I babble about business, babies, and parenthood on this blog, so those of you who come here to read my posts on entrepreneurship but do not have babies, please forward this post to your friends and family who do have babies. For those who have babies and dabble in business, these tips might be right up your alley. If you have babies and no interest in business, then send it on to the folks you know who are knee-deep in business and encourage them to have a baby! To check out more baby advice, check out the baby tips category.
7 Tips for Successful Breastfeeding
by Aruni Gunasegaram
My now 5 ½ year old son was born by emergency c-section making my post birth recovery time challenging because a) I was exhausted, b) he didn’t seem to sleep very much and c) I developed a breast infection. Now a) and b) are par for the course when having a baby but c) knocked me senseless. I didn’t want to take any more medication given that I had just come off of several after the c-section so I waited to see if the pain would go away. When I reached the point where I would wake up from a restless sleep with tears in my eyes from the excruciating pain and I began having thoughts like “I wish I could die right now, but I can’t because I have to feed my baby,” I began a round of antibiotics. Within a week or so I felt sane again.
Now part of the reason I contracted the breast infection was because I wasn’t breastfeeding correctly. It took about 7 to 10 days for my milk to come in and then because of the infection probably 10 weeks for me to quit wondering how the human race survived before bottles and formula! I ended up breastfeeding our son for about 7 months and our daughter about 9 months when it was apparent to me that we were ready to move on to the next phase of our mother/baby relationship. Here are some tips that helped me establish a successful breastfeeding relationship with my children.
1. Mentally prepare yourself that it can take up to 8 to 12 weeks. Some insightful person…maybe a nurse or my lactation consultant, told me “Give it 8 to 12 weeks before making a decision on whether you want to quit breastfeeding.” So I told myself ‘this is a marathon, breastfeeding is important to me and my husband, and I can’t quit before 12 weeks.’ I remember saying that to myself almost every day and when I was 10 weeks into it I realized “Wow, this isn’t so bad. In fact it’s pretty darn neat!”
2. It’s OK to supplement! I know I will be chastised by the pure breastfeeding advocates for saying this, but in my opinion it is OK to supplement with formula especially if you feel something is wrong with you or your baby. I was so afraid to supplement because I was repeatedly told that supplementing was the worst thing I could do, which of course made me feel like an awful mom. But let me tell you, if you are exhausted and your baby isn’t gaining weight, it is one of the best things you can do. After feeling guilty for a week because my milk wasn’t coming in and my baby wasn’t gaining weight, and trying to survive a breast infection, I decided to supplement just a little bit and what a relief because it helped me gain my confidence back. I had more confidence when our daughter was born 2 ½ years later. I smiled at the nurses who said I shouldn’t supplement and did it anyway for the first few weeks of her life. UPDATE: Based on a reader’s comment below, it wasn’t clear that even though we supplemented in the first several weeks, I also continued to pump. It is so true that if you quit pumping, your body will think you need to produce less milk. So I pumped and I took time to rest a little longer to build up my milk supply and that’s why my milk came in! Supplementing is not for everyone but in my opinion the sanity and health of the mom and baby are of utmost importance!
3. Don’t be afraid to take that baby off! Some well meaning nurses told me that when the baby is finished he will fall off. They didn’t know my son. He would stay on for over an hour on each side just suckling half asleep if I let him. I remember breastfeeding sessions that would last 90 minutes which when I had to start over again in an hour and a half reduced me to tears. I believe not pulling him off when I thought he was done contributed to my getting the breast infection. With my daughter I produced so much milk that after 8 to 10 weeks I was able to take her off sometimes at 7 to 10 minutes!
4. Keep a breastfeeding log. So that you have an idea of how much time you are breastfeeding and maybe even what position you are breastfeeding in, keep a breastfeeding log. When our son was born I used a form I created in Microsoft Excel to jot down often illegible notes. Fortunately when our daughter was born, we had an alpha version of our mobile software program, Baby Insights, available. I could easily keep track of my pumping and breastfeeding schedule which helped me understand her feeding patterns and how much milk I was producing.
5. Drink plenty of water. Drinking plenty of fluids, eating well, and getting good rest is a huge contributor to successful breastfeeding. In fact a vast majority of breast milk is water. Keep a bottle of water next to you when you breastfeed.
