My gorgeous wee man was born at 37 weeks exactly. His suck was excellent despite being early and we tried to feed straight away. During the first few days I had a lot of difficulty latching him and blisters and sores started appearing on my nipples. I was sure this wasn’t right and asked for some help, but everyone said I was doing fine and to continue.

We went home from hospital to have him taking up to 30 minutes to latch at most feeds, him screaming, me with tears running down my face. The pain became more and more at each feed. On about the 7th day I rang my midwife because I just couldn’t do it anymore. She advised me to express to give my nipples a break, so we began expressing all feeds and bottle feeding EBM.

By the next morning (I think) I was shaking all over and nearly collapsed on the floor. Beginning of mastitis bout, number one. This was horrid. I couldn’t do anything apart from sit up in bed to express and eat and drink a bit. Thanks to my mum and husband who were there to bottle feed the expressed milk. I got better, but my nipples were still red raw and there was no way I could latch. So I expressed day and night for another week then began to try relatching him.

This was excruciating! Eventually I managed to get him latched with nipple shields. We both gradually managed to get into a rhythm with feeds and make some progress. He took over an hour to feed each time and it felt like I was doing nothing else!

Now, the pain was still excruciating over this whole time! At every feed it felt like needles and glass were cutting my whole breast throughout the feed. After the feed it felt like acid had been poured on my nipples and I would have severe shooting pains through my breast for hours. Needless to say we didn’t get much sleep! The pain was so bad I couldn’t wear clothing! So I was essentially at home the whole time. I think I bought every single breastfeeding product I could find (shells, shields, creams, pumps etc).

I then managed to get another 2 episodes of mastitis. More pain, more antibiotics. We were still using the nipple shields. But at least I was still feeding!

It took weeks to convince people this pain was not normal. I had been told to just get on with it and it couldn’t possibly hurt that much. FINALLY a lactation consultant suggested I may have thrush.  The thrush took over 6 weeks to cure. I had creams, then weeks of nystatin tablets, nothing worked. I finally got prescribed fluconazole tablets and my pain started to subside.

I finally got all the infections sorted enough to brave weaning from the nipple shields. It took another few weeks of gentle coaxing, tricking, encouraging, along with screaming and tears to teach my baby what that nipple felt like again!

By 12 weeks we were finally managing to feed without nipple shields and with much less pain!!

Then came the saga of an unhappy baby with blood in his poo!! It eventuated he was intolerant to cows milk and I then had to go onto a dairy-free diet. That lasted until he was over one! By about 14 months I could eat small amounts of dairy but he could still only tolerate breast milk. Thank goodness I had managed to feed him!

Anyway, here we are now, coming up to 21 months old. We are still breastfeeding.  My wee guy loves his “milkas” and this mummy feels like she has managed one of the best, but hardest accomplishments in her life!! I love the moments we have together feeding and the wee smiles and giggles looking back up at me! Oh yeah, and we have been pain free for more than a year.

I was having ultrasounds twice weekly because the doctors were very worried about twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome, a dangerous complication that happens sometimes with identical twins.  I drove to one of my Thursday ultrasounds, thinking that it would be more of the same: they are still different in size and very small, so you should lay around and do nothing all day.  Instead, they took a very long time to do the ultrasound, and when the doctor came in afterwards to give me the report, the first thing he said was, “So we have you scheduled for a c-section at 7:30 tomorrow morning.”  I was shocked!  I was only 35 weeks pregnant, and not feeling ready for the twins to be born.  But they had measured the blood flow from the placenta, and felt that Baby B, the smaller twin, was not getting enough oxygen and nutrients.  So it was time for them to come out.  Both babies were breech, and the doctors refused to allow me to even attempt a vaginal birth.  They told me that at 35 weeks, the babies should be healthy enough to come  home within a few days, and that “they might have to spend a day or two in the NICU, but it’s no big deal.”  I can’t believe they told me that!  And I can’t believe I bought it!

