Many times on blogs and forums, I’ve read peo­ple share their birth sto­ries, but I rarely read anyone’s nurs­ing story. As much as my kids’ birth sto­ries are amaz­ing and won­der­ful and excit­ing, to me, so are their nurs­ing sto­ries. Many mamas want to breast­feed, but they don’t have either the knowl­edge or the sup­port to do it. When things start to become harder, some­times those who should be the most sup­port­ive end up say­ing things like, “Maybe you should stop nurs­ing.” “Maybe you should try a bot­tle of for­mula so you can get some sleep.” “Are you sure he/she is get­ting enough?” Unfor­tu­nately, in an attempt to help, state­ments like that can dis­cour­age a new, emo­tional mom even more. Nei­ther of my nurs­ing expe­ri­ences have been easy or with­out strug­gle, so I thought maybe if I share mine they will encour­age other moms out there to share theirs and sup­port the new moms who are just try­ing to survive.

So, if you’re a fam­ily mem­ber or friend and you don’t really want to read about 2 years of nurs­ing, this is your cue to stop. Every­one else, onward and upward.

Through­out my preg­nancy, I had a few peo­ple ask me if I was plan­ning to nurse my new baby. As most new moms who plan to nurse say, I also answered, “As long as I can, I plan to.” I read a few books on par­ent­ing, and in one book, I read that you should com­mit to nurs­ing for at least six weeks before mak­ing a deci­sion on whether or not to con­tinue. I decided that I could make that com­mit­ment. After all, how hard could it be to nurse for six weeks, right?

I knew that if I was able to have a nat­ural birth with no pain med­ica­tions and no inter­ven­tions, I had a bet­ter chance of hav­ing an awake and respon­sive baby. While I was pretty deter­mined not to have an epidural, besides the fear of the nee­dle in my back, my pri­mary rea­son was that I was afraid it would inter­fere with nurs­ing the baby. I also knew that it was impor­tant to nurse as soon as pos­si­ble after birth, because some babies have a period of very heavy sleepi­ness that can last for quite a while.

When K was born, I had the nat­ural birth I desired. He was born with the cord around his neck, but after the doc­tor did a lit­tle maneu­ver­ing, he was free and doing just fine. The nurses cleaned him up a lit­tle and brought him back to me. They asked if I wanted to nurse him and I said yes, so I tried to get him to latch on. In my mind, the process was about two steps long. One, I would offer my breast. Two, he would latch and nurse. Well, that didn’t hap­pen quite that way. I offered, and he looked at me. With the nurse’s help, I tried for another 15–20 min­utes to get him to latch, but he didn’t. The nurse told me that it wasn’t unusual for a baby not to latch right away, and so she said that I should try again in 3 hours. Since I was tired and needed a shower, I agreed. Jason held K as he slept, and I show­ered and moved to my new room.

Three hours later, we tried again. Still noth­ing. The nurse sug­gested I try a dif­fer­ent posi­tion. I tried the foot­ball hold, the cra­dle hold, and side lying. None of those worked. At this point, I was start­ing to worry a lit­tle. I asked for a visit from the lac­ta­tion con­sul­tant, but I was told she was unavail­able. The nurses told me again that it wasn’t unusual for a baby not to eat much the first day, so I shouldn’t worry. I could just try again in three hours.

Again and again, we tried to nurse, but K was hav­ing none of it. He would open his mouth, but then he wouldn’t latch. He just didn’t seem inter­ested. He would attempt to nurse for 15–20 min­utes or as long as I could keep him awake, and then he would sleep until I woke him 3 hours later.

After a day and a half of this, one nurse felt that he was get­ting to a point where he needed to eat some­thing soon. I began to pump after attempt­ing to feed him each time, and I got some colostrum. Colostrum is what your body pro­duces before your milk actu­ally comes in. It’s yel­low, thick, and full of anti­bod­ies. It’s won­der­ful for your baby. Because K wasn’t latch­ing, we started giv­ing the colostrum through a med­i­cine drop­per. I was get­ting about 10 ccs every 3 hours. After doing this a cou­ple times, the nurse came back and told me that I really should give K some for­mula so he didn’t get dehy­drated, because he needed more than what I was pro­vid­ing him. Both Jason and I were very frus­trated, anx­ious, and upset. We had asked to see the lac­ta­tion con­sul­tant a few more times on day two, and were told that she would come when she wasn’t so busy. She was also a NICU nurse and work­ing on a mother preg­nant with twins (31 weeks) to try to keep her from going into preterm labor.

