Breast Milk as Cure-All in Poetry Form

Breast milk is basically an antibody juice

EVERYONE who is breastfeeding should take full advantage
for the entire family!

Put it in eyes
. . . . . . . . ears
.. . . . . . . . . . noses
heck, even drink it if you want
put it on cuts and they will heal faster
I always use it on james and
it cleared up his goopy eye and
it healed his rash and
it healed cuts and
scratches and
it has cleared up congestion and
prevented ear infections on
at least three occasions
I would say.

And him breastfeeding though this first cold made it EXTREMELY mild
Like, 20 coughs total over three days and
a runny nose.
That's it.

Breast (for your health) milk
For All!!!

Spread the Word.

Breastfeeding an Adopted Baby

I have several friends and family members hoping to adopt. When we were trying to conceive James, I thought about what would happen if we ended up building our family primarily through adoption, and the number one regret I had at this idea was missing out on breastfeeding.

However, in the time since then, I've discovered that it is actually possible to breastfeed even if you have adopted your baby. Here is a basic outline of how you could proceed if you would like to try to breastfeed your adopted baby. You actually don't need to do ALL of these things, you can pick and choose which parts are going to work for you.

1. Before your bring your baby home (several months before, if possible), buy a high-quality, double electric breast pump. Start spending time every day stimulating your breasts by pumping them. You will not get any milk at first, but the stimulation builds up the prolactin levels in your body, which will start to stimulate your breasts to produce milk. It might be uncomfortable, especially at first, but the more and the longer you can do it, the better off you'll be. After a while, you might start to see tiny drops of milk coming from your breasts--this is a great sign!

If you have the time to do it, the goal should be to pump for 120 mins per day. You could do four 30 min sessions, five 25 min session, six 20 min sessions, etc. However, even if you can't get to this 120 min goal, as much as you can do will help.

If you start to get more than a couple of drops of breast milk, save and freeze the breast milk so that you can use it later on!

2. Start taking supplements to help your body produce more milk. Fenugreek, blessed thistle, and alfalfa, plus eat as much oatmeal as you can. The old-fashioned steel cut oats work best. You can also drink oat milk as an easy way to get more oats.

There is also a prescription medication that can be extremely helpful--domperidone. Talk to your doctor (ideally, at least three months before you bring your baby home) about getting a prescription.

3. Buy a supplemental nursing system. You can see how it works here. Basically, it allows you to supplement saved breastmilk and f0rmula AT the breast. So even if you decide NOT to do parts 1 and 2 above, you can still give f0rmula while providing you and baby the bonding experience of suckling at your breast.

4. Buy a nipple shield (especially if your baby is not a newborn). Babies who have gotten used to bottles will have a harder time feeling comfortable at the breast. A nipple shield can help the breast seem more like a bottle to your baby, which might help you transition them to the breast.

5. Offer your baby's birth mother the opportunity to sell you her breast milk. Some birth mothers are interested in pumping their milk and providing it to you for feeding your baby, at a negotiated cost. This can be beneficial for both parties. If your birth mother is willing to do this on the short or long term (even a week or two of breast milk can give your baby needed immunities), make sure she is educated on the proper handling and storage of breast milk.

This milk can be given in a bottle or through the supplemental nursing system.

6. Look on Milkshare, Eats on Feets, or another milk bank to see if you are able to get donor milk from a Mom other than your birth mother.

P.S. If you are a breastfeeding Mom and you find yourself with extra frozen breast milk, donors to milk banks are badly needed. Preemies and other babies with health issues are the first to benefit from donated milk!

7. Expect it to feel strange or unnatural at first. Even with my biological son, I have to admit there was a week or so of getting used to regarding my breasts as feeding implements. There can definitely be an initial weird-out factor. However, your love for your baby will quickly change the way you think about your breasts. Just stick with it and soon it could feel quite natural!

