For the past two weeks, everything in this house has revolved around breastfeeding.
The sofa and armchair have been filled with ever-changing arrangements of pillows and nursing pillows, barely leaving any space for normal use. On the back of the sofa hangs a light blanket for occasional swaddling (when Ingrid gets too violently upset about not getting to the breast fast enough) and a muslin for wiping up dribbles and spills. Half a dozen nursing pads are drying on the windowsill. Any activities are planned based on when Ingrid last fed, and when she will need to get her next feed. The house smells of milk.
Slowly, slowly, we are coming to grips with how this breastfeeding thing works, and starting to feel more in control (marginally).
Breastfeeding (unlike giving birth) does not just happen. It is work, and requires both skill and knowledge – there are more ways of getting it wrong than getting it right. There are positions, and techniques, and terminology. And the 5 or 10 minutes of instruction that I got from the midwive (at 5 in the morning) were woefully insufficient to teach me what was needed.
It took 3 days for my nipples to be chewed to pieces, until they were cracked and bleeding. Then another 3 days to get mastitis. Not a good start.
The mastitis was cured with antibiotics, which got rid of the pain and fever in about half a day (but I’m stuck eating the pills for a week). The chewed nipples got a chance to heal once I found (on the Internet) a different position for Ingrid, which gave me more control over what she was doing and also let her approach the nipples from a different direction. Finally, a breastfeeding consultant / support worker pointed out what I had been doing wrong, and showed me how to work around Ingrid’s unhelpful attempts to get at the breast faster. (All materials about breastfeeding assume that the baby is calm and quiet when being fed – none give advice on what to do when the baby is frantically waving her arms and chomping her jaw because she wants food RIGHT NOW PLEASE. Ingrid, on the other hand, seems to go from too sleepy to open her mouth, to full arm-waving hungry panic, in about 3 seconds.)
I am still not looking forward to feeding her, and I feel my body tensing up in anticipation of the pain. I’m still sore, and the first few seconds, when she’s finding her grip, are never painless. But it’s a lot better, and I finally feel like I have a clue about what I’m doing.
Ingrid is still feeding 8 to 10 times a day, but the feeds are now getting more efficient, and the intervals between them are less random. We can now generally manage a feed in about an hour (of which about 20 minutes are occupied by actual active feeding, and the rest is getting her onto the breast, or getting her to wake up again after she falls asleep halfway through feeding). This still means that I spend somewhere between 8 and 12 hours a day breastfeeding – a full-time job.
Ingrid is also learning. She can now stay awake and feed for over 10 minutes, so we rarely need more than one or two “reboots” during a feed. And she lasts longer between feeds (if we time them right) – last night she went 5 hours between feeds, which meant that I could sleep without being woken for a full 3 hours! (We lost 1 hour because she was having difficulty falling asleep after the feed.)
