Finally, the joy of breastfeeding

Being able to breastfeed my babies was always something close to my heart, something I always wished I would be able to do when I had my children. Unfortunately, things didn't go according to plan after my first pregnancy. My identical twin girls were born at 23 weeks and 2 days and life was pretty much a continuous nightmare for the first five months. My youngest twin, Isabella, lived only for two days and N went through five tough months during which she had to continuously fight to survive. Towards the end of her hospital stay I started trying to breastfeed her but it really wasn't easy. Poor thing, she was eager, but she was so very small!! To make matters worse she has a facial palsy (paralysis) on the left side of her face so it was extremely difficult for her to latch on...

In the end I decided to express my milk and give it to her in a bottle because at least that way we could put our fingers on the corners of her mouth to help her create some suction. By that point I had become an expert in the 'art of expressing milk'. It started the day she was born, just a few mls of hand expressed milk but by the second day, with the help of my trusted pump, I was starting to produce some good quantities. I was terrified of not having enough milk for my girls. I had read in the "Baby Whisperer" book that if you only express milk without breastfeeding the baby, you lose your milk supply after a few weeks. How was I going to do it?? Not to mention how important it seemed to be to have skin to skin contact. This was simply not an option at this point and I was only able to hold N when she was 11 days old.

Holding N for the first time

As it turns out, these things might be helpful but they weren't essential and I managed to feed N with my expressed milk until she was nearly one year old. For me the important thing was to be consistent and I religiously expressed milk from both sides every four hours, 20 minutes each, even if there wasn't much coming out towards the end, at least there was bit of stimulation. And things worked so well that at one point I was expressing about 2 litres of milk a day! Unfortunately N had lots of issues with her gut and didn't really feed orally properly until she was 3 and half months old. Up until that point it was always building up from 0.5ml/1ml every hour for a few days until the next infection when we would hear the dreadful words: "She's nil by mouth" which meant none of mummy's milk for my little girl. It was horrible. I was working so hard to make this milk for her (there was not much else I could do for her) and she couldn't have it... 

My freezer at home was completely full of frozen breastmilk and I ended up donating milk to St. Thomas hospital (until they told me they couldn't process any more of my milk) and Queen Charlotte's & Chelsea hospital milk banks. At least someone could have that milk. I also knew from the mothers around me in the neonatal unit that many struggled to have enough milk for their babies; it's not easy when you're living under such stress and these premature babies really benefit from having breastmilk.

Fortunately, A's birth was as good as anyone could hope and even though she didn't drink much milk in the first couple of days (neither of us had a clue about what to do...) she caught on pretty quickly and started gaining weight. My problem in the early weeks was thinking that she needed to eat for 20 minutes or else she wasn't having enough. To this day she's usually done in about 10-15 minutes and I guess it was important to learn that you need to get to know your baby. 

I'm loving being able to breastfeed her. She's 3 months old and she is always very cute with her smiles and her little chubby hands holding on to my breast. Things are so much easier this time around! Apart from having mastitis when she was one week old (scary and very, very painful...) being able to just go out and know that I can feed her anywhere has been great. With N the routine was more like feeding for an hour, expressing for 40 minutes, washing and sterilising pump and bottles and then... oh wait, it's time for the next feed...

Knowing what I know now I would never choose to express milk and feed from a bottle as a routine although I might do it eventually so that I can a have a break from the constant feeding. For the moment though, it's still really nice... just not at 2am, or 4am...