Breastfeeding Update

It’s been almost 2 weeks since I posted about our feeding issues – hard to believe! I wish I could say that we got everything worked out, but that hasn’t been the case.

Shortly after drafting that post, I recalled that a friend of a friend whose blog I read also struggled with breastfeeding. I looked back through her archives and while her issues were different than mine, I did come across a piece of sage advice. Someone said that if the end goal was to provide breast milk to her baby, did it really matter what the delivery method was as long as that goal was accomplished?

That really resonated with me. Nursing still wasn’t working and it was adding an additional layer of stress for Landon and me, so we stopped trying. I was a little sad and a little disappointed – but to be honest at that point I was still pretty heavily in “recovery” mode so I accepted it and moved on.

I decided to put more effort into pumping so that I could provide Landon with as much breast milk as possible. However, given my physical condition, I knew that I would have to do it slightly on my own terms. The lactation consultant said that I needed to pump every 3 hours around the clock for 15-20 minutes to really establish a milk supply (or attempt to establish a milk supply). As I mentioned before, that really wasn’t possible if I wanted to get enough rest for recovery. Hard enough to do with a newborn as it is!

I’ve been trying to pump about every 4-5 hours during the day and I typically don’t pump overnight. According to the baby book, I should be pumping about 19-30 ounces of breast milk a day. I average 8-10 ounces. It isn’t much, but it does enable me to put about an ounce in most of his bottles, which makes me feel good. Hopefully he’s still getting some good antibodies that way.

My milk supply isn’t going to last with that limited pumping schedule. I know that. I’m not really ok with it, but I need to be. My goal is to be able to provide supplemental breast milk for the first month, but in the past 2-3 days I’ve noticed my supply decreasing, so not sure how much longer I’ll be able to continue.

It makes me sad and it makes me feel a little bit like I’m letting my son down. (Yes, I know that sounds ridiculous, but we’re still dealing with postpartum hormones over here…)

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On a separate note, since Landon is mostly a formula baby we’ve had to take a crash course in bottles.

(I’ve fed a lot of bottles to babies over the years thanks to babysitting, so luckily I had some insight going in!)

We’ve tried several different bottle types and here’s what works (and didn’t) for us:

• Avent bottles – These are really popular, but I’ve never liked them. They are fat and squat, have an extra piece to clean and keep up with and they tend to leak. L.J. did ok drinking from it, but the bottle leaked all over him at 2 a.m. Not cool!
• Nuk bottles – I like Nuk pacifiers, so was excited to give this one a try. It was fat and squat like the Avent bottle, but didn’t have any extra parts. It was promising, but the nipple flow was too fast and L.J. choked several times during his feeding.
• Playtex Nurser bottles – I’ve always liked these. L.J. likes them too. The only thing we don’t like is that it’s hard to get an exact measure of how much you are putting into the bottle, and it’s also hard to tell how much he has actually drank (because the bag compresses). We’ve found that these bottles have the slowest flow nipple of any we’ve tried.
• Gerber First Essential bottles – These have ended up being our go-to bottles. Bonus that they are the cheapest ones at the store. They are basic bottles with no fancy extra parts to clean. L.J. drinks from them easily without choking and they don’t leak.
• Medela bottles – I received a bunch of these with my breast pump and we like them just as well as the Gerber bottles. There’s little difference between the two.