Breastfeeding my firstborn was a battle for a long time. We started out well, but fought a shallow latch, tongue tie, thrush, and the need for exclusive pumping. Through sheer stubbornness we never had to supplement with formula, but it was really rough until we finally got things smoothed over at six months or so.

So, with plans to breastfeed baby two, I was worried about how it’d turn out. I’d heard from friends with more than one child that feeding problems with the first didn’t necessarily translate to feeding problems with the subsequent kids, and knew that I had much more knowledge and practical experience after two years of nursing M. But I was terrified at the prospect of having to deal with tongue tie and LC appointments and weight curves all over again.

Still, I knew I wanted to breastfeed so I figured I’d take things as they came. When A was born he was content to snuggle on Mac Daddy’s chest in the OR while the medical team finished stitching me up, and right around when he started to root, it was time to transfer me to recovery. I latched him on in the hallway between the rooms and he was happy to stay at my breast for awhile. I was fuzzy from delivery so I can’t remember how well it went, but it didn’t hurt or feel abnormal in any way.

I nursed him throughout our hospital stay, marking the times and the duration first on our whiteboard, then on my phone so the nurses could keep up with what we were doing. He seemed to have a bit of a shallow latch but nothing awful, and although I had to bite back pain a few times, I could tell he was starting to open wider. The most challenging part was actually getting him to latch. He was so sleepy that even though he was crying for milk, the moment he got within the vicinity of my nipple he just passed out instead of sucking. Our second night was the worst for that, and the night nurse had me hand express onto a spoon so he’d at least get some milk into him.

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She weighed him after that and determined his weight was falling faster than they’d like. She immediately procured a hospital-grade double electric pump and I started pumping for 10 minutes after each feed, putting that milk into syringes to top A up when he was done at the breast. It was honestly a huge pain in the butt, because the pump parts had to be sterilized every time at the station one floor up, and he was nursing often enough that Mac Daddy was back and forth dealing with syringes and the wash basin through the rest of that night and into the next day.

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We were excited to find out that he passed his jaundice test — had he failed we would’ve been stuck overnight for a third evening — but after a weight check at noon, showing his overall weight loss hovering around eight per cent, the pediatrician wanted to weigh him again at 4 p.m. meaning there was no way we were leaving Manitoba that day even if we did get discharged later on. I was frustrated because I knew that breastfed babies lose weight and had thought that it was anything under 10 per cent that was acceptable, plus he was starting to latch a lot better.

Still, we wanted out, so we dutifully worked as a team — I fed him, then pumped, then Mac Daddy got the pumped milk into him. At this point, it felt like we were force feeding him a bit. My mom joked that we were fattening him up, but that’s exactly what we were doing! We had to stop his weight loss, at the very least, to be allowed out. When the second weight check rolled around we discovered he had gained a bit (possibly due to Mac Daddy convincing him to take some pumped milk about half an hour before the weight check; we had no shame in how badly we wanted out of there) and we were suddenly in discharge mode, leaving the hospital about a half hour later.

My milk came in the next day on our drive home. Once we got back, for the rest of that first week he was still a sleepy baby, rousing only to nurse, and sometimes not even rousing himself. I woke him up every three hours or so, night and day. After he flipped over the one week mark he started to be more wakeful, and nights involved a few jags of left side feeding, right side feeding, attempted cradle drop-off, back to left side feeding, right side feeding… but he was well on track to be back at his birth weight before two weeks had passed, and in fact he was within ounces at his one-week appointment.

And, aside from a bit of initial pain with latching, breastfeeding didn’t hurt at all. The few scabs and blisters that had formed during our hospital stay went away, and I never had to use anything more than lanolin to make that happen. When he was hungry he was screaming hungry, but he latched easily and nursed well.

As A got a bit older, I noticed he was having more and more poops that were green, and some of them were mucous-y. It made me nervous, and there was a lot of late-night Googling about it. I knew that it could all boil down to an oversupply, which I thought I had — he frequently sputtered when nursing — but also knew it could be a symptom of a food intolerance, likely dairy. A restrictive diet sounded torturous to me, and so I decided to implement block feeding, give it a week, and hope that things changed.

Block feeding showed me that I did, definitely, have an oversupply. I don’t know if it was because of the extra pumping in the hospital or what, but switching to feeding one breast at a time, every two to three hours, made me realize just how quickly my breasts became engorged and leaky. That never, ever happened with M, so I was in new territory! But after a week, A’s diapers were totally normal and I didn’t feel so full and uncomfortable all the time. My understanding is that sometimes babies who are dealing with a mama with an oversupply end up with a lactase overload, which can mimic the symptoms of a dairy allergy, but if it’s a supply issue, it goes away once baby is getting less foremilk.

I’m hopeful that things keep working well as he gets older. M started out well, too, but by six weeks I realized I’d been minimizing exactly how much pain I’d been in for weeks, and something always seemed off from the start. If we run into problems I know where to go to get support and help, but I’m crossing everything that we’re able to have an easy, relaxed nursing relationship this time around!

If you have more than one child, was it different to feed each of them?