Be flexible, persistent, and have reasonable expectations. Most adopted Moms do need to supplement with f0rmula or donor milk, but every drop of your own milk you are able to give to your baby is going to feel awesome! Plus the experience of your baby suckling at your breast is really like no other--even if his/her main nutrition is actually coming through the supplemental nursing system!

Also, this is going to be more of a challenge the older your baby is. A newborn baby is pre-programmed to latch at the breast (though even for biological parents this can also be challenging), but the older a baby is, and the more bottles he/she has had, the harder it might be to get him/her comfortable at the breast.

Finally, here are some tips from Kellymom that might help--especially for an older baby.

There are also a great amount of resources out there on the web!

I hope this is helpful to someone--anyone who reads who has additional tips, please share in the comments! All experience and info wanted!

Say what Doc?

Supposedly gluten doesn't pass into milk (cows eat wheat but cow's milk is gluten free). However, I know what I've seen, and I'm a very observant and intelligent person . . . and James' rash (and spitting up) has DEFINITELY been improving since I stopped eating gluten. I'm going to completely avoid it for another week, and then try eating barley (which is wheat free but contains gluten) . . . sigh.

Sorry I've posted so much about this . . . this is my first time of wishing that my doc would trust my mommy instinct a little more . . . :-/

Supply Regulating

James hit 13 weeks last Friday, and seriously at right around that time, I noticed a serious drop in how much I was able to pump.

My normal pump times had turned into 11/12 pm (after his last feed at 8 or so), and in the morning, after he ate from one breast, I would pump the other one. Sometime in the middle of the night he would also eat (from one breast).

Now lately he's been waking up more often for a last feeding between 9-11, and so I haven't really been able to pump in the evening, and almost overnight I am waking up with just the right amount of milk for him and not much extra.

At first I looked at this supply drop and I worried that my period was going to show up, or that something else was wrong, but then someone suggested (and I think they are right), that my supply is finally just "regulating".

What this means is that my amazing breasts now "know" that James doesn't eat much between 8am and 8pm. So just like that, my body is now making (for example) 20 oz of milk during the day but only 5-10 ozs at night.

Now this would be awesome (and it is actually awesome not to wake up to two rocks on my chest), except that normally I would be able to pump and freeze about 6-9 ozs of milk a day, and now it's been probably three days since I froze ANYTHING.

I know that I need to stick with it and just continue to pump in the evening and morning, even if I don't feel "full" or only get an oz or two a day. Eventually my body will get the signal that I still want a little more milk during those times.

Buuuut, I'm about to hit the road for my parents house for a few days, so I probably will just worry about it when I get home. ;-)

I'm still so impressed with how "smart" breastfeeding breasts are, though! It is the same concept that can help some working Moms breastfeed their baby during the evening but not have to pump during the day while they are at work. Your boobs just learn when your baby will eat and make milk then and only then. Pretty amazing!

Freezer Stash!

I put another full freezer bag of frozen breastmilk into our deep freezer today--that makes 5 bags of 24 ozs each, 120 ozs total! Woohoo.

I obviously want some saved for when James and I eventually go out alone together and we leave James David with a babysitter. Additionally, if I were to get pregnant with our next baby while I was still breastfeeding James (as I plan to be, since I hope James will nurse until he is at least two), I want some extra breastmilk saved up. Pregnancy can affect your milk supply, and some babies will even wean while their Mom is pregnant. Since we are vegan, I really want a (human) milk source for James as long as possible--so I want some extra breastmilk saved up if I need to supplement him while I'm pregnant.

Breastmilk can stay in the deep freezer for at least 6 months. I figure that when it gets close to expiring, James and I can pick a weekend day that we'll be home and James can give James David primarily bottles while I pump--therefore refreshing my stash with new breastmilk while we use up the older milk.

So this is my plan to ensure that little James can get breastmilk for as long as possible, even in the event of my getting pregnant.

