Two of the hardest things I've ever done.
Breastfeeding my baby was something I always knew I wanted to do. The ability women have to grow, birth and nourish our babies with the most nutritious food is truly one of the COOLEST things about being female to me. I was so adamant in being successful, I purchased and read cover to cover, The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding...not my typical page turner, romance novel. I was knowledgable and prepared for success and had a plan to nurse on demand for as long as felt right, my guess was 12-18 months.
Everything I had read said to put your baby at the breast in the first couple hours of birth and she would have the natural drive and ability to suckle. Well, my little girl apparently did not read all the breastfeeding books and blogs I read, and had no interest in my boob. For weeks of trying every trick Google offered, I could not get my baby to nurse and was instead pumping around the clock to increase my milk supply to keep up with her appetite! We had to supplement with formula for the first week or so, but with determination, lactation cookies, power pumping hours, and every other gimmick I could find on the internet, I had enough milk to not need supplementation and to even start a little freezer stash.
Moms that exclusively pump for an extended time, YOU ARE AMAZING. I did it for five weeks and it was the absolute worst. The pump does not work as well as baby at removing milk, so you have to pump so much more to ensure you are emptying your breasts as to not decrease your supply. You have a whole other "task" added to your routine so it's not just ; feed, change, play, sleep, but; pump+feed+pump, change, play, sleep+power pump. This makes exercising, showering, eating, etc., close to impossible. You become afraid your baby's going to wake up before you have pumped enough milk for her. You have to train your body and mind to release oxytocin when you hear a mechanical pump rather than your baby crying. Not to mention you cannot be away from an outlet and "pumping friendly area" for more than a couple hours, because let's be honest, people are even more uncomfortable with public pumping than public breastfeeding!
I feel incredibly lucky and thankful that my baby eventually got the hang of nursing after about five weeks of perseverance, both me trying to get her to nurse and her resisting. I also tried (and swear by) the mimijumi bottle which is advertised as the most similar to mother's nipple for the baby that resists bottles. I thought, hey, maybe it'll work the other way around too! Once she figured out how to drink from this boob like bottle, I was able to slip my actual boob in which seemed to do the trick! The bottles are expensive but for any exclusively pumping moms out there that are trying to get their babes to nurse, I think these bottles are far worth the price!
After my daughter and I both got the hang of nursing, life seemed to get a lot easier. I found more time in my day to be able to run! I was quickly getting back to my pre-pregnancy weight and fitness, and happy it was all working out. Our daughter seemed happy and healthy and was hitting all of her milestones, but our pediatrician was not as pleased with her small size. She was consistently in the 15th percentile for weight. She was adamant that baby was not sleeping well because she was not getting enough milk from me. The doctor told me baby was waking every two hours because she was trying to increase my milk supply. (I later learned from our next pediatrician that by going to feed her every two hours overnight, I was only re-enforcing her habit.) She told me it's great to be toned, but running a lot and training for marathons just wasn't something nursing mothers could do. This obviously was something I did not want to hear nor was expecting. We later decided to change pediatricians, not only because of the suggestion that I stop running so much (at the time, I really wasn't even running that much) if I wanted to keep breastfeeding, but other factors as well. Yes, our daughter was small, but she was happy! If she were bottle fed and just as small, we would at least know exactly how much milk she was getting, but I couldn't possibly go back to pumping, and she much preferred me to a bottle now! I didn't want to have to supplement and inevitably wean her early if it wasn't necessary. I started pumping like crazy again, trying to increase my supply and have a bottle of expressed milk to give her at bedtime. We figured if she was in fact hungry, giving her more expressed milk or even a bottle of formula before bed should help her sleep better. It didn't. We came to the conclusion that our daughter was not hungry, she was just small and a bad sleeper! She was about six months at this point and I was only running about 30 miles a week.
Once our baby finally started sleeping better and not waking up to feed, I slept better and had the energy to run more. This combination of her nursing less and me running more as well as the addition of solids, (our kid LOVES food...) did in fact decrease my supply. At nine months postpartum, I barely ever felt "full" even in the morning after she slept 12 hours straight. I would sit and pump for thirty minutes only to have a few drops come out! My daughter had become less and less interested in nursing to the point where I thought maybe she was starting to self ween at nine months! When the pediatrician had suggested three months earlier that my milk supply was low, I knew in my mom heart that wasn't right. This time around though, my instincts told me my boobs were just not able to keep up with the demands of marathon training and breastfeeding. I knew she wasn't hungry because she was making the calories up with solids, but she still needed the nutrition from milk.
Any breastfeeding (and especially stay at home) mom will understand the unwarranted guilt felt with making a bottle of formula for your kid when you are at home and your boobs are right there! At nine months, we made the decision to give our daughter one bottle of formula a day before bed and I would breastfeed the rest of the day. By ten months she was showing even less interest in nursing, we added two more bottles a day and I am now down to nursing 2-3 times a day. The decision to nurse less and add in more bottles was SO HARD for me, but I realized it was just my pride of not reaching my goal of 12 months. I know I am doing right by my daughter which is the most important factor of all. Not to mention how much more freedom I have now that she can hold a bottle and drink out of a sippy cup. I am no longer the only source of her food which is incredibly freeing. I can feel my supply diminishing the more miles I run and the more she drinks from a bottle. I don't know if I'll make it to my original idea of 12 months, but I'm ok with that.
Like training for a marathon, breastfeeding has been somewhat of a perplexity and definitely a mindfuck. You can read all the books and feel like you're doing everything right and still completely bonk with six miles to go. It has absolutely been one of the most difficult parts of motherhood with no concrete answers, but an incredible experience nonetheless that has brought me even closer to my daughter.
