Breastfeeding challenge

While I was pregnant, my colleague asks me if I would breastfeed and for how long. I was 100% confident I will breastfeed, but I also thought I would only do it max for 2 months and then give it up after that. My colleague then asked me to at least try for 6 months and pump at work. Initially, I thought that was too much work, I couldn’t imagine having the trouble of pumping numerous times at work and all the hassle of breastfeeding.

However, when Josiah was born, you can say it was a process of falling in love all over again and just wanting the very best for my baby. So, I challenged myself to breastfeed no matter how hard it was. I admit, during the first month, there were so many times I wanted to give up.

Firstly, due to inexperience and not knowing how to latch the baby on, I got sore nipples that even bleed in the first few days. Imagine it’s already sore, and still you have to breastfeed and felt like bitten by a piranha…. and enduring that pain for days and days…not to mention feelings of inadequacy, feelings of having not enough, and people telling you so as well. I always felt in the beginning like my baby wasn’t getting enough since he kept nursing without stopping, but later I realised that was the baby’s way of making me produce more.

And then I tried pumping, but at that time I only had a manual pump. Ladies, manual pumps does not work! Maybe it works only when you have a steady supply but definitely not for new mothers in the first month. Pumping manually was pure torture on the hands. So, I splurged on an Ameda double pump that cost nearly 1k. It was well worth it, since today I have more than 10 bottles of expressed milk frozen in the fridge for when I get back to work to leave with my care taker.

Today, at nearly 2 months, I still get sore nipples at times! That’s due to wrong positioning at times, and when baby simply latch on to fast before I can position him properly, and sometimes when he’s really hungry he bites really hard. But I must say, it has been a most satisfying journey. My mind has changed, now I want to target at least 6 months, and maybe more if I can. I find it so much easier to breastfeed than to bring milk bottles out. I can just go out with my baby to the mall and sit down and breastfeed when he gets hungry. In fact, so far I had done it publicly in Tesco Semenyih, at the clinic, in the car, and just yesterday at Jusco. However, Jusco has a nice baby room that I can use.

Expressing breastmilk has also gotten easier. I am now up at 2am expressing and blogging. However, I don’t think new mothers should be made to look guilty if they choose not to breastfeed, it’s their baby after all, so it’s really a personal choice. I’m just doing it because I couldn’t find any cons about breastfeeding as opposed to not doing it, benefits for myself, my baby and everything else, far outweighs whatever inconvenience I had first perceived.