Nursing Questions and Answers

We walked and walked and walked today.  We walked for about two hours all the way to the other end of town, to the church, to the grocery store, around the grocery store and then home again and I still

HAVE NOT GONE INTO LABOUR.

If you can believe it.  Instead I went to my breastfeeding support group where I had the realization that after more than two solid years of breastfeeding I really probably didn't need any help at all, or support for that matter, and that once all of your peers have seen you lift your shirt you really have "crossed the line" so to speak, into the realm of the professional milk machine.

And since I have nothing else specifically lined up for today, and Samuel has inconveniently fallen asleep at 4pm, which is too early for bed and too late for a nap, I'm going to tell you how I got from here:

Roughly 3 billion weeks pregnant with Samuel.

to here:

And from there to here:

And then to here again:

Can you see it?  That weeeeee little plus sign?

while still doing quite a bit of this:


Samuel home from the hospital.

except he's larger than he used to be.  And soon there will be TWO!  Here are the answers to the most-asked questions, and queries I think I should get more often:

Why did you decide to nurse?

There are three main reasons, but only one of them sounds lovely and nice, so that's the one I'll start with!  David and I aren't wealthy, but we have high and lofty goals for our children, and this was one of the few 'perks' I knew I could provide for Samuel.  I may never be able to afford a fancy private school or designer clothes (not that those would be the first two choices for how to spend my money in benefit of my children) but I could give him the best nutrition.  The other two reasons were a bit more prosaic.  As anyone who knows me can attest, I'm a little bit lazy, and the thought of sterilizing bottles every day and pumping for hours and on and on just made me crazy.  As it was, I had to pump and bottle feed a bit at the beginning because of badly damaged nipples, and that work alone almost took me to the edge.  Finally, I'm cheap.  The thought of spending all of that money on formula made me break out in hives!

You mention pain with nursing in the beginning...tell me about it.

Samuel was born with a tongue tie; a minor inherited genetic blip (David's father also had it) where that little piece of skin that keeps your tongue firmly anchored to the bottom of your mouth extends towards the tip of your tongue.  It can be fairly minor to pretty severe, and is sometimes clipped in the hospital and other times left to manage itself (by stretching or tearing naturally) and occasionally fixed during a simple day surgery.  The biggest issues with a tongue tie are a difficulty with nursing and speech impediments.  In Samuel's case the tongue tie affected his latch.  The latch issues led to cracked, bleeding, swollen nipples that lasted for weeks and scabs that were broken through every time he latched on to nurse.  It was agony, especially at the beginning.  For me, the solution was a combination of things: first, I got help from an IBCLC (Internationally Board Certified Lactation Consultant) as soon as I could.  Twice.  She was invaluable.  Secondly, I was rigorous in my skin maintainance routine, which included using lanolin cream (I used Lansinoh brand) and soaking my nipples in a sterile saline solution.  Finally, I gave myself a nursing break every once in a while that first week home by pumping and bottle feeding, since the pump didn't have the same latch issues.

Did you have other nursing issues besides latching on?

Oh yeah!  I produced a lot of milk, and had a very heavy and fast let down.  This, combined with Samuel's inability to properly latch (which also brought in a lot of excess air) meant that we had a projectile vomitor on our hands for the first several months.  And when I say projectile, I mean two to three FEET of vomited milk in a gushing geiser effect all over my carpet and furniture.  It only really resolved itself after about a year.

When did you introduce solids?

That would depend on what you mean by introduce.  When Samuel was about 5 months old a friend of mine gave me a rusk cracker to offer to him.  He held it and played with it (and choked a bit on a few saturated pieces) but I don't know if he even swallowed any.  That same weekend I smooshed a bit of banana (maybe 1/16th of a tsp?) on my finger and stuck it in his mouth, but he didn't like it at all.  If you count that as solid food introduction, then he 'ate food' as in, 'had something in his mouth for a few seconds' at 5 months.  The next time I can remember offering him anything was around 6.5-7 months, when I bought a box of organic barley cereal and tried to get him to eat some.  He would, on a really good day, eat maybe a Tbsp of that.  I also gave him a bit of applesauce around then and again, he didn't do much more than taste it.  He didn't really eat anything worth counting until about 11 months of age, and even then he would eat the equivalent of perhaps 2 Tbsp of food a day.  For this reason, I usually say that I exclusively breastfed him until he was about 12 months old.

Weren't you afraid he would starve?

Nope.  Believe me, if Samuel was hungry, you could tell.  The age at which babies have been introduced to solid foods has changed so much over the decades, going from quite old, to very young, to everything in between.  The 'magic number' right now is 6 months, but the truth is that some babies are going to want to eat earlier and some later.  Some better indicators of when your baby needs more nourishment is whether they're meeting milestones in terms of growth and development, their physical appearance in terms of energy and skin colour, and how many diapers they wet and dirty a day.  We also have a family doctor who weighed and measured Samuel several times in his first year and always assured us that our energetic son was well on the charts in terms of both factors.  In fact, he was in the 90th percentile for height and the 85th for weight for quite some time - that's a big baby!

