Beginners breastfeeding – essential info and (not-so) essential kit

Tips for getting breastfeeding off to a good start:

• Let baby feed as soon as possible after birth: If possible, hold your baby snuggled up to your chest without your top on straight away after birth, so that yours and baby’s skin are touching and they can latch on to your breast as soon as they like. Of course if there have been complications with either of you in the delivery, such as a c-section, or baby needs urgent medical attention, you might not be able to do this. Skin to skin with Daddy is always an option if you are not well enough to do it yourself. I was blessed with two very fast and uncomplicated births, after which I was able to pick my baby up and have him on my tummy/chest immediately afterwards – they both rooted towards my breast within minutes of being born and had their first feed. The soonest possible that first suck is, the better for breastfeeding, but don’t worry if you get separated and the first possible opportunity is later than straight after birth, it’s not a disaster for breastfeeding – just take the first opportunity you have to get your baby latched on for their first feed. Some babies are less good at latching on by themselves than others, so if they don’t seem interested, get help from someone who knows what they are talking about with breastfeeding.

  A sleepy moment – he spent the night after the birth feeding and sleeping, next to me the whole time, skin to skin.

• Let baby feed whenever they want for however long they want (aka demand feeding): If you take nothing from this post other than this bit of info I’d be a happy bunny! It may seem like baby is feeding all the time, but in the first few days that’s a good thing – baby is sucking to stimulate your milk production and help get your milk to “come in”. If you try and feed to a schedule, or think about timings like ‘he/she only fed 10 minutes ago, he/she can’t be hungry again yet”, then you risk interfering with your body’s natural mechanisms for producing enough milk, and you’ll probably stress yourself out in doing so.
• Lots of skin to skin: Holding your baby with both of you unclothed so that your skin is touching is important not only straight after birth but also in the early days and weeks, and beyond in fact. It helps to stimulate your milk production via the hormones that drive it. A few hours after Andrew was born and he’d fallen asleep after his first feed, which was pretty long actually, the midwife dressed and swaddled him because she said he needed to keep warm as his body wasn’t good at regulating temperature yet, So I did what she said and he slept swaddled in the fish tank cot next to my bed all night whilst I lay there staring at him! Since then I learned through getting accurate info based on research from my local La Leche League (LLL) group that lying with baby skin to skin in those hours after birth is better for both of us, because my body heat helps to regulate baby’s body temperature, and it helps stimulate the start of milk production. So after Joel was born, I refused to let them swaddle him (not that they tried this time, maybe having read my birth plan requesting them not to!), and we lay skin to skin all night, during which time he fed and slept in alternation. We also spent a lot of time skin to skin at home, putting a blanket over us snuggled on the sofa. We still spend every afternoon whilst Andrew is napping together skin to skin on the sofa.
• If baby seems very sleepy, wake them up: This seems so wrong – let sleeping babies lie, says everyone. But if baby is very sleepy in the early days, they are missing out on enough sucking to stimulate your milk to “come in”, potentially making it slower and not as plentiful. It could be that they had a difficult birth, or are jaundiced, or have some other underlying reason to be sleepy. There are some simple things you can do to encourage them to feed more often (like I did with Joel as he was jaundiced and very sleepy): remove layers of clothing; have skin to skin time with no clothes |(at the risk of me sounding like a broken record!); change the nappy if they’ve fallen asleep at the breast – if they want more it’ll soon wake them up; tickle their feet and cheeks whilst feeding; talk to them; put them down in the middle of the bed.
• Limit cuddles with other people in the early days: You’ll probably have a queue of visitors at your door, either at home or in hospital, most of whom will no doubt want to cuddle your new little bundle of cuteness. It’s fine to let them, of course, but be careful that baby actually gets to be with you for the majority of the time and doesn’t spend the day just being passed around Uncle Tom Cobley and all. The best thing that visitors can do is help you in other ways, like bring you hot meals, fill up your drinks bottles, do the washing up, the laundry, clean the bathroom, empty the bins and so on and so on. Your parter can be a real support by kindly pointing this out to visitors for you.
• Rest, and don’t try to do too much too soon: I think these days there’s quite a lot of pressure to appear to be super-mum and be back on your feet, out and about doing all the stuff you were doing before baby arrived. But giving birth is one massive ordeal that your body goes through in order to produce said bundle of cuteness, so you need time to recover physically as well as helping your body to get on with the next stage – producing lots of milk. Spending all day in your pyjamas and sitting on the sofa or in bed is totally fine, nothing to feel bad about. If, like me, staying inside the same four walls all day can make you feel cooped up and a bit cabin feverish, a gentle short walk or drive (as the passenger) somewhere calm can help, but don’t go anywhere that you find stressful (for example, supermarkets). The word ‘babymoon’ is worth remembering – treat the first days and even weeks if you can like a honeymoon with your baby, doing nothing but focussing on them and yourself.
• Eat and drink enough: Make sure you drink to thirst and eat to hunger. Not drinking enough leads to dehydration, and drinking more than what you feel thirsty for can actually be detrimental to milk production too. I find sports cap bottles of water are handy – no risk of spilling and you can open them with your teeth when you hands are too full to unscrew a bottle top. Eating a good balanced diet is essential, and it’s not a time for dieting to try and shift the ‘baby weight’ – you gained that weight for a reason, and over time, maybe after several months, with breastfeeding it will come off as it is used in making milk. As I was so sick and nauseous throughout my pregnancies, my appetite was limited and I couldn’t keep much down to begin with, so I didn’t put on any weight. But whilst breastfeeding I have found myself ravenously hungry and have definitely consumed more food per day than I ever did in pregnancy and before having kids – I’m sure this is my body’s natural way of saying ‘come on, I need stores of energy to make this milk, and I didn’t get them in pregnancy’. I find that I’m particularly hungry overnight, so I have a box with snacks in next to the bed and I munch through them during night feeds. Some foods, such as oats, are supposedly good for helping milk production, so I eat a lot of porridge, muesli and flapjacks!
• Make sure feeding feels comfortable: Breastfeeding should not feel painful. The first few days of having a baby sucking on your nipple can feel a little uncomfortable until you’re used to it, and particularly the first minute or so of a feed can feel uncomfortable to begin with, but if you experience real pain or prolonged discomfort, there’s something wrong. Often this can be fixed by adjusting the latch and baby’s positioning, and sometimes it is due to the baby’s tongue being too anchored to the jaw – this is ‘tongue-tie’ and can be fixed by a simple snip of the ‘frenulum’ holding the tongue to the bottom of the mouth - I blogged about this before. Ask someone who knows about breastfeeding to spend time watching you feed so they can check the latch, and if you suspect tongue-tie (see my previous post on it), find an expert who can assess it, which may mean contacting a private lactation consultant if your GP won’t refer you through the NHS.
• If in any doubt, ASK FOR HELP: Don’t hesitate to get help, no matter how small or big you think your concern is – the earlier issues are picked up, the easier it is in general to sort them out, and small issues can quickly spiral into big issues if not dealt with. Although the obvious people to ask may be your midwife team or health visitor, they are often very busy with big caseloads and overcrowded clinics to spend time with you, and they don’t actually get a lot of specialist training on breastfeeding. Local drop-ins and support groups such as those run by LLL and NCT are often better places to get more personal and detailed support. It’s a good idea to look for your local support groups before baby is born, so you can build up a support network before you need it, if you end up needing it, and if you don’t then you can still go along and meet with other breastfeeding mums anyway. It’s much easier to pick up the phone to someone you’ve already met a few times to ask for help when you’re an emotional wreck than it is to phone just a name and number on a leaflet.
• Believe in your body: I’m a rare case (always like to be different I do), and unless like me you have a specific reason to doubt your breasts, it is likely that you are physically able to produce enough milk IF ALL THE CIRCUMSTANCES IN THE EARLY DAYS ARE FAVOURABLE (that’s a big if – see all of the above!) And even if it turns out you can’t produce enough milk for whatever reason, there’s no reason you can’t continue to breastfeed just like we have using the SNS.

