Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Got Milk?

I DO! Remember this post? It was all about my experience (or lack thereof) with nursing Evie, and towards the end of it, I said, "at least now we know where we went wrong, and we can do it better next time. We've learned from our experiences with Evie, and I'll hopefully be better able to nurse my next baby the way I so desperately wanted to with her." Well, exactly one year later, I'm writing this post to say I DID IT! I've been exclusively nursing Ella for over 4 weeks now, and we're still going strong! She's been steadily gaining weight, and within the first week of bringing her home, I even had over 25 ounces of breastmilk stored in the freezer!
A couple of posts ago, I told the story of our hospital stay and the situation with the doctor trying to get me to feed Elizabeth formula. I'm still so thankful that we followed our instincts because now I can say that we started out on the right path from Day One, as opposed to my experience with Evie. Actually, my negative experience with Evie has helped this time around, because I'm now much more fiercely determined to succeed with nursing. For example, while I was still in the hospital, the lactation consultant came in to see how I was doing and was very friendly. She answered all of the questions that I had and never condescended to me. I asked for advice about potential use of galactogogues like fenugreek if I needed them, and she gave me helpful information and dosage instructions. She even offered to come in and observe my next feeding if I wanted to make sure I was doing it right. I thanked her, but never called her back in. I figured that I was doing fairly well on my own and, even if I didn't have "perfect" technique, it was working fine. Rather than stress myself out with someone watching and potentially screw myself up in the process, I decided to just relax and let the milk flow in a way that felt natural to me. Besides, my body had muscle memory from the final lessons with Evie, so what felt natural was actually fairly close to the "right" way anyway. My thought is, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." Despite maybe not having the perfect technique, I never hurt nearly as bad as I did with Evie. At the beginning of each feeding, I would have to curl my toes and hold my breath for a couple of minutes until the pain went away, but that was only because my body was relearning how to use muscles it hadn't used in over a year, and was "priming the pump" so to speak. Even that initial pain went away within about a week or so. Now, I can just pop Elizabeth on and off with no problem. And it's working! I have so many emotions in my heart right now that are threatening to spill over into my eyes: triumph, pride, joy, love, and gratitude. I have been so blessed with such a beautiful little girl, and I am so thankful for the ability I have to feed and nurture her!

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