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Episode 129 Content and Overview
Breastfeeding is commonly thought of as something that comes naturally once your baby is born. For a small number of mothers this may be true, but for the majority of new moms the truth is that breastfeeding takes work and dedication. I am in my second season of breastfeeding and I have learned a lot, and many things I have learned the hard way. In this episode I share those lessons with you to hopefully save you from some of the mistakes I have made, and let you in on some of the changes I made with breastfeeding the second time around.
Included in This Episode
- Links to all Breastfeeding Episodes
- Preparing for Breastfeeding
- Breastfeeding Basics
- Troubleshooting Your Breasts
- Troubleshooting Your Baby
- Breastfeeding challenges in the real world
- Pumping Breast Milk
- Pumping Breast Milk, Building a Stash & Pumping at Work
- Bottle Feeding
- Infant Formula
- Breast crawl
- Pregnancy and Breastfeeding with Large Breasts
- Breast Size and Milk Production
- Working Out After Baby & Milk Production
- Cabbage Leaves
- The mistakes I made that led up to me getting an abscess in my breast
- The lessons I learned from getting an abscess in my breast
- All About Breastfeeding Facebook Community
- Breastfeeding Apps
- Exclusive breastfeeding
- Your baby sleeping through the night
- Over supply
- Building a freezer stash
- Donating milk
- The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding
- Kelly Mom
- Lori Isenstadt, IBCLC – All About Breastfeeding
- All About Breastfeeding Podcast
- Zahler makes a high quality prenatal vitamin that has the active form of folate plus omega 3s and DHA. This is my favorite prenatal vitamin, the one I take everyday and the one I recommend to all expecting moms. Zahler is offering an exclusive discount to listeners of the Pregnancy Podcast. To check out the vitamin and find out how you can save 25% when you buy a one month supply on Amazon click this link Zahler Prenatal + DHA.
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Hi Vanessa,
Thanks for this episode. I think it’s important to talk about challenges and that they CAN be overcome. I agree with most everything you said in this episode, especially about feeding the baby at night. Yes, it would be “easier” if my partner fed the baby at night, but that would mean the hassle of pumping at some other time during the day, or while he’s feeding the baby. Which seems totally not worth it! There is one point that in my own experience (caveat that I’m a FTM and only have one data point) that I disagree with. We introduced a bottle at 4 weeks because I had an appointment that couldn’t be rescheduled. After that appointment, we didn’t re-introduce the bottle until 8 weeks at the recommendation of a neonatal nurse friend of mine and my baby absolutely would NOT eat from the bottle (I mean, breastfeeding is pretty great. If I had the choice, I wouldn’t want to eat from the bottle either!). It took us trying every single day for 6 weeks to have her eat from the bottle for her to finally accept it again readily.
I’m back at work now and am lucky enough to have a job that allows me to work from home on Fridays, so my daughter is exclusively breastfed from Friday-Sunday, with one bottle on Sundays. We found that if she only ate from the breast for those 3 days, come Monday when she would need to eat from the bottle, it was a real challenge for the caregiver. Of course, she isn’t going to starve herself, but she might be super grouchy until she finally decides she’s ready to eat from the bottle. So, we started doing one bottle the day prior so she can be “used to it” to make Monday easier. I usually pump during one of her naps on Sunday, so the milk is ready for her when she wakes up.
I just wanted to share my experience in case others have similar experience or questions around this! Anyway, I love all the work you do—you definitely helped ease my mind and give me so many good resources (Kelly Mom and the LLL are life savors!) as I prepped for this life-changing experience!
Cheers,
Sara
Sara, thank you for sharing your experience!