Breastfeeding

Well he feeds when he wakes up, then we sort of play and talk for a little bit and then he gets a bath, and then he feeds about half an hour after that, then he'll probably feed about two, two and a half hours after that again. And then he'll probably sort of go on like a three, three and a half, three hour cycle until the evening and then he'll feed like every hour to an hour and a half. So he really sort of like bulks up in the evening before bedtime.

How do you know when he wants to be fed?

He sort, he sort, we've sort of got it down to like a, a communication, like a talk, he goes [makes baby noise] sort of thing [laughs]. We'll check his nappy and if it's not that then I know that it's, it's a feed that he's after, and he sort of latches straight on so. If I get, if I offer it to him and he's not hungry then just looks away and doesn't sort of make contact with my breast at all so, I know if he's hungry or not.

And can you describe a feed in close detail, what you're doing, how long, is he having both sides, that sort of thing?

It depends, how, how it depends on how he feeds, 'cause sometimes he does, and he's hungrier than others obviously. And if I latch, I latch him on to one side and if he takes, if he takes a while to sort of eat, excuse me, then he's probably just wanting a drink and it's probably not like a full, full feed that he's having, whereas if you've suckled on he go, he just goes for it when he's really hungry and it, you can feel yourself if you've got like a full breast you can feel it literally emptying. And then at the end he'll sort of latch on, latch on, latch on and he'll sort of come off and on, and coming off and on, and coming off and on and if he does that then I offer the other one because, he, he's obviously not getting enough out of the one I've got left. So if I do that then he latches straight onto the other until he's finished but he's, he does tend to latch off, if I offer him both he does tend to latch off quite soon onto the second. He doesn't sort stay there long.

So he comes off on his own?

Oh yeah he always.

When he's finished?

Yeah he always comes off on his own I never take him off. So, just literally however long he wants [laughs] to be there for, but he doesn't take that long now, to start with it was, it was taking sort twenty, twenty-five, sometimes thirty minutes but I think his suckle must have got better because it's probably ten, fifteen now but he seems to still empty me as well, so I think he's just, his sucks probably just got quicker [laughs]. Initially it was quite tiring obviously, but we've managed to get him into a little routine now where he goes to bed about eleven and he doesn't wake up till seven so [laughs] I can't complain at all. But on the evening he does feed every hour to an hour and a half, it's like he's bulking up before he goes to bed, and then the second he wakes up he gets his, he gets a feed and then after his bath he gets another feed. So he does tend to sort of build up, empty himself while he sleeps all night and then feeds again to fill up.
 

Sorry [laughs] I would breastfeed the baby before he would have his solids in the morning before his breakfast, lunchtime I would probably say that he would have like a ten-thirty or eleven-thirty breastfeed, then he would have his lunch and then I would offer him a breastfeed again. What I found was that once he'd started to have a wider variety of solids and that we were combining foods, he would then start [talks to baby]. Once the baby started getting wider solids, a wider range of solids, I noticed that when I would put him to the breast that sometimes he would bite me.

Ah.

And I knew then that he was starting to say he didn't want that midday feed, or he didn't want the one after lunch, and you know sometimes we would have a bit a battle with me trying to get him on and he would go on and he would smile almost and then bite me, and I would think, 'Well that's very naughty, that it's not nice to bite mummy' but I knew then that he wasn't really wanting it, so we then sort of would drop one feed off. We've got to that stage now where he's on three a day, which some people would say, 'Well that's quite disappointing isn't it?' but he sometimes doesn't want his afternoon one, and seeing as that I will be returning to work, I feel I can now keep my breastfeeding going longer because if he only really wants to top and tail the day i.e. have one when he wakes in the morning and one before he goes to bed, I feel between us we will breastfeed longer, and that I don't have the pressure at work of finding a room to express. So the fact that I've stayed off with him longer rather than going back to work after six months and that he himself has decided that he just wants a breastfeed in the morning and night and he can take or leave it at lunchtime, I think will, we don't have a date now when we're going to stop breastfeeding. We just are breastfeeding, and even my husband asked me the other day he said, 'So, you know, do you think you're going to keep going with [son]?' and I'd said, 'Yes' he said, 'Do you think you'll keep going till we have another one? Because of course you could always keep feeding him and feed another baby' so all these things that we hadn't thought about, initially my goal had been, 'If I could get to three months, if I could get to three months, because of the pain, if I could just get to three months that would be great', then it would be, 'Well if I could just get to six months so that he starts weaning that would be great', and now it's just well there's not that pressure any more to think about if only, because we're doing it. Of course you get another load of problems now where you get people sort of saying, 'You're not still breastfeeding are you? Are you still breastfeeding him?' So you have other attitudes to deal with about being a longer breastfeeder.
 

