Circumstances led me ‘not having enough milk’ myself. My daughter was three weeks old, losing weight, and only getting 200ml of breast milk each day. I ended up feeding her until she weaned just before my second daughter was born at around 15 months of age. Here is my story:

DD fed for 2hrs after being born. I now know that she was not really ‘feeding’, just sucking, bonding and having cuddles, which was lovely. The various midwives in the hospital popped in to see ‘that baby that’s still sucking’ and laughed at her appetite. We thought it was funny too. Unfortunately she was not properly attached and grazed both nipples. I felt I was not ‘getting her on’ properly, but every midwife who checked in the next few days said she was fine, that I was doing well and that was correct. By this stage each nipple had a scab covering the entire top of the nipple, which would come off each time I fed and bleed. My daughter would vomit bits of blood and scab after feeds, but the midwives weren’t concerned, so I persevered, and was sent home. Needless to say, feeding was very painful and not that enjoyable though of course I enjoyed the cuddles and the wonderful feeling that comes with being able to feed your baby and help her grow.

When DD was born, she was wide eyed and placid. Within 24 hrs she was screaming her lungs out and this continued for 3 weeks. She rarely slept; about 3-8hrs in 24, the rest of the time screaming. I now feel she was hungry but I was so reluctant to feed her because of the pain. I tried to keep her to 3 hourly feeds recommended by the Child Health Nurse and the hospital midwives. We actually took her to hospital at about 10 days old because she was ‘too placid’ – we thought there was something drastically wrong with her!

Our GP sent us to a paediatrician and she was diagnosed with lactose intolerance, colic and reflux. She was prescribed medicine for the reflux and he suggested feeding her a combination of lactose free formula and breastmilk to see if that would calm her and help her sleep/relax. Neither of us were really happy with this diagnosis and treatment, but we were exasperated and didn’t know what else to do.

I was not overly pleased with the course the Paed. had set for us. I knew this path would lead to DD being fully weaned and formula fed in a very short space of time. I was determined not to give in, and to breastfeed my daughter. The medication and formula didn’t help not matter how much we wanted it to, so after about a week, we stopped the medication and took her to the Breast Feeding Centre at a nearby hospital. The lactation consultants there were amazing. I had laser treatment on my poor nipples, which helped them heal and they were able to see that yes, she wasn’t attaching properly and helped me sort it out. DD refused to attach in a manner that was totally comfortable, it was much better and obviously my nipples hardened up and got used to ‘her way of doing things’. In fact, as soon as I relaxed about trying to get her to attach properly and just let her do her own thing, it hurt a lot less. I stopped the lactose free formula and started exclusively breastfeeding again. This was against the Paediatricians wishes, but with the support of the lactation consultants at the BFC. She was still screaming a lot and not sleeping and by this stage, about 3 weeks old, she had started losing weight.

The penny finally dropped that she wasn’t getting enough milk, so I convinced the BFC to lend me their scales so I could weight her before and after feeds to work out how much milk she was getting each feed and in a 24 hr period. This confirmed my suspicions – she was getting 20-50mls per feed and under 200mls in 24 hrs. Failing to demand feed from the beginning and switching to formula had severely depleted my supply.

When I was at the BFC I met a woman who had 5 children. She had come back to catch up with the midwives with her bubba. After feeding her first 4 kids, the 5th simply refused to take her breast. So she expressed for 6 months and kept trying until finally her baby agreed it was better from a boob than a bottle. At the time I was pretty ‘woe is me’ about my situation, so it was great to have a reality check in the form of this amazing mum, who committed to express every day, in between getting 4 kids fed, dressed, to school and everything else, so that she could breastfeed. If she could do it, so could I.

With the fantastic help of the BFC, I started using a ’supply line’ to increase my supply. It is a tiny tube that you put into a bottle of expressed (I had to start with formula) milk and stick the other end to your nipple, so that when the baby sucks your nipple they get milk even though your boobs are empty. The extra sucking stimulates extra supply and the theory is that it slowly increases your supply. On the paperwork that came with it were details of how to use if for mothers who are breastfeeding adopted babies, which I found so interesting.

I spent the next two weeks in the following routine, 24hrs a day:
-Feed DD from my boobs
-Place supply line with expressed milk (formula for the first day or so) on nipple and let DD have that as well
-Settle DD to sleep
-1 hr after end of feed, express (luckily we hired an electric pump!) milk for next feed
-crawl into bed for 45 min sleep at night or do a chore/sit down with a cuppa in day
-start again!