So the next morning, Jonah and Owen were born by C-section at 8:17 and 8:18 in the morning.  They were not breathing very well, so the nurses whisked them off to the NICU with nothing more than a quick wave to me.  My husband went off with them, and I was sent up to recovery.  It was so strange to be in the labor and delivery ward of the hospital with no babies.  I could hear babies crying in neighboring rooms, and I ached to be holding my two little ones.  When I went to see them in the NICU, they had their faces covered (for minimal stimulation), and were positively covered in wires and tubes and monitors.  We were not allowed to touch them or even talk to them above a whisper that first day, and the news just kept getting worse and worse.  I will never forget the moment when the doctor said to me about Owen, “Well, we don’t have many more tricks up our sleeve.  If he doesn’t respond to the Nitric, we’re going to have to call Boston.”  Both babies had severe respiratory distress syndrome, and they didn’t respond to hardly any of the treatments for the first 24 hours.

Meanwhile, I was pumping and trying to build my supply so that I could nurse them when they were strong enough.  At first, we were adamant that they not have pacifiers or bottles, but when the nurses said that bottle-fed babies go home sooner, I gave in.  It was two days before they even were able to have the first drops of colostrum swabbed on their gums.  Slowly, they started to be able to take little bits of my milk from a bottle nipple, once they were off the ventilators.  It was five days before we got to hold Jonah, the stronger of the two.  I kept asking when I could nurse them, but the nurses told me that it would make their oxygen levels drop, and they had to be on a certain type of ventilator, and all kinds of other excuses. 

I had plenty of milk, and I was pumping every 3 hours around the clock to build a supply for my little guys.  The hospital finally told me to store it at home in our freezer because theirs was full! 

But we still weren’t nursing.  Jonah was in the hospital for 2 weeks, and I nursed him 3 times before he came home.  Owen was in for 3 weeks, and I only nursed him once while he was there.   Once Jonah came home, we worked really hard to get him latched on and nursing.  He was getting stronger every day, but it was so hard to nurse him (he would nurse for an hour every feeding), then offer him a bottle of milk so that we could be sure he was getting enough, then pump so we would have milk to offer.  And I tried to go to the hospital every day to visit Owen, who was still there.  It was insanity! 

And it only got crazier when Owen finally came home.  We nursed every single feeding because I was so determined to get them on the breast.  And it was the same routine: nurse, bottle, pump.  All day and all night.  Owen had to have some special high-calorie formula that we mixed with breastmilk instead of water, because he wasn’t gaining weight very well. 

And when Owen came home, I started having excruciating nipple pain.  It felt like broken glass was coming out of my breasts at every feeding.  My husband would come home and find me nursing the boys and sobbing.  I started taking painkillers just to be able to feed them, because I refused to switch to formula.  Our doula told us that it was almost definitely thrush, so I went and got checked out by my doctor.  She told me that the boys’ latch looked good, and it probably was thrush, but she wouldn’t treat me unless their pediatrician also treated them.  Their pediatrician then told me that he wouldn’t treat them unless I was also being treated.  It took me three days to finally convince them that someone had to write the prescription first.  And so we all took nystatin, which did nothing for two weeks.   Then, my doctor switched me to Diflucan, and we used gentian violet along with it.  And, even though everything in our house was purple for a week from the gentian violet, it worked! 

We had four glorious, pain-free days of nursing before the pain returned.  And so I went nuts.  I read everything I could get my hands on about yeast.  I became the Hygiene Nazi, treating everything that touched breastmilk as though it were toxic waste.  We put vinegar on everything, and used grapefruit seed extract and gentian violet, and many courses of Diflucan.  Nothing worked. 

So I was in immense pain all the time, but we finally did get the boys solely on the breast, with no bottles at all.  What a triumph!  I wish I remembered more of it, but I spent so much time in a haze of pain that it all seems like such a blur to me.

Finally, six weeks after the pain returned, a lactation consultant at the support group I was going to said, “maybe it’s not yeast.”  The thought had never occurred to me (or, apparently, to my doctor).  So I went to the doctor and insisted that she culture my breastmilk, although she didn’t think it was necessary.  It’s a good thing we did, because it turned out that I didn’t have yeast at all; instead, I had a raging staph infection in my nipples. 

She put me on dicloxacillin, which didn’t make me feel better and gave me an allergic reaction.  When I told the doctor that I was still having pain, she told me she was just going to prescribe another course of Diflucan, because it was probably just yeast from the antibiotics.  I would not take any more meds without being cultured, so I insisted that they wait and do another culture.  And it’s a good thing, because it turned out that the staph was MRSA, a medicine-resistant form of staph. 

