[QUOTE=biddee] inkleberry thanks for answering my questions. I love that you can still have humour in this situation. And I’m feeling lots of grrr’s for you especially since you’ve really done all you can. I really commend you for the effort you’ve put in. Thanks for sharing the saga of the boobs too…I don’t mean to laugh at you, but your style of writing is so wonderfully sarcastic, that I couldn’t help a big grin imagining you whipping your boobs out for the LC :D. I’m not even going to try and offer any suggestions because obviously you know what you’re doing, and I’m hoping that the motilium will help (I know a lot of women who have seen drastic jumps in their supply from the motilium). Actually, I do have one suggestion…have you tried a hand pump like the Avent Isis? Something struck me about your situation in that you have to have shallow, quick, suction and I know with the Isis you can control the quickness/shallowness of the suck better than you can with the electric pumps. I know someone who exclusively pumped with the Isis for about 4 months (although that’s not recommended…the Isis is for occasional use only under normal circumstances (for the benefit of lurkers)).
I believe you that you’ve tried everything. God knows, I did the pumping thing myself with one of my twins, and while I was fortunate enough to produce for the pump at first, by the time she was older, I could pump umpteen times a day and get nothing. Then I quit. And I’d nursed my oldest until she was 5 (and the other twin went on to nurse until 3 1/2).
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5 and 3 1/2. Is that in months or years? And wouldn’t the teeth get in the way? And how do you breast feed a child in kindergarten? I’m all kinds of confused.
I couldn’t stand the Isis, couldn’t get anything with it - and this considering I pumped exclusively for one of my twins with the Medela Lactina (rental, hospital grade) for 21 months).
I gave up when I realised I was spending something like 5 hours a day pumping to get 1/2 of what my daughter needed. Given that her congenital heart and stomach defects had been surgically repaired by then and she was gaining weight and stable, I felt she would continue gaining ground even if I stopped. But there are certainly very strong medical reasons, sometimes, to provide breastmilk in any quantity, even if it’s not 100%. That’s how it was for us, anyway, I can’t speak for anyone else. And I certainly had people say, why don’t you just give her formula? But they didn’t know our situation, and still might not have understood it if they’d known.
Years, not months. And teeth have never proven a problem for me - I get teeth imprints, but never an actual bite. Not after the first chomp, scream, and involuntary jerk of the arms, that leaves me with an adrenaline zing and the baby wailing in startlement. My 19 month old has never deliberately bitten me. I know some babies do, so I count myself fortunate, not smug or anything.
As for kindergarten, for one thing, we homeschool, so the spectre of ‘school’ doesn’t apply. For another, for a child 5 years old, you’re talking about a 2-3 minute nursing session once every day, every couple of days, or even once a week - not eight times a day. In the case of my oldest, every time I tried to ease her off and refuse her, she’d take up thumb-sucking when she thought I wasn’t watching, which was not a self-soothing behavior she had exhibited prior to my weaning efforts. I didn’t want her to start thumb-sucking, and I figured she had some psychological need she was meeting with the nursing, so I allowed it to continue. Anyway, she asked less and less, and eventually she just quit asking. It was so gradual that there was no trauma to her, and I couldn’t tell you exactly when it happened. It’s less ooky than it sounds. Every day they’re just a little older, and a little older, and I figure they wouldn’t ask if they didn’t still need it at some level. And I don’t have to understand the need - just meet it if I can, or refuse to meet it and provide some alternative.
(Yes, I would draw the line eventually. But my kids weaned themselves before that point.)
I just want to say that about 65% of Irishwomen do not breastfeed EVER.
About another 15% only breastfeed for the first 6 weeks or so. Most babies here are given their first solids at 4 months and are completley off formula by 18months. The average Irish child is perfectly healthy.
We’re desperately trying to get more women to breastfeed, but only the ones who can, but don’t because they don’t realise why they should. The culture here is such that we just don’t have boobnazis, because everyone can look at the majority of children who are formula fed and healthy and laugh at their more ridiculous claims. the midwives are the ones who act as lactation consultants here, and every single one I’ve met has been a really nice, comforting person who won’t let a mother struggle on, trying to breastfeed if it doesn’t look like it’s going to work.
Yes, you’re supposed to breastfed, yes it’s the best thing, but for goodness sake that’s only true up to a point. If it’s not working, if it’s making you both stressed out, if it’s not helping you bond with the baby, if everyone is happier with formula, use the formula! You and your baby are individuals, and you need to do what works for you. Formula isn’t as optimal as breastmilk, but it’s damn close and has been designed to be as good a match as possible.
As for people who choose to come up to you while you are breast or bottle feeding and make snarky comments, tell them to mind their own fucking business.
(Alcohol is not a good thing to take while you’re lactating, it gets into the milk. My formulary says “may affect the infant and reduce milk consumption”. It seems drunk babies are not the way forward.)
You know, I’ve thought about this, and I suspect if we were still cavewomen, we might be a lot better off in this respect - surely there were cavewomen who had lactation problems, but my guess is they would have several sisters/cousins/aunts who were nursing at the time and could take over for them.