At night I would normally set my alarm for 1 hr so that I could sleep in between feeding and needing to express, then express, then crawl back to bed

My partner was amazingly supportive, cheering me on from the sidelines. I must admit though, that he just didn’t understand my determination to breastfeed and would regularly reassure me that it would be OK to ‘give up’. In fact, everyone around me seemed to be trying to convince me that it was OK to stop breastfeeding. The only people who seemed adamant that I could do it were the midwives at the BFC. They were supportive, but at no stage did they suggest formula, and I really looked to them for support as a result.

I felt every emotion under the sun: Desperately tired, extremely proud of myself, completely overwhelmed, angry about the events that lead to the situation to name a few. Every night I would cry saying ‘I just can’t do it anymore, I’m going to give her formula’ and every morning I would wake up saying ‘I’ll just do it for 1 more day’. I lasted 14 days, by which time I had increased the feeds to 60-90ml on average, but at times 120ml. This was pretty exciting as you can imagine.

I had done it. And it was so very worth it.

DD will be 7 this month. She grew out of the lactose intolerance at around age 5, although she is still reactive to cow’s milk protein. I had no difficulties feeding my second daughter and she has no allergies or intolerances.

If you’re reading this feeling it’s all too hard and that there is nothing you can do about your low supply, I am living proof it can be done. I’m not superwoman or super anything, just a normal person.

xx Louise

I had been sick for months and putting on weight. I had a thyroid problem, but it was getting worse and I had started to suspect that I had some kind of gut problem, so I went for an ultrasound.

“Oh, you’re pregnant,” said the technician.

“What?” I asked, leaning over to see the monitor, shocked and somehow expecting to see a jelly bean foetus in a blur of undefined body tissue.

“Here,” she said, turning the monitor towards me, “here’s your baby. Did you really not know you were pregnant?”

I couldn’t answer because there was a ribcage on the screen, and it wasn’t mine. I didn’t really have a giant stomach tumour or an immune system disease. I was 28 weeks pregnant. There was a whole baby inside me, well developed enough to survive if it was born that very day.

I don’t need to tell you that I was in a lot of shock for the next few months. I hadn’t planned or intended to have a baby. On the one hand, my fiance and I were planning our wedding, paying our mortgage and in good jobs, so we were in just the right circumstances to have a baby. But on the other hand, I was studying, had travel plans and was on medication for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

As soon as I knew I was pregnant, I stopped taking the Pill (yep, still on it and everything happening as usual) and my antidepressants. By the time I went in to labour, I had all the usual worries and fears of a very pregnant woman as well as increasing anxiety due to the OCD.

At that stage I still hadn’t decided whether I would breastfeed or not. I hadn’t decided anything much! Apart from repainting the spare room (my fiance insisted that if the walls were still magenta, he wasn’t doing any night time nappy changes in there!) and reading as much as I could about childbirth, I hadn’t been able to really face the reality of a baby. I hadn’t even turned up to the breastfeeding antenatal class.

On top of that, I really don’t like my breasts being touched, never mind sucked on and chomped on! But I hadn’t decided to go for bottlefeeding either, because it seemed selfish to me to not even give it a try. I had had 12 weeks of feeling guilty over all the things I had done to my baby already – drank at parties, flown to Seoul to eat street food and hike around the city at -12C, taken my Pill and my antidepressants and stayed out dancing all night. Not to mention not loving my baby or talking to it at all! I felt that I owed it to this baby to make up for six months of unintentional neglect.

I was so proud of myself that I lasted 18 hours into a 24 hour labour before having an epidural, and my little boy was born in the early hours of the 3rd of June. Just like every mother, I promptly went into shock, adrenalin taking the place of exhaustion and I happily let the midwife help my baby attach for the first time. It wasn’t too bad, certainly not yukky like I expected, and I decided that for now, I would try breastfeeding.

Four days later when I left the hospital, Dominic had a name but he still hadn’t had a proper feed. We had tried with every different midwife giving us different advice. I had refused to let him be bottlefed, but had learnt the uncomfortable art of hand expressing so he could be syringe fed some colostrum. I had a little bit of success using a nipple shield, and of course when my Mum came to see us Dominic would attach and drink like a little angel, meaning Mum was reassuring me that he was just fine. The midwives were getting worried because Dominic was sleeping for 7 or 8 hours overnight and not waking up for a feed because he wasn’t getting enough milk to get any energy. So I was pretty stressed by the time I took him home.

