First time bf-er, please help!

[rachel527]

Good Afternoon,

My name is Rachel, I'm a first time momma due October 28, 2010 with a little girl. I have a lot of questions about breastfeeding and not much family to ask so I'd love all you experienced momma's opinions!

I bought the Medela Pump-in Style Advanced breast pump, haven't even taken it out of the box yet! I'm too scared to even mess with it so I think I'll bring it to the delivery room and have a lactation nurse help me with it? Or should I just go for it and try it now... or wait? Wow... I'm already getting anxious!

Anyway, my main concern is, is it possible to only pump (never breast feed from the actual breast?) Is that bad for the baby? I will be working full-time with the baby... when should I start bringing her to work? Is two weeks old too young? (It will be in an office).

If anyone would like to chat or email, I am in need of some advice!! Thank you mommies!! Can't wait to be a new mommie!!

Rachel

[Bebe's Mom]

I am a SAHM, never pumped, so not sure if I can help, but I have heard of people exclusively pumping. However, I advise you to at least try breastfeeding, especially in the first few days, as it will help your milk to come in. Besides, it creates an awesome bond between you and your baby. Also, most women say they get less milk when pumping-the baby is much more efficient at extracting milk. Most women I have talked to put their baby on the breast first to stimulate the let down, and then after the baby is done, they pump. This has the added benefit of making sure you get the maximum amount of hindmilk- the good stuff!! Your supply will vary by the time of day as well, most women have the most milk in the morning. Since you will be bringing your baby to work, you have the perfect opportunity to nurse instead of pumping, which in my mind is the best way to go-no accoutrement needed, just a boob and a baby!! (your office is required by law to provide you with a room to nurse/pump, and no this does not mean a bathroom.) Good luck, I hope this helps!!!
P.S. Get thee to a La Leche League meeting pronto!! They will answer all your questions and help with concerns after you have your baby. They helped me tremendously.

[womenswisdom]

Welcome! To answer your question: yes, you can exclusively pump, but most women do a combination of breastfeeding while with baby and having the baby's caregiver feed expressed breastmilk by bottle when they are working. It sounds like you will be bringing baby to work with you? If so, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to take breaks for breastfeeding while you are there. After all, you will have to either pump or nurse while at work, and pumping/bottlefeeding at work would be much more time-intensive.

You do not need to start pumping now. You won't have anything much (if anything) to pump off at this point. You'll have colostrum at birth and then your milk will come in a few days later. Just start nursing your baby when she is born - the colostrum is essential. Then, after several weeks of getting the nursing relationship solid, you can go ahead and start pumping some bottles so that you can be away from baby if you need to.

I would not plan to take a 2-week-old to work personally. You and she will need to be working on figuring things out. I know very few women who are wanting to go back to work at 2 weeks. Usually it's more like 6-8 weeks (on the longer side if you have a c-section).

If I can make a suggestion, I think you might find Ina May's Guide to Breastfeeding (she also has a good childbirth book!) and The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding really, really helpful. They contain sooo much good information. I'd also suggest you go to www.llli.org and find a good LLL near you and start going to meetings now. They are super-nice and love to see pregnant women and help them get off to a good start. It's great to have met the leaders before the baby comes so that if you run into any problems, you have someone to call that you've met before who will come out and help you.

Good luck and keep asking questions!

[jdg]

There's not much point in getting the pump out of the box yet. While some women have a small amount of milk before giving birth, many do not, and pumping isn't something you can really "rehearse" - you'll need to mess with the settings a bit once there's actually milk! That said, you can get it out to know how it basically works. But when I needed mine four days after the birth, I pulled it out of the box for the first time and was pumping in less than 10 minutes; it's really not rocket science. Don't worry.

Exclusive pumping isn't bad for the baby, but it can be bad for bf'ing in general. You'll find that you get more milk from nursing than from pumping, and you may not get much at all with the pump at the beginning. Remember that your body will need to learn and adjust, it's never done this before! And your body will learn much better and faster if you are nursing; you're biologically programmed to respond to your baby. I would suggest that while you are still at home, you nurse and get the hang of it, then see if you can't nurse at work.

The learning curve with a new baby is steep. Even if you've been around lots of babies, you haven't been around *this* baby, and it takes most new moms about 6 weeks or so to really get into the swing of things and learn their baby's cues. Do you want to be at work when you still are figuring out how to calm your baby when she's upset? What exactly is your setup? How productive are you needing to be? Are you going to be able to devote a huge chunk of your workday to your baby?

I don't mean to sound discouraging. I work in an office that places many demands on me, and would only be able to get 1/2 as much done if my baby was there with me. And there would have been entire days that were shot in those first weeks because she wanted something and I didn't know exactly what and she would NOT calm down and I spent my entire day just trying to figure out how to make her happy. So my personal advice would be to not plan on going back until at least 6 weeks so that you and your babe have established some "communication" and you have a good idea of what she wants when.

