Right now Chloe is sleeping like what she is, a baby. She woke me up at 3am, I jammed my left breast into her mouth, she clamped down like a velociraptor and fed for about 5 minutes before falling back asleep. Great, now my left breast has flow like Eric B and Rakim and my right breast is tingling and engorged and she's sleeping like the dead. I think I gave birth to a vampire. I expressed what was left into a bottle and stored it in the refrigerator. Good thing, since she woke me up two hours later and wanted more, more, more. Luckily, Chloe will take the bottle, but I learned the hard way that she will gorge herself in a couple of minutes with the entire bottle if you let her and then spew it back up like Lindsay Lohan. So I sat there on the bed giving her sips at a time, fighting back sleep. This morning she let me sleep until 9:30 am and now that it's noon, she's fallen back asleep after just an ounce of expressed milk mixed with Infamil formula.
That's right, FORMULA! And, if you really want a reason to call DSS on me, EXPRESSED MILK MIXED WITH IT! I'll admit that I have fed Chloe directly from the breast, with music playing, in a rocking chair, just like the pictures in a La Leche League pamphlet, but DAMN if doesn't feel like a bee sting when she latches on! So I tried reading up about this and there is too much advice about everything to do with breast feeding. If I tense up from the pain, she'll get a complex that will likely lead her to the therapist's couch until she's forty. If I don't do anything, she won't realize that it hurts and I'll be the one on the couch. Anxiety about the pain of latching on will affect my milk supply. Not feeding her from the breast will cause my milk to dry up. Worrying about my milk supply will impede my flow.
You know what? I don't care. Just as every baby is an individual, every mother is too. My first feeding went great, it hurt a little but the student nurse who was showing me how, was currently breastfeeding herself and when I asked, she said it does hurt a little. When "a little" turned into "OW GODDAMMIT!" I asked another nurse for an icepack for my nipples, which, (I had read) was what you are supposed to put on sore nipples. She asked me why I wanted it, I said I was sore and showed her. This battlehardened nurse sucked in her breath in horror and ran to get me some Lasinoh. You would have thought that I was going to end up as some sort of entry into a medical textbook from her reaction. So now I was convinced that it was NEVER supposed to hurt and I was doing it all wrong. I asked my OB what to do, since she still had to eat. He told me to just nurse Chloe for 10 minutes on each breast. Then, I took her to the pediatrician and she hadn't eaten enough to gain weight. And, the pediatrician told me to try mixing in formula with my own milk as a kind of weight gain supplement. I even tried to use a breast pump, but it hurts almost as much as when the baby latches on and works about as much as expressing by hand.
So here we are, one day from another weigh-in at the pediatrician's office. Chloe's on about an every three hour feeding schedule, sometimes the breast, sometimes the bottle, sometimes formula in between. She's eating about an ounce at each feeding, which seems to be enough. I'm resolved to stop freaking out about every little detail and just go with what works for now. I feel kind of bad, since the nurses at the hospital loaded me up with La Leche pamphlets and my husband's niece gave me her book on breastfeeding, but honestly, the more I read, the more stressed out I get. I think, in the end, if we've survived this long as a species, without electronic $500 breast pumps and textbooks, then instinct is probably the way to go. Then again, if she still hasn't gained any weight by tomorrow, then I am perfectly happy to let modern medical science give me a hand.
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