I think it went, breastfeeding went a lot smoother than I'd expected, because I'd been kind of told by people around me how hard it was, how other people had found it hard to get breastfeeding, and how people couldn't breastfeed. And like even my husband who was totally supportive in every other way was like, “I'm just going to buy some formula in case you can't breastfeed” which I was quite upset about. Which never got used [laugh]. It was a point of pride actually. And I, I was fairly determined to breastfeed, so I kind of felt that people weren't terribly supportive about that decision. The first 24 hours she only suckled twice for very short times, I was slightly concerned, and she slept quite a bit. Actually she didn't sleep quite a bit, she slept for kind of four-hour periods, then she was awake. But she was a terribly good baby, because I remember the woman on the next bed saying, “Oh, your baby's so good” because her baby cried all through the night. She said to me, “Your baby's so good”. And, you know, she suckled a few times and that. And then the third night when this other woman had gone home she like screamed the whole night through, because she'd realised she was hungry and my milk hadn't come in properly. And so I just paced up and down the whole night and she just couldn't get enough milk from me.
And then of course my milk all came in at once and I got mastitis and I had to have antibiotics. And the first ten days of breastfeeding were quite difficult because she was like feeding constantly every hour on the hour all night. And even like by about day seven the midwife was saying to me, “Look you can give her a bottle, give yourself a rest, give her a bottle” which I was not going to do [laugh]. I was like, “No, it's not happening”.
But by about day ten she then slept, she went down about 9 o'clock and she slept, such that after about seven hours we phoned up the out-of-hours service and said, [laugh] “Our daughter's sleeping. We're really worried about her.” And after that it was fine. She, she fed absolutely fine. She never had any problems latching on, she didn't have any problems taking the milk, she just didn't stop feeding until about three months. I couldn't like get serious gaps between her feeds until she was about three months old. And the mid-, the health visitor kept saying to me, “She'll establish her feeding, it'll start spacing out”. And it didn't. But she would go down for about 8 or 9 hours a night so I think I was quite lucky that way. |