6. Ask and/or pay for help. Whether it’s a lactation consultant, a post-partum doula, your significant other, or a friend who has breastfed before, ask for help. A good lactation consultant can give you great tips on how to get your baby to latch on and feed properly. If you can afford a post-partum doula a few hours per week, they can be a god-send with both household and breastfeeding support. Ask your spouse to help you keep the breastfeeding log, bring you water, fresh fruit, snacks, and the baby!
7. Relax. I know this is easier said than done, but I found the more relaxed I was, the more my milk flowed. Lack of sleep and stress actually reduces your body’s ability to create breast milk. And worse you may start to resent the process and maybe even your baby! Watch a funny show or movie. Take a nap. Take a leisurely walk. Chat with a friend. Or just bawl your eyes out…we all know what a stress relief that can be!
Once your milk flow is established consider donating to a Mother’s Milk Bank near you. I donated to the Mother’s Milk Bank of Austin with my daughter and it was a wonderful feeling knowing that my milk was going to help sick and premature babies.
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If you like this tip, you might be interested in these too:
Increasing Breast Milk Supply by Carole Hayes at Alias Tex
15 Tips for Surviving The World’s Youngest Insomniac by Rose at From the Park Bench
Why Keeping a Daily Journal Is Important for Moms and Nannies
How To Properly Swaddle A Baby
Tips on Co-Sleeping and Ways to use a Co-sleeper
Keeping a Baby Food Journal by Neena at A Mom’s Life at NeenMachine.com
Note to new readers: these tips are based on our experiences, as well as those of our friends and readers. Please always consult with your doctor before implementing any tip that might impact the health of your baby. If you have a tip you’d like to submit please send an email to blogger at babblesoft dot com. Please check the ‘baby tips’ category to make sure your tip (in some form or fashion) hasn’t already been posted. If it has been, feel free to comment on that post and support the tip. We also welcome respectful challenges to the tips because as is noted in our inaugural baby tip ‘everything is relative!’ We will, of course, give anyone who submits a tip we publish credit and lotsa link love!
Author: Aruni |
Filed under: baby,
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I see the world of childcare changing before our eyes and having a place to keep up with your baby’s precious moments and activities can be a great way not only to share with your family and friends but also to make sure your baby is getting what he or she needs. More often than not, these days there are many people involved in childcare from dad, to nannies, to sitters, to grandparents, to aunts, and communicating effectively with everyone about when your baby ate, slept, or had medicine can be extremely important!
One of the ways I am currently trying to get the word out about Babble Soft is through marketing relationships with nanny and sitter agencies, and I recently had the honor and priviledge to write the following article for the International Nanny Association.
Why Keeping a Daily Journal is Important for Moms and Nannies
By Aruni Gunasegaram, President and Founder of Babble Soft
Written for the International Nanny Association Spring 2008 newsletter
When a new mom leaves her infant in the care of a nanny or newborn care specialist, what are her concerns? What does she want to know? How can a nanny help her feel more connected to her baby and help her deal with possible feelings of guilt over leaving her baby?
A new mom’s perspective
As a new mom, I was so concerned about leaving my baby with anyone else … even my husband! When I returned, I wanted to know when he ate, if he slept, and practically everything he did. Now that I have two kids, I still ask their teachers and care providers what they did during the day. It’s so comforting to have an idea of how their day went. I sent our son to a home care on a part-time basis when he was a baby. I felt frustrated by the vague answers I received when I asked about the details of his day; but I bit my tongue, felt guilty, and walked away wondering what I had missed.
It was difficult to leave my son with someone else and thereafter, leave my daughter – but I wanted to work. My career is very important to me and I knew I would be a better mom if I was able to pursue my passion. However, I still wanted to stay connected to my babies. It would have been a pleasure to receive an email, a text message, a picture, or even have the ability to log in to a website to see how my babies were doing. It would have made my life so much easier if I was assured that although they might have cried a bit when left them, they were eating well, sleeping well, learning and having fun.
