Day 4 was one long day and drained me emotionally!
It's like a switch flipped inside little P's head and something went kaboom!!
He just refused to feed. Nothing I did, worked for him. He kept howling like a banshee. It was like watching Tarzan in a horror show, it was that bad.
He was clearly hungry, but would not bother feeding from the breast.
Looking back in hindsight, I smile as I recollect the things I tried in order to get him to feed.
I handed him to mom, and as she held him i dangled "myself" over him so gravity could works it miracle.
But no! Some more hollering!
I put him down on the bed, and bent over him. NADA!
I had read about the wonders of skin to skin, that is stripping baby and yourself down to nothing and just letting him say on top of you like that. Nothing there!
I was getting restless and the folks were wondering if I was mad.
The thing with breastfeeding is, it's very simple and easy to those who don't face problems; else, it's the hardest thing ever for those who do face problems.
And I, of course, fell in the latter category.
Nothing was working, so we all finally gave in, and gave little P a bit of formula, and off he dozed.
Now, again, how breastfeeding works is very simple, a supply and demand thing. The more you feed, the more milk you make.And that's why newborn babies feed like crazy, because they send out signals to your body to make enough milk for them.
I had no idea what to do. I was crying hysterically. I had envisaged a smooth nursing journey, but this was the beginning of a long, long battle.
So, every day, or rather every few hours, I did the unsexy task of hand pumping my own breasts. And I tell you, this is the weirdest thing one can do with those ladies!
I mean, once you start breastfeeding, the idea of breasts being a sexual commodity sounds so lame and ridiculous, that you wonder what the big deal is about them. After all, they are only a baby's natural source of food!
Things went on like this for about 4 odd days or so. I would be knackered trying to win a lost battle, I would get fed up pumping spoonfuls of milk, which would sometimes take me 45 minutes, and little P was happy and content with his formula, something I was beginning to hate from my core.
In the meantime, I had ordered a manual breast pump for myself, because I was getting fed up of pom poming myself every few hours.
We had our immunisation coming up, and decided to carry little P's formula in a bottle, something we hadn't used until that point.
We entered the pediatrician's cabin, and I was greeted with:
"And why are we feeding the baby poison?!"
I was stunned. The bottle and the formula wasn't a choice, it was a compulsion because things were taking time to work out and the baby needed his nutrition.
I had suddenly, in the matter of a second, been turned into a evil mother who feeds her baby "poison".
The battle between breast and formula had just begun!
It's like a switch flipped inside little P's head and something went kaboom!!
He just refused to feed. Nothing I did, worked for him. He kept howling like a banshee. It was like watching Tarzan in a horror show, it was that bad.
He was clearly hungry, but would not bother feeding from the breast.
Looking back in hindsight, I smile as I recollect the things I tried in order to get him to feed.
I handed him to mom, and as she held him i dangled "myself" over him so gravity could works it miracle.
But no! Some more hollering!
I put him down on the bed, and bent over him. NADA!
I had read about the wonders of skin to skin, that is stripping baby and yourself down to nothing and just letting him say on top of you like that. Nothing there!
I was getting restless and the folks were wondering if I was mad.
The thing with breastfeeding is, it's very simple and easy to those who don't face problems; else, it's the hardest thing ever for those who do face problems.
And I, of course, fell in the latter category.
Nothing was working, so we all finally gave in, and gave little P a bit of formula, and off he dozed.
Now, again, how breastfeeding works is very simple, a supply and demand thing. The more you feed, the more milk you make.And that's why newborn babies feed like crazy, because they send out signals to your body to make enough milk for them.
I had no idea what to do. I was crying hysterically. I had envisaged a smooth nursing journey, but this was the beginning of a long, long battle.
So, every day, or rather every few hours, I did the unsexy task of hand pumping my own breasts. And I tell you, this is the weirdest thing one can do with those ladies!
I mean, once you start breastfeeding, the idea of breasts being a sexual commodity sounds so lame and ridiculous, that you wonder what the big deal is about them. After all, they are only a baby's natural source of food!
Things went on like this for about 4 odd days or so. I would be knackered trying to win a lost battle, I would get fed up pumping spoonfuls of milk, which would sometimes take me 45 minutes, and little P was happy and content with his formula, something I was beginning to hate from my core.
In the meantime, I had ordered a manual breast pump for myself, because I was getting fed up of pom poming myself every few hours.
We had our immunisation coming up, and decided to carry little P's formula in a bottle, something we hadn't used until that point.
We entered the pediatrician's cabin, and I was greeted with:
"And why are we feeding the baby poison?!"
I was stunned. The bottle and the formula wasn't a choice, it was a compulsion because things were taking time to work out and the baby needed his nutrition.
I had suddenly, in the matter of a second, been turned into a evil mother who feeds her baby "poison".
The battle between breast and formula had just begun!
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