around for so may years that this should be the most natural thing or we would have died out. But talking to a lot of women it seems most have had some issues with breast feeding one way or another. I have learnt that it is called breastfeeding because the baby really needs to draw a lot of the breast not just the nipple.
The one thing in this protocol that I really wish I would have seen back in week 3 was the “supplementor” or a lactation aid. This is a container with tubing coming from it where you pour the formula (or expressed milk) and attach the tubes with tape so when the baby feeds, he will draw both milk from the breast and the tube, hence stimulating the breast for creating milk, yet still getting that extra nutrition from the formula. This way you don’t miss out on a “demand”. Really cleaver. I found it really tricky to find one at first, thinking I would have to build one myself, but once I found out what makes there where I manged to get one off amazon, for 15 pounds. And yes it is a bit fiddly at first to fit the tubes into Tycho’s mouth, but it is worth it as he doesn’t gulp the milk down like he does with the bottle and therefor gets less windy and takes a longer time feeding. My milk prodction which really took a nosedive after I introduced more bottles has now slowly but surely started to get better. I just wished that the midwifes that got me to start supplementing would have told me about this.
Most of the informationg has been given to me by the lovely people behind the Breast feeding Network, I even had one of their voulenteers come to my house to help me out with getting the latch on correctly. She also helped me out with a lot of other thing and was a lovely support when the GP told me to “pack it in”. Wonderful that people feel so passionately about breastfeeding, that they take time out from their busy life to go to a strangers house to help them out with such a thing! They also run nationwide drop in centres for people to go to if they have any worries or questions.
Right back to bed with me!
xoxo
Hellie
Tags: breastfeeding, supplementors
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