I was still breastfeeding when I returned to work, and I made every attempt to time my pumping sessions so that I could nurse my babies when I picked them up. If I arrived only to find out they had just been fed, I would have to go home and pump instead of feed them, making me feel very disappointed. On the other hand, it was nice having breastfeeding support and knowing that I had expressed enough milk for them while I was away made me feel more connected to them.
What moms want to know
In the “old days,” moms had no choice but to stay at home. They could get advice and make decisions based on one-on-one face time with baby, family members, and friends. Nowadays, moms rely on their nannies to communicate their baby’s daily activities, issues, fussy periods, smiles, and schedules. When moms are not present, having the opportunity to review their baby’s activities at a glance in a daily journal or report is not only powerful, it helps them and their nanny make better baby care decisions. It is also a great way to provide records for their pediatricians, which can aid in making medical decisions. Here are more examples that illustrate the importance of keeping a daily journal:
- A new mom misses important milestones. While she is at work, baby shows off her biggest smile or makes a first attempt at crawling. Imagine a caregiver who captures the moment via a picture, includes a milestone caption, and emails it to the mom. What a way to brighten her day. Although the mom is not present physically, she can take delight in knowing that the true “first” was captured.
- An infant spits up often but with no discernible pattern. Both the mom and nanny are busy and jot down handwritten notes, which might be stained or misplaced by the next day! Maintaining an online daily record of the baby’s feedings (with corresponding spit-up times) can help to establish a pattern of feeding times and a correlation between the feeding quantity and spit-up periods. The mom can forward the reports to the doctor to aid in a decision regarding whether her baby needs medicine for acid reflux or if there is a need to simply change the baby’s feeding schedule.
- A baby has difficulty sleeping. Mom (or dad) puts the baby down in a specific manner and in a specific place during the weekends. The nanny arrives and puts the baby down in a different manner, thus she witnesses a different outcome. The baby appears confused, which results in additional stress for both the nanny and family. One solution is to review online reports that are designed to track a baby’s sleep patterns and reveal how the baby was put to sleep. The reports can serve as physical proof that specific baby sleep positions or methods work better than others for the baby. The reports can also give parents the assurance that their baby is okay, and shifting their behavior or the nanny’s behavior can make life easier for everyone.
- A baby needs regular medications. Administering medications is a critical part of providing childcare. Therefore, it is beneficial to have a central place where medicine doses are recorded. This procedure can allow both the mom and nanny to ensure medicine doses, reactions, and duration are properly recorded and timed. Proper daily record keeping can help to avoid accidental overdoses and ensure a dose is not missed.
- The nanny runs out of expressed breast milk for baby. If the mom keeps daily pumping records and both the nanny and mom keep daily bottle-feeding records, Mom can adjust her breastfeeding and pumping schedule to ensure there is enough expressed milk for her baby.
There are many more sound reasons to keep daily records. However, the most important reasons in my opinion, are for the health and well-being of the baby, and improved communication between the nanny and family. Although moms today have many more opportunities than they did in the past, they also have more decisions to make and more balls to juggle. Keeping daily records of an infant’s activities helps nannies and moms make better baby care decisions – and it helps moms feel more connected to their baby. A happy mom means a happier baby!
Aruni Gunasegaram is the President/Founder of Babble Soft and she blogs at entrepreMusings. To learn more about Babble Soft, please visit http://www.babblesoft.com.
Author: Aruni |
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To help illustrate how different people use Babble Soft web and mobile applications, we have created family user stories. I am grateful to the families who are willing to share their time, pictures, and energy to write/edit these case studies with us! To see our other user stories please check out our Testimonial page or click on the user stories tag.
Jacob’s Family: (pdf)
Mother: Lea (Financial Reporting Manager)
Father: Chris (Partner/Marketing Consultant)
Baby: Jacob
Born: September 2007
Place: Newport Beach, CA
Browser Used: Mozilla Firefox v2.0.0.11
Website: http://www.fullmixmarketing.com/
Situation
Jacob, Lea and Chris’s first child, was born via unplanned C-section after a long and arduous labor. While in the hospital, Lea was asked to keep track of Jacob’s feeding and diaper activities using generic paper hospital forms. She had planned on entering the information into Baby Insights, which she had already set-up prior to Jacob’s arrival. Unfortunately the papers were lost in the shuffle between the hospital and home, so she started entering information into Baby Insights four days after Jacob was born.
