Starting Solids… But Not Quite Yet
Lilly is racing toward the six-month mark faster than I can believe — she is already five months old, and the question of solids has been circling my mind all week. Current guidance would have us beginning solids within the next month or so, yet Lilly is only three and a half months corrected. I have been searching online endlessly and finding so many conflicting opinions: wait until six months actual age, wait until six months corrected age, wait until she reaches for your food. It is all quite confusing, particularly without guidance from the hospital where she was born. I know her virgin gut is still developing and I do not want to disrupt that, and we are only just hitting our stride with breastfeeding, so I do not want to upset that either. Still, am I the only mum who finds the idea of starting solids incredibly exciting?
My husband would much rather wait until Lilly reaches six months corrected, around Christmas time, but that has not stopped me from gathering every food-related item I can find. This week alone I wandered the baby food aisle reading ingredient lists and decided we will puree our own food to begin with before moving on to baby-led weaning. I also popped into Aldi and picked up some fun eating utensils for Lilly's Christmas gift hamper, and today I even added baby teething rusks to my shopping cart. By the time we are ready to begin, we will not need to buy a single supply. You would think all that shopping would satisfy my urge to feed Lilly solids, but it did not. So I chopped up some of my frozen milk stash and dropped a few cubes into the little mesh feeding toy we received at the baby shower — and just like that, my wish to start solids was met. Kind of.
Labels: baby, breastfeeding, parenting, solids
Mummy Guilt and the Lies I've Been Telling Myself
Before I fell pregnant, I always knew I would breastfeed my babies. I never considered another option — I believed I would push through any difficulties and come out the other side successfully breastfeeding my baby. Once my husband and I were expecting, I began researching and learning everything I could so I could nail feeding for our precious little bubba. I joined the Australian Breastfeeding Association and read their book from cover to cover. I signed up for their class, but sadly could not attend because I became very unwell toward the end of my pregnancy due to pre-eclampsia. I was so determined to breastfeed.
Then Lilly arrived prematurely at 33+6 weeks, very quickly and very unexpectedly (you can read about it here). Suddenly everything I had learned about breastfeeding went out the window. I could not have skin-to-skin with her right after birth because she was rushed to the Special Care Nursery and I was not awake for her birth. When I woke from surgery, my husband began collecting my colostrum with syringes, assisted by my nurse. The next day I started expressing with the hospital-grade Medela pumps. I could not wait to try breastfeeding Lilly, but she simply was not strong enough yet.
A week later we began skin-to-skin. The nurses said Lilly would find my nipple on her own, but nothing happened — she simply was not interested. I even tried placing my nipple in her mouth when she yawned and took our first pretend breastfeeding photo to make myself feel better about our lack of breastfeeding. I told everyone we had started breastfeeding, how amazing it was and how clever Lilly was. I was such a liar. When Lilly was two and a half weeks old, we finally managed to get her to attach and suck momentarily, and things began improving. Each day she would suck a little more and take a top-up through her feeding tube. Eventually we achieved one whole breastfeed and I was over the moon — I finally felt like a real mum. Her progress was quick, and before we knew it she was having two feeds a day with no top-up. At the time it felt like everything was taking too long, but she really did get the hang of it quickly; she just needed to build her strength.
And then it happened. Lilly graduated from the Special Care Nursery and we wheeled her out into Maternity, rooming in together for the very first time in her four and a half weeks on Earth. I was so excited to begin our breastfeeding journey for real. But that is when it all fell apart. We got through the day without problems, but by her fifth feed of the day (she was on three-hourly feeds) she was absolutely exhausted and was not latching or sucking correctly. We spent our 48 hours in Maternity not sleeping and doing our best to breastfeed, with limited success. Whenever the nurses came to check, I lied to myself and to them about what a great job she was doing. I suppose I thought that if I told them I was doing great, we would do great — but really I just did not want to lose her again. I just wanted to get her home.
Finally our 48 hours was up and the paediatrician did her release check-up, but she had lost a whole 100g in just 48 hours. They wanted us to stay, but ended up letting us go home on the condition that we have her weighed again in another 48 hours and return if there was no improvement. In hindsight, we should have stayed. We should have told them we were struggling, but we did not. We wrapped up our precious baby girl and left that hospital as fast as humanly possible. I kept telling myself it would be okay — we just needed to get away from it all.
When we got home I relaxed a little, but we were still struggling. I was so stressed that my milk almost completely dried up; I went from expressing over 200mls per 20-minute session to a terrifying 10mls. I saw my GP and started medication to help boost my supply (which worked practically instantly), and I decided to give Lilly an expressed milk bottle — or two, or three. We started trying a breastfeed then topping up with my expressed milk. I felt better, Lilly went back to sleeping like an angel, and life with a not-so-newborn was amazing. But I felt all this guilt. I felt like a failure for not being able to breastfeed her exclusively. I felt that after our difficult birth experience I needed to be better, and I needed to breastfeed. I continued telling everyone what an awesome job we were doing breastfeeding and that she was a breastfed baby, but I was a big fat liar. We were lucky if we did two full breastfeeds a day — that is not a breastfed baby at all.
Five weeks on, we are still expressing and bottle feeding. I have since got my hands on some amazing Medela nipple shields, and we usually try two breastfeeds a day and Lilly seriously kicks butt with them — but she takes an hour to feed, which my lactation consultant says is too long for a little preemie with little energy. So at around 10am we have one super-long breastfeed and then we rock the bottle for the rest of the day. I am finally feeling at peace with our feeding and I no longer feel like a failure. When someone asks if we breastfeed, I still say yes, but now I fill them in on the details. I think that lying about it just made me feel worse. I feel like everybody else either breastfeeds or formula feeds, but there is a whole other breed of mummies out there just like me who express and bottle feed. I must say, I really love the connection Lilly and I share during a breastfeed and the way she pokes and prods at my boob to stimulate the milk — there really are no words to describe how amazing it feels, and I cannot wait for the day when she is much stronger and able to breastfeed exclusively. But for now I am loving the way she looks up at me when she is having a bottle, right into my eyes as if she is…
Labels: baby, breastfeeding, expressing, newborn, parenting, preemiejourney
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