I think a lot of the stress associated with breastfeeding has come from our more civilized way of living, which certainly has lots of benefits, but has also wiped out a lot of breastfeeding knowledge and isolated people from each other.
If we were still “cavewomen”, or in any situation where commercial formulas didn’t exist, we would have grown up around breastfeeding women. We would have learned a lot without trying, and we would surely have heard women discuss common problems with feeding and what worked to fix them. We would have had experienced moms on hand to show us how to get our first baby to latch on. When and if we hit difficulties, instead of having the Greek chorus in the background chanting “Why Don’t You Just Switch To Formula?”, we would have had family and friends mobilizing to help, with all the urgency that comes from knowing that a baby’s life is at stake. And it wouldn’t be a political thing, or yet another battlefield in the Mommy Wars - it would be exactly what it should be, part of the rich fabric of life.
We might be getting back to this point in Scandinavia, where breastfeeding rates are the highest in the industrialized world. I hope so.
If we were cavewomen, we’d also probably all know someone who’d lost a baby due to malnutrition because milk hadn’t come in, latch-on couldn’t be achieved, etc., etc. Oh, those were good times, those cave-days.
Ah, yes, because somehow, uniquely among mammal species, we really just suck at feeding our young :dubious:
I certainly won’t deny that modern society has brought infant mortality way, way down. All you need to do is look at how high it is in parts of the world where people can’t afford nutritious food, clean water and basic medical care. What I’m not seeing is proof that these deaths are due to breastfeeding difficulties.
…and before I get accused of “blaming women” when breastfeeding doesn’t go well, I’m not. In fact I think I’m doing exactly the opposite.
I grew up in an area of the United States where breastfeeding rates are still quite low; in the seventies, when I was a wee flod, they were very low indeed. What I saw, growing up, was that the normal thing to do with a baby was to mix special powder and water in a plastic or glass tube, add a rubber nipple, and place that in the baby’s mouth. Those women who did breastfeed were, shall we say, strongly encouraged to hide it. I was a teen before I had a clue about the mechanics involved, and then only because there was a sketch in one of my textbooks at school. A mother-to-be who announced that she intended to “try” to breastfeed was given advice from other women - most of whom had breastfed little if at all - about how to “toughen up” her nipples ahead of time, how many minutes it was okay to let the baby nurse on each side, and the best way to suppliment with a bottle if it turned out, and the assumption was it surely would, she didn’t have enough milk. Any woman who admitted to continue nursing once the baby had started on cereals was asked how long she intended to “keep doing that?” Growing up with such attitudes and misinformation all around us, I’m amazed any of us have managed to breastfeed at all!
What angers me is that women who grew up like this, and who are subjected to the stress of worrying that they’re going to have to go back to work in six to twelve weeks and pump (or potentially have to abandon breastfeeding altogether as pumping at work will be impossible), who are warned that they mustn’t let a stranger see them “do that”, who get masses of unsolicited free formula samples on their doorstep, who constantly hear the Greek chorus telling them It’s Time To Switch To Formula every time there’s the slightest difficulty (or even when there isn’t…), who are bombarded with the ideas that breastfeeding is hard and that breastfeeding is a political act (thank you, LLL extremists)… women in that situation who decide they’ve had enough are told that it’s their bodies that failed them. Which is the same thing as saying they failed themselves. And this is supposed to be “kind”, this is supposed to “spare their feelings”. Baloney. Blame the breastfeeding-hostile culture for convincing them they couldn’t do it, and praise their wonderful bodies for everything they have done for their beautiful, beautiful babies.
Abbie Carmichael, I am saying this very gently. I’ve seen you start a Pit thread because a woman didn’t stay home to be killed along side her children. I’ve seen you espouse what look like to me other very rigid ideas about what being a good mother and a good person entail. Are you sure you can’t understand why people would take what some would see as unusual measures to do what they believe is the only right thing to do?
I’m a fan of breastfeeding; I’ve always said if I had kids I’d breastfeed, and I was slightly appalled when my sister-in-law didn’t even consider breastfeeding my neice and nephew. I’m also very cheap. Breastmilk is free; formula, from what I’ve read, is expensive. On the other hand, since I’ve never planned on having kids, this is a subject I know almost nothing about. On the other hand, regardless of what fine, fanciful theories I can come up with in my child-free state, there are two things I know. The interests of mother and child come first and reality trumps theory. You don’t endanger the health of the child or the health and sanity of the mother to conform to some fool theory someone who knows nothing about you and your situation came up with (“someone” could even be you a few years earlier).
Inkleberry, it isn’t easy disagreeing with what can feel like a hoard of people, some of whom can be dead nasty. As I said, this is also a subject I know nothing about. From what I’ve read here, I’ve no doubt you’re doing what’s right for you and your baby. Good for you! Please accept a pat on the back and a hug around the shoulders from me.
Hey, Inkleberry , how’s the domperidone going? Hope you’re having some success with it. I’m trying to stay out of the debate here, but I wanted to let you know we’re still thinking of you
