A cou­ple days ago, I posted about K’s nurs­ing story. I decided to write down A’s story, too. Obvi­ously, it’s quite a bit shorter, but in the end, my goal for both boys is the same, child-led wean­ing.

When I got preg­nant with A, I was still nurs­ing K. I knew that 70% of babies weaned when their moms got preg­nant. I decided to fol­low a “don’t offer, don’t refuse” approach to nurs­ing with K. He con­tin­ued to nurse through my preg­nancy. When I had A, I expected that since I was still nurs­ing K, I wouldn’t have any sore­ness issues. I also thought that since A was my sec­ond, I would have a smooth road with him.

Ha!

A was born after a pretty quick labor. When I was hold­ing him after birth, I put him to the breast. I was con­cerned that since I had had flat nip­ples with K that I would have the same issues with A. Although I knew how to address it, I didn’t want to have to use the shield again. A latched on right away! I didn’t quite know what to expect with a baby who seemed to have no latch­ing issues. He ate for about five or six min­utes and seemed con­tent. I offered him the other side, but he pursed his lips shut and there was no forc­ing him to eat. He knew what he did and didn’t want.

When K was born, I was under the impres­sion that babies should only eat every 3 hours. If K was hun­gry before 3 hours, it took me some time to real­ize that was the cause of his cry­ing. I assumed that since I was told by nurses and lac­ta­tion con­sul­tants that babies should eat every 3 hours that if he was cry­ing prior to that it couldn’t be hunger. By the time A was born, I had come to believe dif­fer­ently. I real­ized that the 3 hour rule was an arbi­trary num­ber cho­sen by some­one and jumped on by main­stream cul­ture as a way to sched­ule and in essence try to con­trol some­thing that is really up to the baby to con­trol. So, when A was born, I offered the breast every time he was fussy if he wasn’t tired or need­ing a new dia­per. I think I nursed him five or six times in the first 8 hours of his life. I was okay with that, and I felt com­fort­able know­ing that he was get­ting the colostrum he needed. How­ever, through the day, he seemed to have increas­ing trou­ble latch­ing. He was tak­ing 10–15 min­utes of fuss­ing before he would latch. Once he latched, though, he was nurs­ing well.

At the hos­pi­tal where I deliv­ered, the nurses come around at about 10:00 every night and take the babies to the nurs­ery to be checked by the pedi­a­tri­cian and have their vitals taken. We sent A with the nurse and waited for an hour or so for him to return. Well, an hour and twenty min­utes later, he didn’t return, but the nurse did. She said that when the doc­tor had been look­ing at him, his res­pi­ra­tions had been unusu­ally high. Instead of hav­ing 50–60 res­pi­ra­tions per minute, he was breath­ing nearly 100 res­pi­ra­tions per minute, so they had admit­ted him to the NICU and would be watch­ing him until 1:00 a.m. We were more sur­prised than scared. We had just been with him and he seemed fine. It seemed weird to us that he would sud­denly be in the NICU.

They brought him back to us at 1 and said that he was doing bet­ter. I fed him, and after I fed him, I noticed that his breath­ing had sped up again. I knew he was breath­ing faster than the 50–60 breaths he should have been hav­ing, so we buzzed the nurse and she took him to the NICU again. I asked that he be brought to me as soon as he was show­ing signs of hunger. I didn’t want him put on a sched­ule or “held off.” The nurses explained to me that when it was time for him to eat at around 4, his breath­ing had still been to fast. The doc­tor was wor­ried that he would aspi­rate milk into his lungs, so instead they had been giv­ing him sugar water from a syringe. Although I wasn’t happy, I didn’t know what else to do.

The next morn­ing, A returned to us. He was doing fine and was ready to be back with mom and dad. He did alright through the day. He was hav­ing trou­ble latch­ing though. He seemed to be gum­ming my nip­ple instead of suck­ing. The LC came to see me, and she sug­gested that we do some suck train­ing. We were sup­posed to let him suck on our fin­gers between feed­ings so he could get used to the suck­ing action. Then, right before feed­ings we were sup­posed to get him to suck on our fin­ger and then trans­fer him to the breast. We tried that, but it didn’t seem to make much of a dif­fer­ence. He still strug­gled to latch.

Again that night, the nurse came to col­lect the babies for the pediatrician’s exam­i­na­tion. Again, she returned to tell us that A had been breath­ing more quickly than nor­mal, and his oxy­gen lev­els were drop­ping a lit­tle more than they liked. He was back in the NICU. I insisted again that they please bring him to me when it was time to eat. This time, they did bring him about every 3 hours for feedings.

We were told the next morn­ing that A most likely had TTN. The doc­tor explained this was most likely caused by his fast deliv­ery and the fact that not all the fluid was squeezed out of his lungs when he went through the birth canal. It wasn’t seri­ous, and it should go away by 3–5 days after birth, but just in case she wanted us to stay another night in the hos­pi­tal with A being mon­i­tored constantly.

We moved to pedi­atrics, and A was placed on a mon­i­tor in the room. He was allowed to stay with us all night. He nursed about every hour or hour and a half for ten min­utes. The nurses kept urg­ing me to nurse him longer so that he wouldn’t need to eat so often, but I knew that he was doing just fine and I con­tin­ued to allow him to eat on demand.

When we went home, A con­tin­ued to strug­gle with latch­ing. It was usu­ally tak­ing any­where from 10–15 min­utes to get him latched for a feed­ing, but once he was on, he did fine. I did notice though, that he seemed to be chok­ing and strug­gling with my let­down more than K ever did. A didn’t really seem to enjoy nurs­ing and he rarely com­fort nursed. He seemed to have sort of a busi­ness like approach. It sat­is­fied his hunger, and that was it. It didn’t appear to pro­vide any com­fort for him. Also, he seemed to be hav­ing more and more issues with gassi­ness. Some evenings, he would be gassy and arch­ing in pain for more than an hour as he cried and cried.

After a bit of read­ing and ask­ing friends who breast­fed for help, we real­ized that Asa had a cou­ple things going on. One was a dairy sen­si­tiv­ity. I’m still not sure if he’s sen­si­tive or aller­gic to dairy, but any time I ate dairy, he would have a lot of gas and stom­ach pain. I also had a very large sup­ply and a fast let­down, so when my milk let­down for him, he was prac­ti­cally drown­ing each feed­ing. I had to start block feed­ing to deal with this.

For a week, it seemed like all our prob­lems were solved. Then, the gassi­ness came back and so did the cry­ing. It was very frus­trat­ing. We took him to the doc­tor. We tried feed­ing him more, burp­ing him more often, and a bunch of other things. Dur­ing this time, I heard a lot of feed­back from those around me and most of it was encour­age­ment to stop nurs­ing. It seemed as though they thought I was caus­ing A’s issues by con­tin­u­ing to nurse.

Finally, when A was about 3 1/2 months old, we started him on some reflux med­i­cine, and that seemed to help. He was no longer cry­ing for an hour in the evenings and his spit­ting up went from fountain-like to min­i­mal. It was wonderful!

He’s still a fre­quent nurser at 4 months old. He nurses at least ever 2 or 2 1/2 hours dur­ing the day, and he is up any­where between three and eight times a night. I know that one day I will look back and this time will be just a mem­ory, but right now it’s hard. I feel tired all the time and most of the time I’m about one step from crabby, too. Poor K, and poor Jason. Look­ing back on all A’s issues so far, I do not for one minute regret choos­ing to breast­feed him. In fact, I think that because of his issues, breast­feed­ing has been the bet­ter choice for him, and I am glad I had the sup­port to con­tinue when things got tough.