Breastfeeding awareness

Anni Taylor
August 1, 2008
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With national breastfeeding awareness week taking place in August, we thought what better time to feature two breastfeeding EB Mums. EB member Michelle explains how she manages full-time work and providing breastmilk for her baby son. Manda tells how her plan to breastfeed her daughter for six months became a beautiful 28-month journey.

Michelle
I was so lucky, when my son Jack was born in October 2007 he was an absolute natural at the whole breastfeeding thing. I can't take any credit for it - he just seemed to know instinctively what to do. They handed him to me; he latched straight on and has fed beautifully ever since.

As much as I would have liked to have stayed home for at least the first year of Jack's life, I always knew that I would have to go back to work when he was six months old. I knew that he would need to have a bottle but I wanted him to continue to have breastmilk.

I enrolled him to start daycare a month before I was to go back to work so that we could learn to separate. (Okay, so I could learn to separate!) A few weeks before that I started to express at least once a day to build up a stock pile and so we could introduce Jack to a bottle - until then he had been exclusively breastfed. To say he rejected the bottle would be an understatement. Every time we tried to give it to him he screamed...not just a little bit... he screamed as if we were trying to poison him.

We tried everything we could think of. I left the house and let my husband give it to him, we walked around to distract him, we tried about 13 million different varieties of bottle and teats. I tried expressing and giving the milk to him so it was still warm, wearing the teats in my bra so they were warm and smelled like me...nothing worked.

The first weeks at daycare were hard. He was fine; I cried a lot. It was mostly the thought that my baby was going for hours without anything to drink. The staff were great and assured me that he would eventually get used to the bottle and would drink when he was ready. So I continued to express religiously and sent hundreds of mls of expressed breastmilk (EBM) with him each day. Each day almost the same amount would come home again. Continued...