And, you know, that allows me to go into this experience now my baby is eight weeks and I feel totally happy, I totally follow my instinct and my body, I have not, I have not expressed a single time, and it's just, a total harmony, you know, it's my body, knows what it has to do and my babies knows how to get it, it's just the way it's meant to be, I think and, so, that totally natural, there's no equipment, there's no [laughs] you know, you can always go out, it's always on you, it's easy, this time.

How have you found the milk supply this time now that you're not expressing? 

Totally I, it seems that my baby's getting what he needs, I haven't had engorgement, I haven't had discomfort, if I have it it's just for, you know, half a day and it's not as bad as it was the first time so, you know, if there is too much milk then I don't know, it sort of sorts itself out, I don't do anything it's just happening and that's the magic of it, it's easy because I don't tamper with it, it's a sort of a, it's an automatic thing, I you know, I don't do anything [laughs].

Do you find you have different amounts of milk at different times during the day?

During the day, well it's very interesting because my baby is quite a sleepy baby this time and he has a sort of frantic feeding and it always happens in the evening and I wonder whether my milk is actually my, I usually find that I have more milk and perhaps the better milk, I don't know, but he seems to want to really feed at this time, he feeds almost hourly, so he's not a baby that feeds every three hours like they tell you it should be, my baby tends to feed early in the morning when I get up, he feeds about you know, hourly, sort of at three hour, you know, three hours at an hour interval and then sleeps quite a lot when he's awake but doesn't feed very much and then in the evening he has another burst of feeding time where he wants me all the time and that's the way he is. And I'm not worried about it as, you know, you get sort of advice that it should be every two hours when they are little and then every three hours, but really he knows when he's hungry and, that, you know, there's no I was told to wake him up every two hours to sort of feed him but he's not hungry, he doesn't want it, he's asleep, he's happy, he's probably growing up, so I leave him and he knows what he needs and I think, you know, I can see that he's well, with him.
 

And I remember it, when me daughter was six week old, ringing the health visitor and saying, I think it was something like half past five on a Friday, when everybody's wanting to get home to work and saying, 'You don't have to come, because this is not a child, this is a freak of nature, and I just can't cope. And she said, 'Why what's wrong?' and I said, 'She'll never, I can't put her down, and I have to carry this baby everywhere.' Because I I'm, even though I had all the instincts, you know, everything was there, I still thought that there was something wrong, because I thought that she should, I thought babies did go down in their own cot and, and would sleep on their own and, you know, so because even during the day I couldn't put her down if, she'd be asleep and if you put her down in her, in her little crib she would start to cry, she wanted me to pick her back up. I thought, 'This ain't right, there's summat wrong, what's happening?' And, and I said to my health visitor, 'You know what, she, I can't put her down she'll, she's crying, out if I leave room she starts to cry, you know, like what's wrong? And this can't be normal'. And she said to me, 'Actually it is normal, because she's a baby, and for nine months she's been with you, and all she wants to do is be with you,' and she said it and I thought [sighs], 'Well that makes so much sense, that's so much easier than thinking that she's, she'll sleep and stressing that I can't get her to go in this crib', because this crib were, you know, it were like a nasty word to me because, I couldn't get her in it and I felt that everybody else's baby went in their cribs and mine wouldn't, and I'd gone through every, you know, oh it's because it's closed in, oh it's because it's got this hood thing on it, oh it's because she don't like this, she don't like that, I'd made every possible excuse that I could, oh she'd like them things in hospital better because you can see through 'em', every excuse I possibly could, never considered that all she wanted to do were be with me because I were her mother, it, it never, never entered me head, and when this, when the health visitor said it I thought 'oh yeah'.

Was that a huge weight off your shoulders?