Did you ever doubt your nursing/feeding decisions?

I did, a few times.  That first week I was home from the hospital and my breasts were bleeding and Samuel was nursing constantly, I doubted then.  I remember nursing him for 14 hours straight in the hospital, and I think I almost gave up right then and there.  And when we went in for his one year shots and the nurse asked me what he ate in a day, and I was honest with her and said he had just started solid foods and ate very little every day, her reaction was enough to make me doubt myself.  David and I agreed that if we were ever asked again we were to smile and nod and lie through our teeth rather than go through the agony of being lectured by a woman who knew nothing about us, our family or our decisions as parents.  You can read about that appointment here, if you like, although I warn you I wrote it very soon after the meeting and it isn't very objective.

Is there anything you didn't/don't like about nursing?  Especially a toddler?

Of course!  I'm only human, after all.  I didn't like being the one who had to get up at night with the baby, and I didn't like the fact that only I was able to soothe a cut knee, a sick boy or the heartache of a friend pushing during playgroup.  I still am not a fan of the fact that Samuel and I cannot cuddle.  Cuddling means nursing, and so if I'm not up for nursing, I can't snuggle my boy.

You obviously nursed through your pregnancy, what do you plan to do after the baby is born?

Keep nursing, I suppose!  I've spoken to several friends, done some research, and just today got a chance to speak to a La Leche League leader about tandem nursing (nursing two siblings at the same time).  I don't have any specific concerns about having enough milk, since I had lots and lots with Samuel, and I imagine that Sam will be tolerant (as his personality usually is) about sharing the nursing, although no doubt there will be jealousy as there often is with a new baby anyway.  My concerns are more along the lines of 'will I do nothing but nurse, if I'm nursing two?' 'What happens if the new baby has latching issues as well and I can't nurse Samuel?' and so on.

So when does it end?

I don't know, honestly.  My goal when I started nursing was to make it to a year.  A year came and went and Samuel was just not interested in weaning, nor was he physically able to with the amount of food he was eating.  By the time he was 14 months old or so he was eating enough to sustain himself on solid foods and starting to lose a bit of interest in nursing, going down to just one session in the morning at one point, but I concieved again when he was 16 months old, and at that point he stepped up the nursing in an attempt to keep my milk flow up, and has remained a steady (if probably pretty unsatisfied) nurser for the duration of the pregnancy.  About a month ago I noticed the beginnings of colostrum starting, which I hoped might encourage weaning, but it hasn't seemed to.  I've resigned myself to the reality of tandem nursing a two year old and a newborn!

Is there an age past which you wouldn't consider nursing?

This is a tricky one.  I've heard a lot of different opinions on this topic and I can only tell you what I personally think and feel about it all.  I believe that life consists of stages and ages.  The Bible reinforces this theory time and again, and in our family, the Bible is the ultimate source of wisdom.  Someday I'll have to write a post on it.  When a child is young, they should be treated as and expected to act like a young child.  I wouldn't tell my two year old the facts of life, or expect him to understand long division or take up woodworking as a hobby, for example, because those things aren't appropriate to his age.  But at the same time, I wouldn't expect that he would need to wake five times a night to eat food or be unable to communicate in any way besides screaming or suck on his feet, either, because those things fall into stages that he has passed.  Nursing is a bit trickier to pinpoint, but God has also given us biology to help us to understand our natural world.  Biologically, a woman's milk tends to dry up as she carries a new child, and so if the previous child was eating solid foods and still nursing when conception happened, and the child nursed out of hunger or thirst, then they would begin to look elsewhere for nutrition at that point.  Because children nurse only for physical or emotional reasons (ie because they need the food element or the comfort/security element of the act of nursing) a child who didn't wean during a pregnancy could be assumed to be relying on the act of nursing not as a source of nutrition, but of emotional stability.  The stage of nursing, therefore, would end when that child was old enough to self-comfort.  Because of this, I think a child should be 'finished' nursing, ideally, by the age of three.  An average three year old can speak and express themselves, they probably are sleeping in a toddler or single bed rather than in a crib.  They usually have potty training under their belts, barring accidents or sickness or the occasional absent minded moment.  They have their teeth, they're often starting preschool, they have friends.  Emotionally they are children and no longer babies by three and their needs for comfort and love, therefore, can be filled in a child's way, and not an infant's way.

So there you have it.  If you ever wanted to ask a nursing mama any fun questions, feel free to pass them my way and I'll make sure to answer them in another post.