I'm going to finish blogging about my fun day at P.Allen's house next week - today I'm blogging again about a baby's first year!
This is another post in a series I am doing with Huggies and BlogHer on a baby's first year.
Today I am going to focus on feeding a baby. I want to say right now, straight up to the 3 men who read my blog (which includes Scott, my dad and maybe my brother): you might want to come back tomorrow. This is a TMI post that you don't want to read. :-)
I want to start off by saying I did breastfeed and I'm thankful I did BUT it's not for everyone, and everyone can't breastfeed and there is nothing wrong with that. I'm just sharing MY experiences!!! And I'll add that my goal was to breastfeed for a year with both girls and I made it to 10 months and 7 months. And I'm totally okay with that.
Also, I'm not giving advice, just sharing how my experience was. I know everyone is different and I will NEVER put myself out there as any kind of parenting expert. Ha!
Harper and nursing got off to a rough start, since she was in the NICU. It wasn't what I had expected. I had to pump the whole first month and only finally started nursing when we got home from the hospital. That was a strange experience. Thankfully, Hollis latched early and we got a good start. But it was different. It hurt SO bad! I thought something was terribly wrong because by the time I was able to nurse Harper after all the pumping, it didn't really hurt.
I'm not a strict schedule girl. I know a lot of people live by their schedules with babies, and I think that's awesome, but I was just not that girl. I stuck to a mostly-every-3-hours feeding schedule, but I also had big, hungry girls and sometimes they wanted to eat every hour and I was okay with that too. I just didn't want a schedule to stress me out, but it does help to have some sort of structure if you ever want to leave the house!
I loved that I could nurse, but there is a lot that's hard about it. It's hard to be gone more than 3 hours or you have to find somewhere to nurse in public. That doesn't bother most people, but I am super modest and I ended up feeding in my car a lot. It also makes it hard to travel. And dressing for nursing is hard too. I mostly just wore what I wanted and went with it unless I was going to be somewhere like church and knew I would have to nurse. Some Sundays got interesting.
I bought a good pump - a Medela Pump in Style - and I'm glad I did. I honestly didn't use it much, though. After having to pump that whole first month, I wanted nothing to do with it after that. But if I ever wanted to leave the girls with Scott, it was important that I could keep a bottle or two stored up. I know a lot of you work or need to pump to keep up the supply.
Some things I found essential when nursing were the Boppy pillow, a Hooter Hider, nipple shields (I'm a wimp and used those the entire time I nursed) and good nursing tank tops.
I really wanted my girls to be able to take a bottle so I could occasionally be away from them. Harper took the Dr. Brown bottles, but Hollis wouldn't have anything to do with them. A friend let me try out Tommee Tippee bottles - they are shaped a lot like a breast - and she loved them. And I like them because they are much easier to clean than a lot of others.
I honestly didn't have a problem weaning either girl. I did it pretty much cold turkey with Harper and that was a little quick. I let her try formula and she guzzled it down. She had not been nursing very well, and I think I had started to lose my supply, so I think I was starving her at that point. She took 3 formula bottles in one day and I just quit right then and there. With Hollis I slowly weaned her, dropping one feeding a day. I thought I would be really sad to stop nursing, but I think I was more relieved. I could wear dresses and leave the house for longer periods of time. In both cases, it just felt like it was time for us to stop nursing.
That's my experience in feeding. I think everyone has a different experience, but the end goal is for us to all have healthy, thriving babies!
I'd love your comments - but PLEASE be respectful to others.
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