Prior to leaving the hospital, Jacob’s pediatrician recommended formula supplementation as Lea was concerned about breastfeeding following the c-section. Lea’s milk did not fully come in for over a week, and with breastfeeding, pumping and formula feeding, using Baby Insights was tremendously helpful in keeping track of Jacob’s feeding schedule and intake. Baby Insights was also very helpful in tracking Jacob’s diaper activities. A feature of Baby Insights that Lea wasn’t initially aware of, but came to use extensively, was medicine dose recording. She was taking three separate pain medications to aid in her recovery from the C-section.
Lea’s Experience
The information I got from using Baby Insights was so helpful! I really liked the fact that I could go to one place and see all of Jacob’s information at a glance. In hindsight, I wish I had bought a PDA or smart phone before Jacob was born to make entering the information easier! Some of the benefits I gained from using Baby Insights are:
- Since we were supplementing with formula, it helped to see how much formula versus breastfeeding time he was receiving. It’s been fascinating to see how the two amounts have changed over time. The Daily Summary report was beneficial as it calculated the total amount of milk we gave to Jacob.
- It was great to see how much I was pumping to get an idea of how much he was getting at each feeding. Knowing this helped me make decisions about how often and how much to supplement.
- As a first time mom, managing my time throughout the day can be quite challenging. Baby Insights helped me see how much time I was spending breastfeeding and pumping so I could better plan my day.
- Tracking my pain medication using Baby Insights was particularly helpful during my recovery from the C-section. I was taking 3 different pain medications at varying times and being able to view my medication schedules became one of my favorite Baby Insights tools!
—End—
If you are interested in participating in your very own user story, please activate a FREE Babble Soft Account. If you find that Babble Soft applications work for you, you want to tell the world about your great experience, and you are interested in being a part of our media campaign, please email us at info at babblesoft dot com for more information and a hook-up! 🙂 We plan to do a family story every one to two months so please let us know as soon as possible if you are interested.
Author: Aruni |
Filed under: babble soft,
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breastfeeding schedule,
pumping |
Tags: babble soft,
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1 Comment »
I babble about business, babies, and parenthood on this blog, so those of you who come here to read my posts on entrepreneurship but do not have babies, please forward this post to your friends and family who do have babies. For those who have babies and dabble in business, these tips might be right up your alley. If you have babies and have no interest in business, then send it on to the folks you know who are knee-deep in business and encourage them to have a baby! 🙂
Since there were so many views of my first baby tip on Increasing Milk Supply post, and I saw on Carole’s blog recently that she was dealing with the exact same issue, I asked her to write up a baby tip based on her experience for my readers. Carole is one my faithful blog readers and a Baby Insights user. She has 3 kids at home and blogs at Alias Tex. She is an amazing person and an awesome Mom! Thank you Carole for a great baby tip!
I’ve nursed three babies and have had supply issues with all three. I was not able to correct the issue with the first two, so I ended up supplementing with formula both times. When I discovered that my supply was low the third time around, I decided to work with a lactation consultant. I ended up supplementing with formula for about a month; in total, I think Christina ended up having about 2 1/2 cans of formula before my supply was enough to make it unnecessary. Here are the things we tried, in the order in which we tried them:
– Pumping. I pumped as often as I could, but at least 5 or 6 times a day, for at least 10 – 15 minutes each time. (The pumping was in conjunction with all of the other things I was doing — I’ve heard that for some women, pumping alone can help, but I wasn’t one of them.)
– Herbs. I took fenugreek, blessed thistle, and alfalfa — the highest dose of each that I could find at Whole Foods — two or three of each, three times a day. (This did increase my supply some, but not enough that I could stop supplementing.)
– Domperidone* — I take 20mg capsules. I started out taking five of them a day, then — once my supply was established — dropped down to four. I tried cutting back to three and discovered that that was too low to maintain my supply, so I rented a pump for a week and jumped back up to five pills a day again. Now, I’m down to four capsules a day, and I have enough milk that Christina only nurses one side at a time — and doesn’t usually even empty that one! (I don’t like having quite that much extra milk, so now every couple of days I’ll take only three capsules — it seems to be working out….)