Over the next few weeks, my nipples cracked and bled, becoming more and more painful. I was starting to dread every feed, and Dominic still wasn’t getting much milk. We hired an electric pump from the chemist, and it was pretty clear that I was producing hardly any milk. In an hour I could manage perhaps 10mL or 20mL and it was scarcely less painful than feeding him myself.

We had many visits to the local clinic, where the nurses ranged from kind to brilliant, and they were all encouraging, but nobody had the magic solution I was looking for.

Some time in the third week, as I sat on the sofa, both of us crying our eyes out, my wonderful fiance went to the kitchen and made a bottle of formula. Dominic had his first bottle feed with Daddy. I felt a huge pressure had lifted and I realised that if Dominic and I were crying and dreading our feeds, we couldn’t possibly have a good relationship.

So for the next few weeks, I would feed Dominic a bottle whenever my nipples felt too sore to feed comfortably. And a couple of times a week, Daddy would do bottle feeds overnight and give Mummy a rest. My fiance really treasured those times with his little boy, and he delighted in sending me out to do the shopping or visit a friend while ‘the boys’ had ‘boy time’ together.

I was really lucky at this time because my Mum, my sisters-in-law and some of my aunts are very very pro-breastfeeding. They were encouraging me to keep on giving it a go, when I felt I could. My sister-in-law in particular said to me that I should stick to it for six weeks, using formula and expressing to help, but that if I managed six weeks, I could be satisfied that I’d done my best. So I persevered with nipple shields and Lansinoh, and fed Dominic at least a few times every day. During this time I also had Maxolon prescribed by my GP to try and increase my milk supply, which was still very poor.

At the same time, Granny and some other aunts had bottle fed, either from the start or from a few weeks in, and they were quick to point out that there was no shame in deciding not to breastfeed.

I had encouragement from both sides of the bottle/breast divide. And I had it fixed in my mind that if I persisted, even just once a day, until the six week mark, I could then hang up my maternity bras and pat myself on the back.

One evening when Dominic was about four weeks old, I was giving him a pre-bed cuddle when he threw up all over me. Not unusual for Dominic, he was the spewiest baby I’d ever met, but this time it had blood in it. It seemed far too much to be from a cracked nipple, so I shouted for my fiance. We bundled Dominic into the car and rushed off to casualty. Being such a tiny baby, he was attended to instantly, with specialists being hurried out of bed and all the nursing staff fussing over him. It seemed that he had reflux, and that he had thrown up so much that he’d irritated his throat to the point where it was bleeding.

After this drama, as well as combining bottle and breastfeeding, we were now adding reflux medication and formula thickener to our repertoire. That worked straight away, and Dominic’s paediatrician even gave me permission to take my OCD medication while breastfeeding, so ‘anxious cranky Mummy’ and ‘crying spewy baby’ almost overnight became ‘happy Mummy’ and ‘contented baby’.

Suddenly making it to six weeks didn’t seem like such a big trial: I would just keep on rubbing Lansinoh on my nipples, using the nipple shields and topping up with a bottle of thickened formula. I could do this!

Then one day, when he was about six weeks old, Dominic just… latched on! All by himself! No nipple shield, no careful inserting of nipples, no aiming. Within a day I was breastfeeding at every feed, and topping him up with a bit of formula a couple of times a day. Within a week, my nipples were completely recovered and I hardly ever needed any Lansinoh. ‘They’ were right, once breastfeeding worked properly it didn’t hurt at all.

We continued with mainly breastfeeding and a little bit of bottlefeeding until Dominic was six months old. Doing both meant that I could go out to a party and leave Dominic with his Daddy or his grandparents for a few hours. I would still be home within a few hours because my breasts would be huge and leaking everywhere, but at least I knew that if he was hungry, Dominic could have a bottle. On the other hand, breastfeeding is so much more convenient out and about. I could just find a comfy spot and breastfeed any time Dominic was hungry or stressed, and stay out as long as I wanted without worrying about running out of bottles.