The doctor put me on Levaquin, another antibiotic that the culture indicated would work, but told me that I couldn’t nurse while I was on it.  And then told me that I could.  I asked our pediatrician who told me it was fine, and then another doctor in his practice said it was absolutely not.  I kept asking doctors, and kept getting conflicting answers.  Finally, I decided that I wouldn’t risk the health of my two boys who had already been so sick, and I decided that I would formula feed them for the fourteen days while I was medicated, and just pump.  I had to go stay with my parents so that they could help with the logistics of managing and feeding two babies and pumping.  After 24 hours of having the boys reject the bottles and then, finally, gulp down the formula and spit it all back up, I decided that I couldn’t do it.  I did a lot more research, and found some information saying that it was probably all right for me to nurse while I was on the Levaquin.  I still was wary of it, so I decided to nurse every other feeding, so at least they would still get the benefits of breastmilk, and any harmful effects from the medicine would be limited.  It was a disaster.  They had a lot of trouble keeping the formula down, and my supply dropped because the pump was not getting as much as the babies normally did. 

But the medicine was working!  By the end of the fourteen-day course, I was pain-free again.  And once I was done with it, I started nursing the boys for every feeding again, and trying desperately to build my milk supply back up. 

Unfortunately, the pain came back after only four days.  I had another two cultures done, because I wanted to make sure we were treating the right problem.  I was afraid that we had yeast again from the antibiotics.  But both cultures came back negative.  I was at my wits’ end.  I couldn’t understand why I was still in so much pain.  I went to my doctor, who told me that she just couldn’t understand it either.  She said that our latch looked good, so I probably just needed some time to heal up.  She told me to pump and bottle feed the boys for a week to let myself heal.  “No nursing for at least a week!”, she told me.  This didn’t sound quite right to me, but I didn’t know what else to do, so I tried it.  Again, it was a disaster.  My breasts no longer would let down for the pump.  I would pump for 20 minutes and get only an ounce of milk.  Needless to say, my supply plummeted.  We had to supplement the boys with formula, which they again had trouble keeping down.  I went against my doctor’s advice and nursed them once a day, in the evening, just to make sure they would go back to the breast after a week. 

After 4 days, they rejected the breast completely.  Every time I tried to nurse them, they would scream as if they were being terribly hurt.  It was horrible.  They had decided that the bottle was much easier, and they didn’t want to nurse anymore.  I stopped all bottles immediately, and we cup-fed them to make sure they were getting enough to eat.  They still refused the breast, and cried all day and all night.

I was completely at the end of my rope.  Friends and family were telling me to just give up and switch to formula, but I felt like I didn’t know how to be a mom without nursing.  It was so important to me, and I felt like Jonah and Owen really needed it, that I refused to quit.  I cried and cried and spent hours and hours researching on the internet.  Finally, even though we didn’t have the money, I bit the bullet and paid for a private lactation consultant to come out to the house and consult with us. 

She will forever be an angel in my mind.  In the space of about 15 minutes, she had diagnosed and then fixed our latch problem.  I felt so foolish that I had been ‘doing it wrong’ for four months!  As for the nipple confusion, she said to just keep doing what we were doing, and that now that they had a better latch, it would be easier for them to get milk from the breast.  Within a few days, my supply was back up, the boys were nursing like pros, and I was pain-free!  I can’t believe it was so easy after all that pain.  I had been told by two other lactation consultants, my doctor, and the boys’ pediatrician that our latch was very good. 

It was beautiful to nurse without having it make my toes curl in pain!  I was thrilled, but the boys were not happy babies.  They were covered in rashes, and spitting up constantly, and too uncomfortable to sleep, ever.  We were all exhausted, and I did more research.  Although my doctor told me that what I ate wouldn’t affect the boys, I thought that something I ate might be bothering them.  I cut dairy out of my diet for two weeks, and they got much better, and then worse again.  I decided to do the Dr. Sears total elimination diet.

So for two weeks, I ate nothing but rice, millet, summer squash, turkey, sweet potatoes, and pears.  I was ridiculously hungry and lost a twenty pounds, but it helped a lot.  The boys’ rashes disappeared, they stopped spitting up entirely, and they started sleeping longer stretches at night.  They seemed much happier. 