• breast pump: If it’s just a small amount of expressing, you can actually be very effective at getting milk out just with your hands, so a pump isn’t necessary. But for whole feeds worth of milk, a pump makes sense. Manual pumps require you to pull a lever by hand over and over again to pump, so again, they’re more for smaller amounts of pumping otherwise they get tiring, but they are cheaper than electric pumps, If you end up doing a fair amount of pumping, you’ll probably think that an electric pump is worth investing in. They range from small portable ones with battery or mains options, to hospital grade ones that you can hire. Some come with one pumping piece, some come with two so you can do two breasts at the same time – useful if you’re pumping with little or no time with baby at the breast. Over time, the effectiveness of the pump decreases, so it may not be worth getting a secondhand one. I was given a secondhand one that hadn’t been used much, and I compared how much I got out with what I got out using a double hospital grade pump that I hired for 2 weeks when Joel was born – there was no difference, so I carried on using the single one I’d been given before Andrew was born, but it could well have been different had the pump been used more. (I pump sometimes to try and increase supply, though I don’t have much time to do it now with a toddler as well, so I mainly do it overnight.)
• bottles: Breast pumps come with at least one bottle, attached to the pump via a length of tubing. You’ll probably need to get more than this, because by the time you’ve filled, emptied, washed and sterilised, it’s handy to have a few. I would always buy new bottles. There are a few bottles marketed at being shaped such that they are closer to the shape of a breast and therefore make it easy for the baby to switch between bottle and breast. We have a few of these as well as a few with the more traditional teat shape, and Andrew managed to switch fine between bottle and breast with both sorts, and his latch onto each teat shape didn’t appear to differ. That said, he took a bottle as well as the breast from a week old, whereas an older baby might do one or both of two things: refuse to take a bottle in the first place because they’ve got used to the breast and prefer that (this is what I’m now finding with Joel at 12 weeks); get used to the easier flow of the bottle and start getting fussy at the breast.
• steriliser: There are two basic ways of sterilising – steaming in the microwave and bathing in a chemical solution (Milton fluid). I only have experience of the microwave method, but find it pretty easy, and you can pick up secondhand microwave sterilisers at a good price at, for example, nearly new sales or through friends.