Yeah. Yes, I just felt that in that one statement it all made sense, so that's, just, live my life how I need to live my life as a mother, stop trying to be independent from my daughter, accept that this is how life is, and once I did that, and I stopped trying to put pressure on myself to hoover every day, and put her down because I'll spoil her, which, you know, I, lots of people, 'Oh you don't want to be carrying her about all day, you'll spoil her, you'll never get a minute, you're making a rod for your own back' all these things, and in me, here, I'd be here at home in me, like, 'Oh God I'm doing it all wrong, oh no, I will, I wouldn't, what will so and so, what will auntie so and so say because I've, I've spoilt her, I've spoilt the-I've fed this baby and I've spoilt it, and I'm, I'm doing it wrong I'm not good, I can't do this'. And so all that went, I just thought, 'd'you know I'm going to just trust what feels right, trust this process', and that's what I did, and we absolutely sailed through, we had a wonderful time. And, you know, we had us little moments along way as you do, things weren't always great and there'd be night times when I'd sort of be blue in the face and thinking, 'Oh no what have, you know, what have I done?' [laughs], 'Scuse me. But it were all, I acknowledged it as all being normal and that was what was normal, and not this trying to make, trying to make a baby fit in with my life, I just accepted that we had to learn it were a new thing, we were a new family who had to learn to be a family together and each one of us as individuals would bring something to that, and had to take something away fr

Well my husband was the main support, at home, in terms of just being around and like doing everything that wasn't related to the immediate needs of the baby which obviously I, I was the [laughs], was the one who was needed to do that in terms of feeding. And I suppose it's amazing how much time feeding a newborn baby takes, that's amazing I think when you get a newborn baby home you just have no appreciation of the drain on time, you know, you'll be sitting for hours on end feeding, and so nothing else gets done. And then when you're not feeding, once you've sorted out everything else that the baby needs you're tired because you're not getting much sleep, so the second priority after feeding the baby make sure, making sure he or she's okay is to get some sleep, and so literally days can pass and you don't do anything else, and that's a revelation really I think when you first have the first child. And for me it was quite frustrating because I'm the sort of person who, I cram, lots and lots of things into a day and get a sense of achievement from having done a lot in a day, and so to actually get through a day and feel I haven't actually done anything apart from suckle this baby and maybe have a sleep was quite difficult  to get used to.

So how did you reconcile that difference?

It took time, it took a long time, you know I'd say several weeks really, before I realised that this was actually the most important thing I could be doing, and that it wasn't doing nothing, that it was actually growing this baby and that, that was my prime role at the time.

So this was your day's work?

Exactly.

And you had to be satisfied that you'd done a good job?

Yes that's it, but it's a really big mind shift, and it's not something I give, I think people tell you beforehand [laughs], and maybe it's not something that everyone experiences I think some people are quite happy to sit on the settee for six hours a day, or some twelve hours day but it's not easy to read I don't find when you're breastfeeding, you know, I tried having phone conversations while I was breastfeeding and that didn't really work either it seemed to sort of unsettle the baby, and, you know, it's how do you hold the phone and, I found that I actually needed to concentrate on what I was doing even when it became second nature, it was different if I was trying to do something else at the same time, as breastfeed, if I wasn't concentrating on that mainly, the feed didn't work as well. So whether that was the baby picking up the fact I wasn't giving it my full attention, or whether it was that my mind was occupied elsewhere I'm not sure but, there was definitely a link, and so really you're left with trying to just sit and, think [laughs], which suits some people but is more difficult for others.

What about television or the radio?

Yes I mean television, to a certain extent, but I can't watch anything on television I'm not a sort of person who can just sit and watch, I need to actually want to see something. And in night time feeds I did actually used to listen to the radio, with my first child that was.
 

Yes my son, who's my first child was really, really straightforward, really easy to breastfeed, just kind of one of these children that went on, you know, drank it, put on loads of weight, drank loads of milk, was really easy, had absolutely no problems at all with him and I fed him for a year and a half in fact he wouldn't, he'd never take a, he was one of those horrible children [laughs] that would never take a bottle 'cause you know even of expressed milk, he just wasn't interested but he, he was fed for a year and a half so he was really, really, really straightforward.

Did you feed him on demand or to a schedule or?

No just on demand I just fed him when he was hungry and he was great really because he fed quite, especially when he was little he fed a lot during the day so I'd kind of be feeding every hour or so during the day.

Was that a problem for you?