[boobs4milk]

nursing at the breast helps stimulate the hormones that assist in 'letdown' (aka the milk ejection reflex) and milk production. some women respond better to baby nursing, but i can pump multitudes of milk!

the best advice would be to read all you can about breastfeeding and pumping. if baby will be with you, why not just put her to breast. feeding at the breast is much easier than pumping, but breastmilk is a wonderful gift to give your baby, no matter how she gets it. good luck and try these websites:

www.kellymom.com
www.drjacknewman.com
www.askdrsears.com

[cocoanib]

Hi there Mama!
I would get the pump outta the box and wash everything up now. I would get to know how it works without actually pumping. That's what I did with mine, I have a PIS as well.

I'm a full time Mama too. I would lobe to bring my DD to work with me. That would be awesome. More BFing time. Right now, I pump when I'm at work. Enough for the next day as well as freezer stock.
Some Mama's do exclusively pump, but I would really recommend trying BFing with baby to breast. EPing will make more work for you and BFing to breast is fab for you and baby.
My fav thing to do when I get home at night is BF DD.
Many blessing with your pregnancy and baby!

[Anastasiya]

I wonder if exclusively pumping at work while your baby is there with you would even be productive. To me, it sounds like a massive waste of time, and I don't mean that rudely. What I mean is that, if your baby is there with you and she fusses, you just pop her on a breast and keep working. No big deal. Easy peasy! She can nurse as long as she wants, have her need to suck fulfilled, etc.

If you only pump, when she fusses you have to get up and get the bottle, warm the bottle, feed her, burp her, monitor the ounces she eats, figure out whether to keep or toss what she doesn't finish in that bottle, and then if you save it and she's hungry later you give her that last ounce but it's not enough, you're back up to heat another bottle. Then washing bottles. Then, because breastfeeding is a supply and demand thing, you'll need to go pump right afterwards. Probably taking the baby with you. And what if she fusses while you're pumping? How will you console her or burp her with your hands all tied up? What about washing the pump parts, milk storage, and all that?

I'm just thinking from a totally practical point of view here, because I've pumped too (though not exclusively), and it's not super simple. I imagine it would be annoyingly frustrating to do it at work *while your baby is there with you*. Anyway, if I were you, I would try just breastfeeding first, from the source.

[rachel527]

thank you!!

Wow, thank you all so much for the responses!!! I am going to try the breastfeeding for the first couple weeks from just the breast, and if it goes well I might just do that all the time (followed by pumping so I can bottle-feed at work or at least try it if I want to). I was just curious and scared reading all of the horror stories of breast feeding!! But I really want to try it and succeed at it!!!!! Thank you all so much!!

[Anastasiya]

Originally Posted by rachel527

Wow, thank you all so much for the responses!!! I am going to try the breastfeeding for the first couple weeks from just the breast, and if it goes well I might just do that all the time (followed by pumping so I can bottle-feed at work or at least try it if I want to). I was just curious and scared reading all of the horror stories of breast feeding!! But I really want to try it and succeed at it!!!!! Thank you all so much!!

What horror stories? Sure, it can be tough at first since there's a learning curve for both you and the baby, but I don't know of any horror stories. Care to share?

Also, try hanging around the BFeeding section and ask as many questions as you need to - the ladies are SO helpful!

[PatioGardener]

Originally Posted by rachel527

Wow, thank you all so much for the responses!!! I am going to try the breastfeeding for the first couple weeks from just the breast, and if it goes well I might just do that all the time (followed by pumping so I can bottle-feed at work or at least try it if I want to). I was just curious and scared reading all of the horror stories of breast feeding!! But I really want to try it and succeed at it!!!!! Thank you all so much!!

Welcome!


you can do it! it is hard at first, but then (for me, anyway) it got sooooo easy! i adore nursing my little one. he's 3 months now, and loves to nurse. sure he loves the milk, but he also loves to connect with me, to bury his head into my breast, to softly stroke my arm as we nurse. his whole body relaxes, and i do too. it fills my soul and makes me a better mother, and a better person. What a great way to re-connect at the end of a long day.

Not every nursing session is restoring, for example when we nurse in the elevator balancing grocery bags in one hand and baby in the other, but I gotta tell you, it is so useful to have immediate calming, comforting, hunger stopping milk available 24/7. Always safe, clean and the right temperature!

hope you stop back here regularly!