So, with no idea what to do and no real help, we agreed to give some for­mula. The nurse offered K a bot­tle, and he latched on right away and sucked down about 2–3 ounces of for­mula. I cried for most of the feed­ing. We con­tin­ued all night offer­ing the breast every 3 hours and then I would pump and we would give what­ever I pumped through a med­i­cine drop­per. Then, we’d give some for­mula from the drop­per. Feed­ings were tak­ing at least one and a half or two hours. So, after almost two hours, we’d go back to sleep for an hour and start all over with lit­tle or no success.

Finally, on the third day, the lac­ta­tion con­sul­tant was able to come see me. She brought a nip­ple shield and a sup­ple­men­tal nurs­ing sys­tem. A nip­ple shield is a small, thin, sil­i­cone shield that goes over the nip­ple so a baby can latch when he wouldn’t be able to oth­er­wise. A sup­ple­men­tal nurs­ing sys­tem is a con­trap­tion that goes around a mother’s neck, and then a tube goes down to the breast and the baby sucks on this lit­tle tube at the same time as the nip­ple. When she watched K attempt to latch, she told me that I had flat nip­ples and that was what was pre­vent­ing him from latch­ing. She showed me how to use the nip­ple shield, and FINALLY K latched. I was so happy. I couldn’t believe it.

Because he hadn’t been eat­ing well, the pedi­a­tri­cian decided to admit K into peds, and Jason and I were able to stay in his room with him for another day to make sure he was still eat­ing well. K was now latch­ing, but we were still strug­gling a lit­tle bit. He was eat­ing for 45 min­utes or more on each side, and it was nearly impos­si­ble to keep him awake. After wak­ing him, we had to change his dia­per and take of his clothes to wake him up. Then, I fed him for about 1 1/2 hours before pump­ing for 15 min­utes. Again, by the time I fin­ished this process, there was less than an hour left before I had to wake him again for the next feed­ing. The good news though was that he wasn’t lost­ing any more weight. He was finally eat­ing, pee­ing, and pooping.

We went home, and feed­ings remained a chal­lenge. K woke every 2 1/2 or 3 hours at night to eat, and feed­ings took at least an hour. Dur­ing the day though, I had to wake him and strug­gled to get him to nurse every 3 hours.

That went on for about three months. Dur­ing this time, I tried to get him to stop using the shield and nurse with­out, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t. Finally, one day, I was try­ing to get him to nurse when he was three months old, and he refused to latch. As a last resort, I took the shield off and offered the breast. He latched right on! I was so amazed. Another big change that day was that he went from tak­ing 60+ min­utes for a feed­ing to only need­ing 15–20 min­utes. I even called my sister-in-law to ask her if that was nor­mal. It was such a quick change that I wasn’t sure what to do, but I just decided to go with it.

At that point, my nurs­ing goal became to make it to one year. Look­ing back, I can say that after that day when K was 3 months, we didn’t have many, if any, chal­lenges for quite a while. A week before Kael turned one, he got the rotavirus. He also ended up with an ear infec­tion from it. Dur­ing that time, he didn’t want any­thing to eat or drink. He only nursed. I am con­fi­dent that nurs­ing is what kept him from becom­ing dehydrated.

When he turned one, I knew that I had made my goal of nurs­ing for a year, but other than that noth­ing else seemed to have changed, so I wasn’t sure why I would choose to wean at that point. So, I didn’t. A week later, I found out I was preg­nant with A, and know­ing that 70% of babies who are nurs­ing dur­ing preg­nancy self-wean before the next baby is born, I decided to let K make the deci­sion about whether to con­tinue nurs­ing or not.