No, well it wasn't a problem for me because I didn't have bottles to make up, you know I didn't have to worry if I wanted to have a snooze I developed the skill of feeding lying down, so we could both kind of have a little sleep, it was very nice but he was really good at night as well, he fed, he went for sort of four or five hours, more or less from two, three weeks old in the night so, he was fabulous [laughs]. Really, really easy feeder and just you know gained weight and was a bit of a superstar really, and so I have to say I did I found it you know fairly easy.

Did you know much about breastfeeding before?

I did, and I suppose I felt quite strongly that I wanted to do it and I felt it was the best thing.

Because?

Because of the health benefits and because basically almost like a laziness thing of the fact that it's just, it is so much easier than making up bottles, sterilising and all the stuff that goes with it and basically you kind of, I know people say, 'Well then it's got to be you, it's got to be you', but I think as a mother if your baby wakes in the night, you're going to wake anyway, so, you know you kind of think, you might as well, you know, I think had I bottle fed I think I'd probably have been awake even if my husband was bottle feeding until he'd gone back to sleep. The other thing I think that was fantastic for me about breastfeeding was this sort of the comfort side of things, which you don't get with a bottle and the fact that if your baby is ill, even if they have got gastric illness you can still breastfeed them whereas obviously you can't do that with bottle and it's such a comfort and it's useful if they are grisly or if they're tired or if they hurt themselves, just stick 'em under your jumper and plug 'em in and it's like magic really, just like magic and that's I don't think when I started I thought to myself, 'Oh I'm going to feed for you know for a year and a half', but it was just kind of one of those things that I just carried on doing, and it was interesting because one or two of my friends I thought, once my son was walking were a bit like, 'Oh, are you still feeding' you know found it a little bit uncomfortable, but I think when it's your child and they just grow up day by day, you don't think, 'Oh they're a toddler and I'm still feeding him', so, yeah, I found the whole thing just really easy and by the time I kind of wanted to move on and maybe leave him for a little while at sort of you know five, six months, obviously he was starting to wean onto foods then anyway so you could do that but also he wouldn't take a bottle so he went sort of straight to a cup, an open cup and that was and that worked really well so it didn't mean that I was you know tied to him

And kind of realising that, you know, at certain points apparently the baby has a growth spurt and the feeding patterns change, or your milk patterns change.

Can you describe that in a bit more detail? What is a growth spurt? 

It's suddenly you think you're relaxed with your feeding pattern and suddenly it all seems to go wrong and you're like why what's, what's different? And it kind of, emotionally, again you feel like, 'Oh I'm going to give up, I'll just put them on bottles, they're going to go on bottles eventually anyway' and there's certain, I always found there was certain hurdles two weeks, four weeks, six weeks that I would feel like, 'I'm going to give up, it's going wrong' and then this friend would remark, 'No that's normal at about this time the baby's demand for milk is changing and stick with it for another couple of days and you'll get back on par again', and it was that kind of.

So how did you know that you'd reached a growth spurt? 

The, it was just kind of a, a change in the, the feeding pattern, you kind of feel like, 'Oh actually it's starting to work now.' I was starting to feed and, and feed well, and the baby's taking the milk well and then the baby settles and the baby sleeps and it doesn't have too much wind, and then you have breathing space for an hour before you feed again, and you just kind of feel like you're cracking it and then suddenly it all goes to pot and, and you're kind of back, you kind of feel like you're tearing your hair out and baby's just having little drib's and drab's and you're not sure whether to go on the left or the right side and, you kind of lose control of what's going on again and you kind of think, 'Oh this must be it, it must be time to stop now.' You kind of lose your incentive I think because you've had it good for a few days, you kind of then everything goes, goes wrong and that's as my friend told me maybe she was just fooling me and just trying to give me confidence to carry on but that, that, those were times that, when I presumed the baby's, is demanding more milk because it, it needed more milk and I just went with the flow so I just kind of went with the flow and I guess that's what they called 'feeding on demand', but it can be quite draining when, you know, literally you, you feel like you are just continually feeding the whole time. But I think if you, I was fortunate with my, the first child that I breastfed I was fortunate in that my daughter, my elder daughter was at school my husband was self-employed so he was taking her to school in the morning and some days we just stayed snuggled in bed and she just fed when she needed to feed and we slept and dozed when we, you know, when, when it was right and that, that really helped I think just to, I mean I was lucky enough to be able to do it, so that really helped build a good bond and feel relaxed and comfortable with the breastfeeding.