‘My breastfeeding journey started with my son, who I fed until he was two years eight months old. Our journey was tricky to begin with as we had a long and traumatic birth experience that involved forceps and a hefty postpartum haemorrhage. I know now that breastmilk is made from blood and so, as I’d lost so much, my body took a little longer to produce milk. I was also extremely weak, exhausted and in shock after the birth. I was unconscious for roughly the first 12 hours of my son’s life so didn’t get the skin to skin or initial breastfeeding opportunities that I would have had otherwise. Of course, Jacob found this all very stressful too and was very distressed. I have very vague memories of trying to latch him and then another little memory of attempting to hand express colostrum into a syringe in an attempt to feed him.

The lactation support team visited me and their advice was great as was many of the midwives, particularly ones working nights. However, at day three, Jacob had lost too much weight (around 12.5 per cent) and was put onto a feeding regime. I was shocked and heartbroken, realising that he may have been crying with hunger the whole time. We pushed through to day five of three-hourly breastfeeds, pumping, bottle feeding expressed milk and bottle feeding formula top ups. Thank God for the Maternity Care Assistants overnight who helped feed Jacob a bottle while visitors weren’t allowed! Jacob’s weight was back up and we were discharged.

At home, on day six, my milk came in! After that, I chose to no longer follow the feeding regime and exclusively breastfeed. I had lots of support from the community midwives that I had seen whilst pregnant and managed to get half-decent positioning and attachment but suffered with sore nipples. At the time I didn’t really know better and pushed through.

However, things did improve as Jacob began putting on up to a pound a week and as he got bigger and stronger, feeding became so much easier! We went on to have an amazing breastfeeding relationship for about two years… then the aversion set in. We night weaned and Jacob’s sleep did actually improve (not a guarantee) and gradually dropped more and more feeds, pushing through the aversion until we eventually stopped feeding in the November before his third birthday…

In the December we found out I was pregnant with number two!

Baby number two was such an incredibly different experience. Having had an amazing breastfeeding journey beforehand and feeling that I was much more informed, I was much more confident going into this next breastfeeding journey. It was still hard at the beginning as baby learned to feed and I had to adapt to feeding a newborn, with no head control, again. I spoke to my midwife a lot through my pregnancy and we had a big debrief about my previous birth experience. Second time round the birth was much less traumatic. So we had a better head start than first time round. Fortunately, Isla took to breastfeeding like a dream and we are still feeding now at 18 months old with no current plans to attempt to wean.’ 

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