After a couple of months, we figured out that they were reacting to dairy and soy in my diet, which explains why they always had so much trouble with the cows’ milk formula. So now I eat anything but dairy and soy. Now that the boys are a year old, I am able to eat a little bit of cheese once in a while.

One day, when the boys were 7 months old, I noticed that my nipples were getting sore again.  We had started nursing in some new positions, so I just monitored their latches closely, hoping it would go away.  It didn’t, and one day I woke up to find that one of my breasts was red and hot.  I had had this for months before, and I figured it would go away, but later that day I started to feel hot and really tired.  Before long, I had chills and was in really bad shape.  I figured out that I had mastitis, and was put on antibiotics.  Within a day, I was feeling better and I thought that was the end of it.  Unfortunately, I had it again as soon as the antibiotics ran out.  The same thing happened twice more, and I ended up with three courses of antibiotics within 8 weeks.  I was sick from the antibiotics and worried about taking to many meds, especially because I was also on Diflucan so that I wouldn’t get thrush from all of the antibiotics.  The fourth time that I woke up with a red breast, I decided to give it 24 hours and see what happened, as long as I didn’t get a fever.  I kept a heat pad on my breast all day and after every feeding I swabbed my nipple with grapefruit seed extract, let it dry, and applied Bactrim and a clean nursing pad.  After 24 hours, the inflammation was gone!  

Still, five months later, this happens about once a week, but it always goes away with heat and super hygiene.  I had given up on it until recently, when a friend sent me a video about something called inflammatory breast cancer.  I was scared into getting some answers, and will be seeing a breast health specialist this month and getting a mammogram and an ultrasound.  So far, no one has been able to give me any answers, but I’m hopeful that we will figure this out.

Our nursing relationship has been worth every bit of trouble.  It has been amazing to watch my boys grow from two tiny, sick, skinny babies into happy, healthy, chubby mama’s boys.  They will be a year old this month, and they are complete milk monsters.  Their first baby sign was the sign for milk.  They don’t even know what to do with a bottle.  Aside from the disastrous (and, thankfully, occasional) formula, they were exclusively breastfed for 7 months, when they started solid foods. 

I think we have made it this far on sheer determination, but I hope the next year will be easier; my initial goal was a year of nursing, but now I think we’ll do two!

After my son was born, a long, and exhausting spurious labour resulting in an epidural, and vacuum extraction I was exhausted but exhilarated. When they put him on my chest, our eyes locked and the connection was instant. The midwife immediately put Liam to my breast for a feed, in the lying down position (the only one I could muster the energy for!). That still seemed easy-it was later on that our problems began. I guess there were multiple factors why breastfeeding in the early weeks of Liam’s life was not the easy, innate experience I’d imagined-for either of us. My breasts were larger (DD cup), he was drowsy after the pethidine & epidural drugs I had had during labour, and attachment was not easy. He screamed and fussed and I despaired of ever getting him to attach. I felt fumbly, clumsy, and hopeless. Finally, a lactation consultant recommended the ‘football hold’ coupled with a triangular shaped pillow, which was the most successful position so far. The midwives helped me to express some EBM and spoon-fed him. I asked why we did not use a bottle for the EBM. While I was drastically opposed to formula, I did not understand about nipple confusion. The midwives explained the concept and were very supportive & helpful.

At home the attachment problems continued. Added to this, I had a hard-core case of the baby blues that eventually escalated into PND, little support and a baby that screamed for hours every day with colic. Breastfeeding continued to be difficult, but we persevered. I suffered thrush, sore nipples and engorgement. I made three trips to the breastfeeding clinic. Eventually after 3-4 weeks we began to get the hang of it a bit better, and the 2 hour feeding sessions (40 mins of screaming and crying trying to get him attached-and that was just me!! began to reduce in time and difficulty.

The next thing that happened was I contracted bad case of mastitis. I still remember going to a friend’s house for dinner when Liam was about 6 weeks old, and coming home afterwards literally frozen with cold (her house was not well heated and it was the middle of winter).My breasts were engorged and extremely painful. I got in the shower and tried to get warm. I got into bed with three doonas, and the heater on. Nothing worked-I literally shook with cold and my entire body ached. My breasts were blocked up and the baby screamed…and screamed. My mum came and took me to the doctor, who prescribed antibiotics and then mum took us home to her house, where I eventually recovered. I spoke to a breastfeeding counsellor or health nurse on the phone (I honestly cannot remember which it was!), who told me the best way to deal with mastitis was to express the milk away under a warm-hot shower. I was appalled at the idea of losing all that milk-but I did it, and it worked!

