While I was pregnant with Monkey I always said that I planned to breastfeed my baby as long as it worked for us. I assumed of course that it would work for us. Unfortunately Monkey and I had trouble breastfeeding so for us breastfeeding lasted a matter of weeks before switching to a bottle was necessary.
Luke and I took Madeline into a standard appointment with a lactation consultant 5 days after she was born. This appointment is to make sure that new mommies and new babies in our area are transitioning to breastfeeding well, to give support to families and to address any issues that may have come up. Well at that appointment we found out that Monkey had lost 12 ounces in the 5 days since her birth. Since she started out at 6lbs 3oz that was a lot more than the 5-10%that our doctors considered normal. My little baby was not getting enough milk.
I was heart broken, I cried for days.
How could I be a good mom if I couldn’t even provide enough milk for my baby? I had been a mom for less than a week and I had already failed. We eventually found out that not only was I not producing enough milk. We started a feeding routine of round the clock breastfeeding, bottle feeding and pumping that nearly drove Stinky and I to the breaking point. We even had to wake us our little baby from sleep to stay on schedule, poor girl. After a while with no change we decided as a family to bottle feed exclusively.
It was a hard decision to make I would have loved to have breastfed my baby longer. I would have loved to have skipped over that whole heartbreaking reality and it took me a while to fully come to terms with our situation, but at 1 year old my baby is happy, healthy, thriving little girl and things turned out fine for us.