– Oxytocin nasal spray** — 1OU/ML. (1 spray in each nostril, 2 – 3 minutes before nursing.) In addition to my supply issues, I’ve had problems with my letdown reflex. Sometimes it worked just fine, but it was not uncommon for me to nurse her for 45 minutes or more without having a letdown! I also tended to have them at random times throughout the day/night, and then I couldn’t have another one for at least an hour, so I had to try to nurse her whether she seemed hungry or not! The nasal spray has changed all of that: if I don’t have a letdown when Christina starts nursing, I use my nasal spray and I have a letdown within a couple of minutes. The only times it hasn’t worked are when I was experimenting, trying to see if I could do just one nostril, or use a drop instead of a spray. (It does work as drops, but I have to do a couple in each side, not just one.)
Now that I have it all under control, my days of sobbing in frustration seem like a bad dream — it almost makes me want to have another, just so I can see what it’s like to get it right from the start! Imagine: me, with a baby who has never tasted formula…. It could happen! : )
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*Some of you may know that the FDA issued a warning about Domperidone several years ago. (On the same day that the National Breastfeeding Campaign was to begin!) It’s actually a stomach medicine, and was prescribed off-label for breastfeeding mothers. Because of the FDA’s warning, it’s no longer possible to just walk into a pharmacy and get a prescription for Domperidone; you have to go to a compounding pharmacy to get it, and even some of those are afraid of FDA reprisals if they fill the prescriptions. Fortunately, for those of us who need it to maintain a normal milk supply, there are still doctors and midwives willing to prescribe it for us, and some compounding pharmacies who will still make it.
Domperidone is widely considered a safe drug when administered orally, and is approved by the AAP for use in breastfeeding mothers. Many were outraged when the FDA issued its warning — especially since the cases it cites in the warning were decades old.
Official statements from prominent physicians can be found here.
A very good summary of the controversy can be found here, and many more links here.
Side effects of Domperidone.
Side effects of Reglan, another stomach medication that can increase milk supply, which has no warnings issued against it — even though it is NOT approved by the AAP for use in breastfeeding mothers!
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**I also get my Oxytocin nasal spray from a compounding pharmacy.
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Note to new readers: these tips are based on our experiences, as well as those of our friends and readers. Please always consult with your doctor before implementing any tip that might impact the health of your baby. If you have a tip you’d like to submit please send an email to blogger at babblesoft dot com for possible inclusion. Please check the ‘baby tips’ category to make sure your tip (in some form or fashion) hasn’t already been posted. If it has been, feel free to comment on that post and support the tip. We also welcome respectful challenges to the tips because as is noted in our inaugural baby tip ‘everything is relative!’ We will, of course, give anyone who submits a tip we publish credit and a link back to their site!
Author: Aruni |
Filed under: baby tips,
breast milk,
breastfeeding,
breastfeeding schedule,
mom,
mother,
nursing,
pumping,
working mother |
Tags: alfalfa,
baby tip,
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breast milk,
breast milk supply,
breastfeeding,
domperidone,
fenugreek,
increasing milk supply,
nasal spray,
nursing,
oxytocin,
pumping |
7 Comments »
To help illustrate how different people use Baby Manager (i.e., the baby is managing you!), we have begun creating user stories/case studies.
We appreciate that many new parents are uncomfortable with having their picture online or don’t want to even think about the possibility of being mentioned in print or being on TV the first year or so after they have a baby. But if you are the type of new parent who loves the spotlight, doesn’t care about being in the process of losing those baby pounds, and loves Baby Manager, we welcome your participation with open arms!
If you are interested, please activate a FREE Trial of Baby Manager and get familiar with it. If you find that it works for your family, you want to tell the world about your great experience using it, and you are interested in being a part of our media campaign, please email us at blogger@babblesoft.com for more information and a hook-up. It’s not as big as the Harpo Hook-Up by Oprah, but it just might be what you need. 🙂
We will be posting all future case studies in this blog and on our Testimonial page.
So now for our very first user story about the Hayes family…drum roll please…ta dah (as my 2 year old would say)…
Author: Aruni |
Filed under: babble soft,
baby manager,
breastfeeding,
breastfeeding schedule,
case study,
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