[spughy]

A couple of things - first, HOW AWESOME that you get to bring your baby to work with you!!! That's fantastic. My sister works in an office where she can have her baby sometimes, but as she sees clients a lot she can't have her all the time. Mostly her partner just brings the baby in a few times a day (well, once, now, she's 8 months old) so she can nurse her. (My sister has never used a pump.) As far as age when you take her to work - play it by ear. It varies so much, and will depend in large part on the personality of your baby. I would strongly, strongly recommend you get a wrap-style carrier (like a Moby Wrap or a Cuddly Wrap) because babies (all the babies I've ever dealt with, anyway!) love being in them, and will settle and snooze or just snuggle peacefully for hours at a time, freeing both your hands and allowing you to type, file, or whatever it is you do. Later on, as your baby gets mobile, you can use the wrap as a tether to tie him/her to your desk so he/she doesn't run off. (ha ha! kidding!)

I am definitely not anti-pump, I think they're extremely useful and to be completely honest, I loved pumping... something about *seeing* all that lovely milk go swishing out BUT pumping with my baby around was far less than fun. If I were you, and had my baby at work, the last thing I would want to do is pump! Nursing is so much faster and easier, you can't hold your baby while you pump, you have to fiddle around with cleaning bits and pieces, and you have to expose a great deal more of yourself while pumping than you do while nursing. I remember having to change my entire wardrobe over when I started back at work, and had to pump... layers or button-down shirts, so I could pump facing the wall in case anyone walked in and saw my exposed back if I had to hike up my shirt (I was able to reserve meeting rooms for pumping, but sometimes people neglected to check the schedule!) Anyway, while the actual activity of pumping was fun, and a nice break from my workday, there were some fiddly annoying aspects to it and I would definitely have preferred to nurse my baby instead!

The other thing I wanted to mention is that typically women who exclusively pump do so because of persistent latch issues, and it's not their first choice of how to feed the baby. Part of the reason is that normal oral-facial muscular and bone development relies on normal feeding - breastfeeding. The baby must use a different set of muscles, and to a greater extent, when breastfeeding than when bottle feeding. You can actually tell, much of the time, what babies are fed by bottle and which ones are breast fed, by the shape of their cheeks. Later on, children who were bottle-fed babies have much, much higher rates of dental malocclusions and complications of ear, nose and throat development. This is regardless of whether the liquid in the bottle is breastmilk or formula - it's the sucking action that's important. (If you want to read more on this than you ever wanted to know, visit Dr. Brian Palmer's website. My own father was a dentist who used to go on and on about it but I will stop here. )

[PatioGardener]

Originally Posted by spughy

I would strongly, strongly recommend you get a wrap-style carrier (like a Moby Wrap or a Cuddly Wrap) because babies (all the babies I've ever dealt with, anyway!) love being in them, and will settle and snooze or just snuggle peacefully for hours at a time, freeing both your hands and allowing you to type, file, or whatever it is you do.

ohhh, yes yes yes wraps are so useful! I have a moby both baby and I love it!

[ebbb]

Congrats on your baby. I have a 3 1/2 month old baby girl- and she is my first, so I have just gone through the whole first time breastfeeding thing. I am far from an experienced expert, but I have just walked through the path you are about to take more or less so, I just wanted to mention a couple of things to you that I discovered during my journey and offer some encouragement.

It can be hard at first, and figuring out good latch (if you have a lactation consultant in the hospital- get them to help you get a good latch) . Also, in all the books that I read they always said if the latch was bad then your nipples will get sore and cracked- but for me at least, this happened even with a good latch. I never realized how powerful her sucking would be and since my nipples were not used to it, they had to toughen up. So I would say, focus on getting a good latch, and eventually your nipples will get used to the sucking and it will be pain free.I'm not going to lie, it was very painful at times- but after she was on for a minute or two, I couldn't feel the pain anymore, and after about 2- 2 1/2 weeks and everything was healed up, it didn't hurt at all. I'm not saying this to scare you or as a horror story, but just because I think that it can really put a new mom off of breastfeeding if she thinks that her nipples are sore because she's doing it wrong, even when she's doing it right. Or think that it will feel this way forever. It will get better- just make sure you have a good latch and your body and baby will heal and get into harmony. The most important part for me was having a support person (for me it was my mom) who had been through it before. I agree with the other posters, to find a LLL meeting near you and go because in those first few weeks when you are tired, hormonal, and getting to know your new daughter, having that support with breastfeeding, I think is essential.
Even though breastfeeding is the most natural and best thing for us and our babies (it's what we were made to do), it does take a commitment, and it does take work, but once you get the hang of it, it can be so liberating!( And incredibly work and time saving) To know that know matter where you are or what you are doing (with some limitations) as long as you and your baby are together, you can meet her needs, is an amazing feeling. And you never have to worry about sterilizing, warming, how much or how old, it is perfectly ready to go all the time. When I started breastfeeding I honestly dreaded it because my nipples were so sore, but with encouragement I pushed through and can honestly say now that the breastfeeding relationship I have with my daughter is one of the most precious gifts of being a mom.