I was due to go back to work at the start of January so I started to offer him a bottle for his feeds during work hours, followed by a breastfeed top up, so that hopefully when I was due to go to work I could send him to daycare with bottles of formula. My Mum was very positive about managing part-time breastfeeding as she continued with morning and night feeds for some months when weaning my sister and I. But Dominic had other ideas. Over the course of a week he completely dropped the breastfeeds and had his last breastfeed on Christmas Day. It wasn’t our best feed. I was engorged and a bit sore, and spent ten minutes persuading him to suck just a little bit so I could relax and enjoy Christmas lunch!

At first, we continued to cuddle Dominic during his bottle feeds so that he did not miss out on the closeness he had experienced with breastfeeding. But he decided very quickly that he prefered to lie on his wedge pillow and hold his own bottle, in fact he insisted on it! So these days we sit with him and read a story instead. At ten months, he is a happy, healthy, well-adjusted baby. And as they say, you can’t tell whether he was breast or bottlefed – just that he is well-loved!

I’m really proud of myself for sticking with the breastfeeding for six months. I feel like I gave Dominic the best possible start in life. I managed to balance the nutritional benefits of breastmilk with the benefits of having a calm, relaxed Mum at mealtimes. When Dominic was born, I felt I’d had very little choice, and therefore very little control, about having a baby. With the support and encouragement of my friends, family and clinic nurses, I felt in control of my body and chose to stop breastfeeding when it hurt too much, and persist again when I felt ready to, while still giving my baby the best care possible.

The biggest barrier I faced was the idea that breastfeeding is ‘all or nothing’. That might be true for some, but it doesn’t have to be. If you are finding breastfeeding a struggle you often receive advice that points you to either breastfeed in agony or bottle feed exclusively. You don’t have to do that. You can mix and match, try different things, and work out your own perfect balance.

Here is a list of things we tried, which all more or less worked (and were undertaken with the supervision of a paediatrician):

* Breastfeeding
* Breastfeeding with a nipple shield
* Hand expressing
* Pump expressing
* Using Maxolon to help produce more milk
* Lanolin for cracked nipples
* Bottlefeeding expressed breast milk
* Bottlefeeding formula
* Thickening formula to reduce reflux
* Using a dummy
* Breastfeeding, with a top up of thickened formula at each feed
* Breastfeeding, and topping up once or twice a day with formula
* Having Daddy, grandparents, godparents and family do bottlefeeds
* Dreamfeeds, where you feed the baby right before you go to bed to increase your chance of a longer sleep
* Bottle handles, because Dominic insists on holding his own bottles
* A kidney shaped pillow to breastfeed on
* A wedge pillow to bottlefeed on (once Dominic decided cuddles were not happening during feeds)
* A variety of bottle and teat styles, and now a variety of sippy cups, straw cups, pop-top drink bottles, regular cups etc. In short, Dominic will take the food however it is dispensed!
* Early start on solids (Farex) to help with reflux, while continuing to breastfeed.
* Cabbage leaves while I was weaning
* Hand expressing while I was weaning
* Pleading with Dominic to please have a little bit of a drink so Mummy was less sore (didn’t work terribly well, but I gave it a try!)
* Your obstetrician and psychiatrist will probably defer backwards and forwards to each other, neither wanting to say that it’s ok or not ok to take your medication while pregnant. Get in touch with a paediatrician as soon as you can, and talk to them about it.
* For any OCD mummies out there, start out by not caring which breast the baby drank from last. It’s only going to end in tears because one night you WILL be too tired to remember and you don’t want to get yourself in a state over it! I’m not a ‘germ phobe’, I’m a counter and a worrier, so I haven’t had as many problems as I expected.
* If you have a mental illness, be extra aware of the possibility of postnatal depression. You probably already have a support network set up. Tell all the midwives and nurses about your mental illness and how it might affect you as a parent. I did, and got lots of extra help in the hospital and at the clinic.
* Only listen to family, friends, midwives, nurses and doctors who said things we liked and encouraged us to find the best solution to our feeding problems without pressuring us.