For the first 20 weeks of my preg­nancy with A, I didn’t find much dif­fer­ence in my nurs­ing rela­tion­ship with K. He nursed 4 pre­dictable times a day. He nursed first thing in the morn­ing, noon­ish, 4 o’clockish, and before bed. How­ever, right around 20 weeks, my milk sup­ply dropped dras­ti­cally. It was a very hard time for K. He went from nurs­ing 4 times a day for 15 min­utes to nurs­ing almost all day long. He would ask to nurse and he would latch on and nurse for an hour or more at a time. I knew that at this point nurs­ing was as impor­tant for secu­rity as it was for nutri­tion, so I allowed him to nurse as much as he wanted. Some days, I think he nursed more of his wak­ing time than he did any­thing else.

By about 30 weeks, I knew I had to talk to my doc­tor about my con­trac­tions. I was hav­ing brax­ton hicks con­trac­tions all day long and espe­cially while nurs­ing. I was hav­ing 30 or more con­trac­tions a day. Some days they were as close as 2–3 min­utes apart, but they never lasted very long. When I did bring it up with my doc­tor, she did a test for preterm labor and ordered an ultra­sound to check my cervix. Both came back with reas­sur­ing results. I was neg­a­tive for preterm labor, and my cervix was nor­mal, long, and closed. I was okay to con­tinue nursing.

I did limit K’s nurs­ing a lit­tle after this point. Since he had been born at 36 weeks, I was con­cerned about another early baby. Also, the closer I got to my due date, the stronger the con­trac­tions while nurs­ing got. At some points, the con­trac­tions were so strong that I had to hold my ribs and breathe very shal­low to man­age the pain.

At about 33 weeks, K started nurs­ing less. In fact, in May (A was due in July), he went an entire day with­out nurs­ing for the first time in his life. After that point, he would often go 2–3 days with­out nurs­ing, then, nurse 4 times in a day. I had decided at that point to let him do what­ever he wanted. I didn’t offer to nurse, but I didn’t refuse when he asked.

A was born three days after his due date, so I did not have a sec­ond early baby. A was also 9 pounds 12 ounces, so appar­ently nurs­ing K dur­ing the preg­nancy didn’t keep A from get­ting the nutri­ents he needed to grow and gain weight. While I was in the hos­pi­tal, K didn’t ask to nurse and I didn’t offer.

When I got home from the hos­pi­tal with A, he again didn’t ask to nurse. I waited a day or two, and finally, I was so engorged one day I asked if he wanted to nurse and he did. When he real­ized that my milk was back, his eyes got wide and he just melted. It was every­thing I’d hoped for.

Unfor­tu­nately, K got a pretty nasty cold right away after A was born. So, as I was deal­ing with try­ing to learn to nurse A (which is another story in itself), K was try­ing to nurse with a plugged nose. He was so excited to have milk again that he was nurs­ing as much as A some days. When he was sick, he would latch, and start nurs­ing. Then, when he had to breathe, instead of unlatch­ing and breath­ing, he would hold my nip­ple with his teeth to take a breath. Very uncom­fort­able, bor­der­ing on painful. He also had some issues with jeal­ousy of A nurs­ing. He never seemed upset at the baby or mad at him, but often, when I was nurs­ing A, he would stand on my feet and cry as he waited for his turn.

Slowly, we got into a rou­tine where K was less upset with A nurs­ing. I think he real­ized that there was still milk even if A did nurse first. He still gets upset while wait­ing for his turn some days, but that’s not nearly as com­mon as it was even a month ago.

K still nurses sev­eral times a day. Some days, he nurses as often as A does, but again, I’ve cho­sen not to limit his nurs­ing. I feel like he’s had to grow up a bit more quickly than he would have oth­er­wise since we chose to have another baby so close to him in age. I believe that if I allow him to con­trol the nurs­ing rela­tion­ship, he will be able to make devel­op­men­tally appro­pri­ate choices for when to nurse, how often to nurse, and when to stop.

So, that’s K’s nurs­ing story. As hard as it was in the begin­ning, I’m not sure I would change any­thing, because if I did, I don’t know where we would be now because of the changes. I feel like where we are right now is a pretty good place to be.