It was relatively smooth sailing for a while after that, but when Liam was around 6 months old, I began to experience terrible stabbing pain in my breast after each feed. I consulted my maternal and child health nurse and my GP-who both told me it was thrush. However, the cream wasn’t working and the symptoms were getting worse, so I rang my health nurse again, this time in tears because the pain was getting unbearable. She send a lactation consultant out to see me, and the LC took one look and told me it was ‘white spot’ – a condition where a blister is blocking up the milk duct and getting infected;the cure for which was to poke a sterilised needle into the blister to pop it! The LC suggested I do this myself. I was horrified, but did as she suggested, and (TMI warning) the blister popped with a gush of pus, milk and blood. Ewwww. It worked though! I was fine after that, save for maybe two subsequent white spot attacks, with I quickly nipped in the bid with the trusty needle method!

Around this time, I spoke to the midwife on the phone who was conducting the follow up interview on the breastfeeding study in which I had participated. She was impressed that I had continued with breastfeeding after the white spot incident. To be honest, I came close to quitting, especially when my mother suggested it might be time to stop if it was causing that much pain, but I was so glad I persevered. At this point, my PND was improving thanks to medical treatment and I was beginning to enjoy parenting a lot more. I was determined to get to 12 months of breastfeeding, and by now felt confident I would.

Around the time Liam was 8 months old, I got a computer and connected to the internet-a whole world of information was at my fingertips! Due to a rather negative experience with being sent to ‘sleep school’ and ultimately rejecting the notion of leaving my baby to cry himself to sleep-but feeling very isolated in my parenting, I discovered some websites about Attachment Parenting. I found this fit my own philosophies and beliefs perfectly, and I read up on all the aspects. One of which was extended breastfeeding and baby-led weaning. I was intrigued to discover some people continued to feed their babies well into toddler hood, and many for longer. This wasn’t entirely a foreign concept, having a friend who had fed her daughter until she was 2.5. At that time, I’d been shocked to learn she was still breastfeeding such a ‘big child’! Not because I thought, it was gross, or wrong or anything like that-simply because I didn’t know you could! I had been under the impression that lactation only lasted a certain amount of time, and most mothers’ milk dried up by the time babies were past 12 months! I laugh at that now, but it goes to show how little many people know about breastfeeding before they have children of their own. Anyway, I began to review my previous notion of breastfeeding to 12 months as a result of reading about the benefits, and so Liam’s first birthday came and went-and I continued to breastfeed. I should also say that he decided to wean himself from my right breast around the age of 11-12 months, and so was feeding solely on my left one. We continued to feed this way for another 3 and a half years!

Many people were shocked to hear I was still breastfeeding well into Liam’s second year. My mother expressed her reservations-however I printed off a few articles for her to read and she never said anything else again! She was if not a convert, at least accepting of why I believed so strongly in the benefits of extended or full term breastfeeding-both physical and emotional.

The challenges Liam and I faced as extended breast feeders after that were purely of the attitudinal variety-let’s face it, breastfeeding past the age of one is still considered an anomaly in our society, however it is slowly improving as people learn more about the benefits. However, I’ve had some ignorant comments, even from GPs, whose education seems to be remarkably basic where breastfeeding is concerned. My MCHN was stunned to hear I was still feeding when L was only 15 months old!! Liam ‘day weaned’ at around 2.5, which in a way was a relief as it meant people at kinder and other places didn’t actually know we were breastfeeding-unless I told them so. As much as I’d like to be a militant warrior about it, I’m usually non-confrontational, and most of all, did not want my child to experience the negativity of anyone making comments in his earshot. However it’s interesting that I did meet a few mums who also breastfed their children as toddlers-who might have never said anything if I hadn’t admitted’ that Liam was still breastfed. I also had plenty of like-minded friends through playgroups, the breastfeeding association and parenting sites and so we were mostly in an environment of support and encouragement where extended breastfeeding was concerned.

