What Is Going On? Your Opinion Please

[WyattsMom2008]

My son, almost five months old now, has been fussing at the breast for about a month now.

Let me just lay out all the facts.

It started happening right when he spontaneously weaned himself from nipple shields.

When I wore the nipple shields, he would take a half hour to eat at each breast. Once I switched from medium to small shields, he would then take 15-20 minutes at each side.

Without a nipple shield, my letdown seems to happen extremely fast. He guzzles the milk down in just a couple of minutes for the first letdown and then, as soon as it stops coming out, he will fuss unless he is nursing while sleepy. Half the time, he will not keep nursing to make the second or third letdown happen.

Here are all the things I've been doing:

I've been spending hours each day nursing him in bed, since he's more relaxed there and more likely to nurse in a sleepy state.

I've been eating oatmeal in the morning, as well as taking fenugreek pills.

I've been nursing him every hour, sometimes even more often, during the day. He eats every 2-3 hours at night.

I've been switching him back and forth from one side to the other several times each feeding.

When he starts to fall asleep and comfort nurse on one side, I wake him and switch him to the other.

After doing all of these things, he's only slightly improved. He almost never comes off the breast satisfied. What happens to end a feeding is one of three things: 1) He falls asleep, 2) I run out of milk and then get up and distract him and he's then fine for an hour, 3) I run out of milk, he's still fussy, and I try feeding him every fifteen minutes for short spurts until he either falls asleep or allows me to distract him.

Since I've started doing all of these things, he's gotten noticably chubbier. He's really chunking out. He also poops almost as often as a newborn again. He had started pooping only once every 24 hours, once he was about three months old or so.

I don't know exactly what to make of all this. I could shrug it off since he's gaining weight okay, but the breastfeeding relationship works best when I respond to his cues. Yet his cues are telling me that he is never satisfied, he's never getting enough, no matter what I do.

[GooeyRN]

If he is gaining well, peeing and pooping well, he may just find comfort in sucking.

[WyattsMom2008]

He only comfort nurses when falling asleep. When awake, he expects milk to come out when he sucks, and if it doesn't, he will fuss or cry. Sometimes will lie there with his fist in his mouth blowing raspberries. Other times he will cry. Sometimes he just looks at me as if to see if I'm doing it on purpose or something.

The reason I suspect low supply is because I used nipple shields for so long, and I have read that they can compromise supply. I think he may not have fussed when using those, only because a little bit of milk was constantly coming out, and he nursed almost constantly in the morning and evening.

Also, I recently started to get him to sleep six hours at night without eating, but now I have stopped that and gone back to feeding him every three hours or so during the night.

One more thing I may have done wrong is that I used to make him nap two or three hours at a time in the afternoon in the sling. Whenever he would stir, I would make sure to dance around until he settled back into a deep sleep. In that way I would control his nap time. Maybe he needed to wake up to eat more frequently.

Also, right after he weaned himself from the nipple shields, I didn't suspect low supply. I thought he was freaking out because he was used to feeding longer, and he was used to a little bit of milk coming out for a half hour or hour of continuous feeding. So once he would start freaking out, I'd take him off the breast and distract him with play, or I'd put him in the sling and dance him to sleep. I didn't want him to cry. But then I read that there is more than one let down, so all that time I was doing that, I may have limited him to only the first let down. Maybe I should have let him cry and try, cry and try, until he got more. Maybe I made my supply drop by the way I handled it.

Another thing I fear: I don't know how it works, but sometimes I suspect his body got the message that my milk supply was not the greatest while I was using the nipple shields, so therefore his body slowed down his growth rate. Now that my milk supply is (hopefully) going up, maybe his body is getting the message to make up for lost time, so maybe he's trying to grow more, and the supply has not yet caught up with the demand.

[TefferTWH]

Can you pump after he comes off the breast? If you are already taking steps to increase your supply, but he isn't providing more demand, it isn't going to work. If after he latches off and goes to sleep, you pump and get some more stimulation, perhaps your supply will increase and he'll get the milk without much work.

[WyattsMom2008]

That's a good point. That must be why I've been struggling with this for so long. I'll try that. It seems like it would only end up depriving him of the milk he would otherwise get, but I suppose that would only be a temporary thing.