My Breastfeeding Story: Part I

Long before I had my first daughter, I had resolved to breastfeed my children. I knew my mother had breastfed me for one year, and my mother-in-law had breastfed my husband for two-and-a-half years. As I went through months of infertility, I watched my friends breastfeed their babies, and I saw how happy their babies were, how easily comforted, and how portable the breastfeeding mother/baby pair were.

Luckily when the time came, my newborn latched on like a pro. She was placed on my chest immediately after her birth, and we nursed for a blissful 15-20 minutes. One of my favorite newborn pictures of her shows her at the breast with one alert “whale eye” peeking up at the camera. It’s almost as if she were saying, “This is where I’m supposed to be, and I’m content here no matter what else is happening around me.”

I took a breastfeeding class at the hospital after the birth, and that helped tremendously. With all the reading I had done I felt prepared to breastfeed, but it was a different thing to have a tiny, live baby to latch onto my breast. We roomed together at the hospital and things went well from the start. Often times though I joked about how it took four people to breastfeed–me, my baby, my husband to help with pillows and positioning and my mother to help supply me with food and water while I nursed!

A few days after I got home, my milk came in. Painful engorgement left me frustrated and crying. Thankfully hot showers and hot compresses before nursing and cold compresses after nursing helped relieve the pain and engorgement and we were once again on our way. I was surprised to have a few additional episodes of engorgement over the ensuing days as my milk supply attempted to regulate itself, but I knew how to handle them and my resolve to breastfeed remained constant.

It took about eight or nine weeks for my milk supply to regulate, and during that time I experienced recurring plugged ducts. Fortunately I had heard that it could take eight weeks for both the mother and baby to learn all the ins and outs of nursing, and I rode out those hard times. I learned to use hot compresses, to nurse often with the baby’s chin pointed toward the plugged duct, and eventually to hand-express until I could see the small white bleb on my nipple and I could remove it with a sterilized needle, clean fingernails, or simply by expressing the milk. At one point a plugged duct turned into mastitis which was treated with antibiotics.

By the time my baby was three months of age, there was no question we were going to continue nursing. She was a high-needs baby and often nursing was the only thing that would settle her. She was content and extremely happy 95% of the time, but if she ever got hungry, tired, fussy or just plain bored, nursing was always the answer. I loved that she never cried for more than seconds at a time, because she was so easily contented at the breast. My husband appreciated that she nursed for that reason too!

Just as my family moved from one state to another, my daughter went from sleeping 5-8 hour stretches at night to waking hourly. We tried everything possible to determine what was wrong. We investigated medical concerns and I even went on an elimination diet for a while and also received treatment for possible thrush. It was during this time that I first contacted a La Leche League leader. I was grateful for the support and information she was able to provide, and I started attending meetings regularly. Finally we determined that my daughter simply needed comforting through the night. We already were co-sleeping and I would go to bed with her when it was her bedtime and I tried to get as much sleep as possible that way. As she got older, we worked on ways to get her to sleep better. I read several books including Dr. Sears’ Nighttime Parenting (and later his new The Baby Sleep Book) and Elizabeth Pantley’s The No-Cry Sleep Solution: Gentle Ways to Help Your Baby Sleep Through the Night. Not much helped until she was old enough to accept a change in the bedtime routine to: nurse, brush teeth, read stories, rest on Daddy’s chest and sing songs until she fell asleep. Only when we separated nursing from falling asleep did I get some relief, and that was when my daughter was 20 months old or so.

Click here to read Part II of my breastfeeding story!