And I would also agree that giving yourself at least 6 weeks before going back to work is a good idea if you can. Having that time to figure out your new little baby, your new little family and yourself as a new mom would be a good thing. It definitely caught me off guard how emotional I was after giving birth for those 6 weeks. Giving birth- going from pregnant to not pregnant is a big deal and it will take at least that long for your body to make the transition. Looking back now, I wouldn't have even been able to function normally at work. But that's just me, you may be different. I would say though, that giving yourself the gift of those first 6 weeks to be with your new daughter and bond and eat, sleep,cuddle and breastfeed (as much as possible anyway:-)would be something you will never regret.


Congrats again on your impending bundle of joy!

[RaeDyCo]

I wanted to add one thing about the pump -- it's great that you bought the pump so early but there is a warranty on pumps, usually a year from the date of purchase. By buying the pump so early when you aren't even using it, you have shortened your warranty. If you haven't opened the box, I would see if you can return it and buy another closer to your due date so that you can get the most of your warranty.

[Quinalla]

Glad to hear you are planning to breastfeed!

It sounds like you might not need your pump much, but I too would get it out and get acquainted with it, read the instructions and get it all washed and ready to go for when you do need it. Pump are pretty simple, but it is still nice to have familiarity before the first time you sit down to pump. Also, you have so much more time now than after with a new baby, so anything you can do now before she arrives, I recommend doing

Hang out and read plenty of threads on this forum. Visit kellymom.com, excellent BFing resource. Go to a/several LLL meeting if you can. Go to a breastfeeding class (there are lots available for free from hospitals, pediatrican offices, etc.) and get some breastfeeding books from the library. You'll do great, but if you do have any problems/questions, it really helps to have prepared so you can feel confident in yourself and know where to go to get answers.

[AislinCarys]

Rachel, if I were you I wouldn't look or listen to horror stories, but success stories! Take to heart that with the right support at least 95% of women can breastfeed their babies.

My story is a success story. We had huge problems early on, and had to supplement (using donated milk and a an SNS, a tube at the breast). At six months, just around the time DD started playing with solids, we had weaned of the donor milk, and onto my milk, and have never had a problem since, despite DD being quite slow to take to solids (well, I had some plugged ducts between 13 months and 18 months, but not too bad).

Our case is unusual. Low milk supply, if you get good support and don't introduce bottles early and feed on demand etc. is really rare. And usually reversible, even in a bad case! If we could do it, almost everyone can. In the antenatal groups I went to, of the three groups run right after each other (12 mothers in each) i was the only one with low supply issues. I know there was another one in the class run when DD was about 9 months old. But we had excellent support, great midwives, lactation consultant.

The other major obstacle to many women is pain. My advice would be, don't be surprised if it is painful in the early weeks, it isn't unusual, and the initial pain passes. Lansinoh is a good standby, paracetamol can be useful, and just try to get through the let-down at first! However, do see a lactation consultant to make sure your latch is right and nothing else is wrong.

My advice for you to prepare:

- Contact La Leche League before the birth.

- Have a good IBLCE lactation consultant lined up, and arrange to see her in the first week or two.

- www.drjacknewman.com Also before the birth, read up on his pages, watch the video clips. This will help you know a good latch, know if the baby is getting milk, and know what to expect, and what is a myth!

- Arrange for help in the first few weeks, friends and family to deliver food and snacks, help out with housework. You need to be able to focus on feeding that baby! Make sure you have a lot of nutritious snack foods and bottles of water at hand, to keep next to you as you rest and feed.

- However, keep visitors to a minimum, and plan when it is suitable, make a sign to put on the front door "Mum and baby are resting".

- We were told in antenatal classes that breastfeeding is a full-time job in the first few weeks, expect to spend up to 20 hours a day with baby at the breast!

- Don't make too many plans too early, you don't yet know how your recovery will be! I had a vaginal birth, with an episiotomy, but could hardly walk for the first two weeks, I was too weak and in too much pain, so recovery was slow for me. A friend of mine couldn't sit in the first few weeks, so she wore her baby in a sling and walked all day, for her that worked. Also, it takes a few weeks to get a bit settled - for the mother, I mean - to get out of the first confusing haze. However, once you feel strong enough, and you and baby have got a bit settled together, I don't think there's a problem bringing the baby anywhere. A friend of mine brought her 3 day old to her older child's music class.

- Expect to be able to breastfeed, not to try, and you are much more likely to succeed!

If you want to talk, about anything at all, please pm me, I'd love to talk to you!

Good luck!