As we prepared for Ethan’s arrival I started to get excited about breastfeeding. I was committed to raising our baby “green”. I went out and purchased nursing bras, went to a breastfeeding class and paid ahead of time to have a lactation consultant come support me in our home after his birth. I had heard of the challenge of breastfeeding from many moms  and wanted to be prepared ahead of time.  Finally on August 3, 2008, 10 days late, Ethan Paul Dumouchel, 8lbs 8 oz, arrived after a 13 ½ hr, unmedicated labour, with the support of our doula and Obstetrician. I remember that as soon as they put him on my chest, I felt such relief as I observed his perfect little face and ten fingers and toes. He was perfect and beautiful. His APGAR scores were awesome and they took us to our room right away. Through the night I tried nursing him several times as he woke up hungry to be fed. It was a holiday weekend and so the hospital lactation consultant was unavailable. We got Ethan to latch a few times but every time we would hear large “clucking” sounds and then he would fall off. I felt so frustrated as I listened to him scream. I thought the problem was that my breast was too large for his little mouth. I satisfied him as best I could by squeezing colostrum into his mouth. Matt, my husband and I had decided ahead of time that no formula was to be given to our baby and that we would spend as little time as possible in the hospital so we were eager to be discharged.  I remember the next morning as clear as day in my mind. I don’t think I will ever forget the words of the pediatrician who came to check him over in preparation to discharge us. “Did anyone tell you about his mouth?”, he asked. What we learned next was that Ethan was born with a cleft in his soft palate. This was the reason for the clucking sounds while breastfeeding; Ethan could not get a good seal while breastfeeding with a hole in the roof of his mouth; . I remember the horror that I felt as I listened to the doctor. Seeing my distress he quickly reassured me that it was “the best kind of cleft to have” because of how small it was. At the time neither Matt nor I knew what a cleft palate would mean for us or for Ethan. They discharged us after setting us up with an appointment with the “Cleft Palate Team” a few days later. The nurse was reluctant but I assured her that the lactation consultant that I had hired would be coming to the house that day to help me. My lactation consultant was wonderful. She got Ethan on my breast right away and although I felt him sucking, it wasn’t very hard and he would quickly fall asleep only to pull away screaming full of air a few moments later. She constantly reassured me that “all babies can breastfeed”. After the first night however, it was clear that it wasn’t working. My lactation consultant suggested nipple shields, whichseemed to do the trick in terms of getting Ethan to latch. He still seemed to struggle with gas from swallowing so much air through his cleft. After weighing him two days after birth, it was evident that Ethan wasn’t getting enough sucking on me. I began pumping and syringe feeding him. I would put him to breast first and let him suck for as long as he wanted and then I would syringe feed him. The “cleft palate team” came on the Thursday, four days after Ethan was born. I remember the words of the feeding specialist very clearly. “Only 1% of babies with a cleft palate successfully breastfeed. I am sorry you won’t be able to breastfeed your son. Does that make you feel disappointed?” To me her words were like a shotgun to my heart. One part of me immediately disliked her and wanted to prove her horribly wrong. The other part of me wanted to succumb to the disappointment and accept what she was saying and move on. I couldn’t even respond to her, I just stood and cried. I remember nothing else that she said that day. I couldn’t bring myself to look at the literature that they provided or to talk about surgeries etc, for weeks after. They gave us a bottle called a Haberman feeder which allows a baby to eat without sucking. I had been determined to avoid giving our baby a bottle for fear that he would prefer it over my breast. My lactation consultant told me that everything that was happening with Ethan was normal for a baby with a cleft palate and that she had helped many moms to successfully breastfeed post surgery if they kept offering the breast every time. I found it really hard to believe. I continued to pump and syringe feed every two hours until Ethan was about 10 days old. He hadn’t pooped since he was born and I was worried that he just wasn’t getting enough. I finally caved and gave him the bottle. It took Ethan thirty minutes to finish a bottle and he immediately pooped. We continued with this trend of giving him the bottle after offering him the breast. My lactation consultant kept encouraging me that we would be that 1% and that babies will always prefer the breast.

