On Breastfeeding

I am not sure why but I thought breastfeeding was going to be magical. I thought my baby was going to just eat and I would just produce his substance.   Both of these things were true but it was just not that simple.  From basically day 1 jones was a lazy eater he preferred nodding off to eating.  He also never would latch good and so we introduced him to a nipple shield - this was right up his alley. 

While the nipple shield seemed to help him eat it didn't make breasting magic.  It often made his latch worse and made me sore.  In addition to this he was taking about 1-1.5 hours to eat and I kept having to nudge him back awake.  

It took him two months to get back to birth weight because he was such a sleepy eater.  And I was feeding him pumped milk after feedings.  I kept wondering where the magic was.  The only thing miracle like was I could produce everything he needed myself.  

I started pumping after about a week to supplement him.  I had purchased a medala pump that was highly recommended but sadly it never emptied me.  I could shoot milk across the room but never could pump more than 4oz at a time.  Because my pump was not sufficient I was always engorged (hello painful).

I tried getting new parts for my pump, did power pumping, drinking gallons of water, hand pumping and lactation classes and consultants.  It didn't seem to really help.

 I went back to work when babyburf was 6 weeks old and very quickly my pumping problems became even more annoying.  I was getting up at 1 and 4 to pump even though the baby was sleeping.  This just to produced enough milk throughout the day - where is the magic in that? Jones actually preferred the bottle but all this pumping was making me crazy.  

At about 12 weeks jones was over breastfeeding he screamed bloody murder if I didn't offer him a bottle I offered the breast.    This made me engorged more because I wasn't even emptying a breasts 3 times a day as I had been when I went back to work.  It was highly painful and just frustrating.  It also caused the production of my right side to slow after he quit eating from me I never could pump more the 2oz on my right side😁.  It was about this time we introduced 1-2 bottles of formula a day because the baby was hungrier than I could pump milk for.  I felt crazy frustrated.

We actually tried a few formulas before we went with simalac I am still not entirely sure it's the best option but he's finally got out of the 1-5 percentile bracket (we hop 45%) and he's no longer taking a poo instantly after eating formula.  

Just recently I gave up on breastfeeding all together and we transitioned entirely to formula.  Since quitting entirely my only regret is spending the money on something I should be producing naturally - but for my sanity switching was entirely necessary or I should have taken off work for another 6-12 weeks (which is way more expensive than purchasing formula).  

Hopefully when we have a second child we will have better results.  Anyhow that's our story on breastfeeding.