Liam breastfed twice a day-morning and night from the age of 2.5-4, and then after a bit of gentle persuasion reduced down to one feed a day at bedtime. Eventually it reduced to once every few days, and then one day he had his last feed. Neither of us knew it was the last one. I was more than ready to stop by then, and only continued as long as I did because Liam’s breast feeds helped my breasts to produce more milk. I needed to express for his baby sister, who was born with a cleft palate so was unable to breastfeed. Had it not been for that factor, I probably would have encouraged him to wean a bit earlier 3.5 four probably. However I am so glad his feeds were able to help both him wean gently and gradually, and his sister to get the precious milk she needed.

Breastfeeding is a wonderful thing. It can be hard, and in some cases impossible-but where possible, it should be celebrated, encouraged and supported. All women who want to breastfeed should be supported to do so, for as long as they and their baby decide is right for them. The relationship I had with my son was one of the loveliest things about parenting a young child, and I still remember fondly all the glowing, warm fuzzy oxytoxin enhanced moments we shared. Looking into his big brown eyes made all the early pain and sacrifice worthwhile

When I gave birth to her she was put on my chest immediately to help the process along so that breastfeeding would come easily. But from the very start we had problems: I had flat nipples and she had a tongue tie. We had her scheduled to have a frenotomy and till that happened I expressed (at that stage colostrum) and fingerfed her. On day four my milk came in – with a vengeance. I had way too much and my daughter couldn’t even begin to empty my supply. So my breasts were never fully drained and for that reason I got mastitis. I still expressed milk and fingerfed her the milk. I expressed every three hours around the clock. For at least a week I expressed around two litres of milk every 24 hours! I filled my freezer with my milk till there was no more space. I filled my fridge till I had no more containers. I could have supplied the whole neonatal ward with my precious breastmilk! But at the time all I could think about was how engorged my breasts were – they were in almost constant pain. Not least because of the mastitis.

The doctor even managed to give me the wrong anitbiotics so I had to go back and get different antibiotics when my fever didn’t subside and the pain wasn’t going away in my breasts.

All along I was expressing every three hours and fingerfeeding my daugther all the milk she could possibly dream off. She gained so much weight in the early days – so that was a good thing! She did get an upset tummy from all that milk though, which resulted in her being very unsettled.

When the day came for the frenotomy the surgeon said that her tongue-tie wasn’t severe enough and she wouldn’t cut it. However, coupled with my flat nipples she still couldn’t latch on properly. I had set all my hopes up for this frenotomy. I had thought to myself that as soon as she would have that done she would be able to latch onto my breast and my supply could begin to settle to her demand instead of me expressing so much milk all the time. And this hope was shattered when the surgeon wouldn’t cut her tongue tie. I felt so lost.

We then decided to stop the finger feeding and start using nipple shields – with that my daughter could at least drink the milk straight from my breast. I still had way too much milk, though. And because I still had mastitis and was on antibiotics, I got thrush – oh the pain. (Lactation consultants know that women have thrush when they mention pain that’s similar to being cut with a razorblade or broken glass!) Anyway, she fed using the nipple shield and I would express milk to drain my breasts to get rid of the mastitis. But in order to decrease my supply I was informed to express as little as possible. This meant that my breasts were engorged and painful most of the day and night. I thought it would never end. The lactation consultant said that supply would meet demand around 6 weeks, but I couldn’t even think that far ahead, I was so frustrated.

My supply did decrease over the following weeks and I remember the first day I didn’t express at all. That was such a victory. And then the next big milestone was the first night I slept without soaking myself completely in milk because of the engorgement and oversupply. Through the first weeks I had soaked many a jumper and bed sheet with my milk. Everything in the house, even the washing coming straight from the washing machine, smelled of stale milk. Yuk!

Now my daughter is 11 weeks old, my supply meets her demand beautifully. We still use the nipple shield because she still can’t latch on properly, but we’re working on getting rid of that. There’s no more mastitis, no more thrush. Her weight gain has settled as well and she doens’t get an upset tummy from too much food any more.

Breastfeeding is finally a really enjoyable part of the day, my breasts are finally comfortable 95 percent of the time. My daughter and I have come a long way! A journey that I couldn’t have made it through without the help of my husband or the fantastic lactation consultants at the hospital. They were so informative and helpful and understanding. But it truly has been a rollercoaster this whole breastfeeding business and I began to understand why some women give up. However, it truly is worthwhile sticking with it. I know how good it is for my baby and the closeness I have with her through feeding her my own breast milk is truly wonderful!