Hang in there, Mama, it gets easier! The first few weeks with a newborn are just hard, no matter how you look at it.Â
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It's normal for your supply and your baby's needs to not be completely in sinc at first. During the first 5 weeks of breastfeeding, your body is establishing supply. Your milk-making cells are all turned on, and responding to your new breastfeeding hormones. Over the next few weeks, your body and your baby will get more into sinc and you should have less leaking, less engorgement, less discomfort. In the meantime, if you start to feel your breasts getting full and uncomfortable, it's fine to express milk to comfort, either with a pump or by hand. You're not trying to empty your breasts fully (which will signal your body to make more milk, it doesn't sound like you need that), but just relieving the fullness so you feel comfortable and don't get plugged ducts/mastitis. Good call, by the way, using compresses and ibuprofen right away when you started noticing early signs of mastitis.
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It sounds like he's gaining weight well (by 3 weeks, should be close to 1/2# over birthweight, if not more). Sore, cracked nipples, as you probably already know, aren't normal. Is it only when you nurse lying down that he has latch issues? Cracks open a route for bacteria to enter your breasts & make mastitis more likely. That's also a sign that he's not transferring milk well, which can impact supply & make him want to nurse a lot more. Does your IBCLC make house-calls? It might be helpful to have her come to your house and help with side-lying positioning. You might also try looking at some videos of reclining positions and see if they might work better for your. A good place to start is biological nursing (also callled laid-back breastfeeding): http://www.biologicalnurturing.com/index.html. Some moms do find, though, that until baby has better head control, side-lying is just tough. It might be easier on your body to keep a big stack of pillows by the bed and sit up with lots of pillow support for night nursing.Â
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It also sounds like he might have his days and nights mixed up, which is also pretty normal! Remember when you were pregnant, and you'd feel tons of movement when you were still, but not so much when you were up and moving? Most babies are born sleeping more during the day when mom was active, and less at night when mom was still. You can encourage him to shift his sleep time by making day and night as different as possible - keep lights off as much as possible at night, soft voices, as little stimulation as possible for night; lots of light and activity and movement during the day. He'll adjust!
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Sleep deprivation and sore nipples will make anyone frustrated and angry! It's okay to feel overwhelmed and unhappy; we all do sometimes. That's a sign that you need a break, even if it's only sitting with your feet up and a cup of tea while he takes his morning nap, or letting your partner take him for an early morning walk while you get an extra 20 minutes sleep (if that's an option). It's so important to find some way to nurture yourself, but it's hard!
. He sometimes goes 4 hours without eating (he's asleep) and my breasts feel like they're going to explode. One of them even turned hot and red and I wound up taking ibuprofin and using compresses, etc. to get it back to normal. Other times he feeds twice in an hour, or just feeds continuously for hours at a time. Adding to all this, at night his latch is just horrible (he's tired, I'm tired and don't feel like wrestling to get the latch our LC taught us was a good latch, and by the 7th time trying to latch I just give up and accept a bad latch), leaving me with cracked and bleeding nipples, making the 2 or 3 hours of feeding constantly just painful. I've tried waking him up to feed, but he's so groggy he can't latch or just falls asleep at the breast after a couple of sucks.