Ethan’s weight gain was slow and both the Cleft Palate Team (CPT)and some of the doctors discouraged my desire to breastfeed prior to bottle feeding at every turn. I felt as though they thought I was a bad mother for wanting to breastfeed. The feeding specialist from the CPT kept encouraging me to quit. When Ethan was six weeks he returned to his birth weight. I learned later that, whether breastfed or bottle fed, it’s normal for a baby with a cleft palate to have extremely slow weight gain and that it is common for them to not return to their birth weight until six weeks. I continued to encounter many challenges along the way. At nine weeks my milk supply dropped drastically down to nothing. A combination of exclusive pumping, PCOS and stress over Ethan’s slow weight gain forced us to have to supplement with organic formula. The first time we gave Ethan formula I cried. I felt like such a failure. Not only could I not successfully breastfeed our baby “normally”, I could not make enough milk for him. I tried everything and anything that I could. I tried Domperidone, Blessed Thistle and Fenugreek. I also took Goat’s Rue an herb tincture specially formulated for women with PCOS who are breastfeeding . It was shortly after this that my milk supply came back up a bit. Ethan began taking more and more formula and at three months his weight finally took off and started to catch up with other babies. During this time Ethan went on countless nursing strikes as he learned very quickly that the bottle was the easier way to get food. Each time my lactation consultant promised me that Ethan would come back to breast and he always did. I was determined to not let him forget how to latch. As much as I wanted to believe that someday, if I kept going, Ethan would breastfeed like a normal baby, it was a constant battle in my mind. It was that hope and desire that made me keep going every time I wanted to quit and just give him the bottle.  I tried not to take it personally when Ethan would reject the breast but I would often cry in frustration.  All along the way I struggled with blocked ducts, and sore, nipples from pumping. Every time I thought about stopping, my husband and my lactation consultant would encourage me on. When Ethan had finally started to catch up with his weight we introduced a supplementary nursing system (SNS). It was messy and awkward and most days Ethan wanted nothing to do with it, but it convinced him to come back to breast after one of the longest nursing strikes that we had ever had. It had been three weeks and he happily sucked away with his new gratification. I continued pumping and using the nipple shields, SNS and Haberman until Ethan was almost ten months old. At this point Ethan had surgery to repair his cleft palate. I pumped while he was in the hospital and sippy cup fed him after his surgery for about a week. In an effort to prevent him from doing too much sucking after his surgery I used the SNS, squeezing the milk into his mouth and offered the breast. He took to it immediately and refused to use the sippy cup. After three weeks the surgeon informed us that his mouth was healing nicely and he could now suck I pulled out the SNS and let Ethan suck away. The first time I felt Ethan suck on the nipple shield after his surgery I cried. I had no idea what a normal suck was supposed to feel like. I was amazed. Ethan had surgery May 25, 2009. For the entire month of June, I began cutting away pieces of the side of the nipple shield and then finally started to cut away pieces of the nipple. Every time I tried to offer my nipple without the shield Ethan would freak out. Finally on July 7, 2009 when Ethan was eleven months old, I slipped the nipple shield off when he wasn’t looking and he latched on and sucked away happily. It was at this moment that I breastfed my baby normally for the first time. I cried. I had known that I was always meant to breastfeed our child but I had doubts that it would ever happen.  Hope is a powerful motivator; it kept me going when I thought I had nothing left.

Today, Ethan is a happy, healthy, beautiful, fifteen month old. I nurse him anywhere from 3 to 4 times a day around my part-time teaching schedule. I plan to continue nursing until he is ready to quit. One of the complications of a cleft palate is malfunctioning Eustachian tubes. As such Ethan has tubes in his ears and will need to have them until the soft palate muscle allows the Eustachian tubes to function on their own. Until this time he is prone to ear infections. Breastfeeding as long as we have has helped us to be ear infection. I have never been so proud of anything that I have ever accomplished in my life as I have in the fact that Ethan and I did not give up. I feel joy and happiness every time I breastfeed my son. I am so eternally grateful for what we have accomplished and so proud of Ethan for how far he has come. I never would have breastfed my son if it hadn’t been for my lactation consultant and my wonderfully supportive husband. I now truly believe that “all babies were meant to breastfeed.”

Due to the fact that Jayden was breech, I was scheduled for a caesarean at 39 weeks. I had the most wonderful birth experience and was back in the room to greet my husband and new baby within a few hours. I was elated, and could not believe this perfect little person was created by us.

After an hour or so back in the room, we tried to breastfeed. Jayden was still so sleepy and didn’t attach or seem at all interested. Fair enough, he was just yanked out of my belly unexpectedly (in his mind) so I thought we’ll give him some time to wake up.

Jayden didn’t wake up properly for a good few days and was quite unsettled as my milk didn’t come in properly until day 5 due to the caesarean. He was very hungry and not getting much at all because he was too tired to feed – what a vicious cycle it was, so hungry because he was too tired to feed, but too tired to feed because he was so hungry. I had the ‘baby blues’ moment early on day 5 when the midwives decided to give him formula with my EBM (what I could get!) – I felt horrible as formula was something I wanted to avoid at all costs. I reluctantly agreed, as I had to look after my little man as he had lost 430g (over 12% of his birth weight) and was getting jaundiced and very unsettled.

