Breast feeding journey

So it's no secret I've been absent from my blog since breaking the news of our pregnancy. I won't lie it was a real struggle pregnancy however as you can tell from the title we have news.

We welcomed Gracie Rebecca into the world, Sunday March 17th at 15.14. From the date of this post she is 5 days old.

One thing I promised to be within my blog is honest, the good, the bad, the gritty, the works. So here I am day 5 of Breast feeding ready to give a little insight to our so far short journey and how it's really been.

Now I didn't breastfeed with our first, Archie. I think the main reason was because I was shy, I was worried about getting my boob out in public to feed. As silly as it sounds with it being such a natural thing, I still would hear of horror stories of people having a hard time or being asked to 'feed elsewhere'
However this time I wanted to give it ago. I still fully believe in you do you, if your baby is formula fed or breastfed no-one will be any of the wiser when you take your child to school. Honestly, my main reason for wanting to BF was money.

In the lead up to the birth I attended many workshops and groups to help me get a understanding of Breast Feeding and exactly how to do it. I looked up YouTube videos and took as many leaflets and books from the library that would help in anyway possible, I wanted to be prepared.

When Gracie was born, we managed to get a strong latch and a good 10 minute feed from her, the midwife was fab and helped check she was in position and that I was comfortable. She then left the room allowing us to adjust to our newborn and to continue feeding.
 It wasn't until abit later on, when I was back on the ward (as I had a overnight stay) that we hit problems.  Gracie could latch, we got that part but she just didn't want to do any of the hard work, I ended our first night hand expressing just to get a feed into her.

MONDAY - having hand expressed through the night, the midwife came round in the morning to once more give a little guidence to help get Gracie to work for her food.
It soon became clear Gracie wasn't up for hard work, so I was told to contiune hand expressing to get her going. We was then discharged from hospital.
Thankfully we had a very sleepy baby who didn't care much for food so we made do the rest of Monday with the syringe and hand expressing a ml at a time.

TUESDAY - due to the lack of feeding when the midwife called to check how we were doing she agreed she was concerned that a ml was not enough so agreed to come out, we established a latch and a little suckle before the boob got pushed away. It was a huge break through, but still not enough to make a huge difference. I was told to keep at it, as she was showing signs of improvement.

WEDNESDSY - OUR scheduled midwife appointment, weight check and genural check in with how it was all going.
The midwife weighed Gracie to find she had lost 8.5% of her birth weight. Thankfully my milk had started to come in so I was able to express my milk off. Our main concern was upping Gracies weight in anyway possible. I was told to offer the boob first however if she was refusing to stay on for more than 5 minutes to introduce the expressed milk.

THURSDAY - what a suprise our little monkey is still not wanting to work the boob, however her feeds are on the up, the day was spent expressing, and then feeding her.

FRIDAY - THE day I'm writing this, day 5. We're not exclusively breast but we are exclusively breastfed. I'm not going to lie, it's knackering, I'm expressing after every feed to keep my milk supply and enough for Gracie to always have milk. We get the odd suckle on the boob but not much. The midwife attended again today in order to weigh and do the heel prick test. Thankfully Gracie had gained, birth weight was 6lb 9oz, she dropped to 6lb3 on Wednesday and today was 6lb6 
We are getting a little better with staying on the boob but not enough for me to go cold turkey on the bottle.

We have an appointment to see a breast feeding specialist, the guru who comes highly recommended that within a few hours she will have your baby off the bottle and on the breast. I have my fingers crossed for this..


I'd be interested to know how you all got on. Did you breast feed? Could you breast feed?
How did you establish a good latch that remained.
We have tried skin to skin many times and daily we set aside a good hour to promote this but other than the small little signs of improvement it seems to be doing more in the way of producing extra milk that I always manage to spray. (Doh)