I will always remember the moment when I was attached to a double pump at 4am, trying to express what little milk I could get out, whilst feeling like the biggest jersey cow. I watched with tears streaming down my face whilst a midwife (a total stranger, in my eyes!)  was feeding MY baby. Why couldn’t I do that? What made my body so incompetent that I couldn’t do the one thing that nature intended it to do?

The pump must have done its job, as later that morning my milk came in, and I suddenly resembled a Dolly Parton impersonator. Unfortunately, we now had another problem in that because my breasts were so engorged, he couldn’t attach properly. Nevertheless, I continued to try and offer him the breast at regular intervals.

I had a light bulb moment later that day. After seeing how Jayden quickly demolished the bottle of formula, and now that my milk was in, I decided to try expressing again and feeding it to him in a bottle. All the staff were supportive of this idea, so I got pumping – and the liquid gold flowed.

Now came the biggest test – would Jayden drink it? Yes – he would! You have no idea the amount of relief I felt knowing that I COULD feed my baby MY milk – okay, it might be through other means other than my nipples, but he was still going to get all the lovely liquid gold and nutrients that I was producing for him.

So on it went – I expressed every single feed for my 2-3 hourly fed baby for the first 5ish weeks of his life. Looking back now I think how hard it actually was (especially when my poor husband was trying to sleep next to me with the breast pump going!), but at the time it was just something I had to do for Jayden.

I would always offer the breast to Jayden before the EBM, in the hope that he would attach and feed. The day that he actually attached properly, and I saw him happily sucking away was one of the best days of my life. I nearly jumped off the chair – in fact I would have, if he wasn’t still attached!

This could quite easily be the end of my story, happy ending right here. However, we had another spanner thrown in the works when Jayden was about 14 weeks old. One day I woke up – and suddenly had no milk. After having a fabulous supply with fast letdown, it was just suddenly gone. I couldn’t express anything, and Jayden couldn’t get anything out! I tried to keep Jayden on the breast all day to stimulate the supply, but the poor thing was crying, I was crying, it was just a horrible, horrible day.

Thankfully I was able to get to the Doctor who prescribed some Maxalon which worked straight away, and we were back on our breastfeeding journey again. Phew!

Now THIS is the happy ending.

Jayden is now 14 months old – and still breastfeeding. :)

He was exclusively breastfed until just after 6 months old when we started solids, has been demand fed otherwise. He currently feeds morning and night, and during the day 1-2 time before sleeps.

My initial goal was to get to 6 months, then 12 months and now…we’ll see. I am not going to put a timeline on it; I am just going to let our little man decide when he’s had enough.

It could have been so easy to give up, especially when faced with professionals who didn’t see the big deal about offering formula. I am so glad I didn’t though; I love the bond Jayden and I share when he is feeding, it is like our own little special time together.

I am so glad that I persevered and I feel very proud to know that our little man has been given the best start to life that I could possibly provide him with.

Just three short years later, my husband and I became pregnant with our first little boy, Ryan. He was born on November 10, 2005 via c-section, and he was the most beautiful little thing I had ever seen. The choice to breast feed was a no-brainer for us, and I began to nurse him just hours after I had left recovery. At Ryan’s 2 week appointment, he had lost a significant amount of weight, and until then it had never dawned on me that there might be a problem with the breast that had been operated on. We are not sure if it is damage to the areola or the milk ducts or both, but at that point I was given a pump to help stimulate my milk production and was instructed to start supplementing. That, for me, was heartbreaking. I struggled for months to try to keep up with Ryan, but I was fighting a losing battle. At one point, one breast could produce 6 ounces while the other, only 1 ounce. I think my story is truly inspiring because despite all of my frustrations, low supply issues, and struggles, I worked my butt off and nursed him for 2 years! 

On December 19, 2008 we welcomed out second little boy, Reid, in to the world! I will never forget my husband’s exact words as he was pulled out of my belly, “Oh Cindy, he’s beautiful.” This time things are a bit different. I know that I can do this and I think that, combined with my determination has made nursing Reid so much easier than it ever was with Ryan.

In the grand scheme of things, we have to laugh about it, as my husband jokes with me, “Don’t hold out on him, give him the “good” boob.” I am so proud of myself, and I think that if I can nurse my big boys with a “bum” boob, then anyone can!