(On a side note, why am I awake right now? It's one in the morning and both my husband and my baby are upstairs sleeping soundly. I will regret this in a few hours when James wakes up hungry, sigh)

Baby Laundry

So you always hear that babies make a lot of laundry and I never got it. I always thought that even if they wear a lot of clothes, that the clothes are small and that wouldn't be very much extra laundry.

What I didn't count on was the fact that any of the following things might suddenly get covered with baby pee, spitup, or breastmilk at any given time:
-our sheets and pillows
-our shirts (and pants)
-bibs
-his mattress sheets
-his swaddle blankets
-his clothes, obviously
-the boppy cover
-his towels
-our robes

And all these things smelling slightly of milk is unusual for our vegan household . . .which means we like to try to wash things fairly promptly.
So it's more than just the baby clothes--it is a LOT of extra laundry.

Plus we go through certain things quickly (like sleep sacks) and so we need to wash a load with them when we run out.

PLUS we are cloth diapering, which means we ALSO have an extra load every day of diapers. We can skip the occasional day, but mostly we wash diapers every day or day and a half.

So it's more than I anticipated. I'm so glad we got our washer fixed before the baby was born!

Witch's Milk

So, there's no easy way to say it. I have an amazing lactating baby.

You heard me right. When you squeeze James' little boobies, milk comes out.

I wasn't too concerned when I noticed this, because I had read about it before. This milk is known as witch's milk, or neonatal milk, and according to Wikipedia, 5% of babies, or 1/20, will lactate in their first month or two of life.

I thought this was crazy and wanted to take a video of it and post it here, but James forbid it--insisting our future teenage son would one day discover this and be mortified. But he permitted me to write about it.

I guess it's caused because the hormone prolactin is secreted in high amounts by the mother's body to stimulate her body to produce milk, and this hormone is passed to the baby through the breastmilk, which sometimes causes the baby to also produce milk.

James sort of thinks it is freaky but I think it is awesome. LOL

Fun Times Tonight

The title of this post is sarcastic. For some reason, James was really fussy tonight. Even after eating and eating and eating, and getting changed, and getting burped and rocked and changed again, and fed again and again, he continued to fuss and cry no matter what we did. Unless I was actually feeding him, of course, because breastfeeding never gets old for him.

Finally my boobs were killing me and I couldn't deal anymore, and I asked James to take him upstairs and I sat down here listening to him cry for a few minutes. Finally I decided that today was a good day for his very first bottle.

I'm very proud to say that up until tonight, he has breastfed and only breastfed--nothing else has ever gone into his body by any other method. And while I fully intend to never give him formula, and plan on waiting to introduce food until the recommended six months old, I did always intend to start introducing bottles as a way for him to drink the breastmilk that I've pumped and collected . . . so that James could feed him sometimes, and so we could someday go out and have a babysitter . . . I sort of thought I would wait until after the holidays, but apparently James David had other plans.

Because today when I was feeling completely touched out and exhausted and like I needed a good meal and a never-ending drink of water, I just couldn't deal with nursing him anymore. But hey, that's why I've worked so hard to pump that frozen milk, right?

So I went down to our freezer and picked out an ounce and a half of milk saved and frozen from his first week of life, and I brought it upstairs and stood in the kitchen defrosting it in one of our Tommee Tippee bottle, in a hot water bath, over the steamer, and I listened to my poor little son cry continuously as I watched the pot and checked the milk again and again, tapping my foot and standing there beside the stove, mentally pacing.

And finally I brought that little bottle of milk up to James and he said: "I thought you were going to do that." And he popped the bottle in the open maul of our crying baby, who eventually figured out that there was food in there, and proceeded to gulp it down like his life depended on it (which I guess it kind of does).

It was odd watching him eat like that--obviously, I am normally feeding him and looking down at him--it was so funny to see him across from me, in James' arms, eating away.

Of course once he had sucked down the bottle he continued to cry and I had to breastfeed him anyway, but it somehow took the edge off--after only a few minutes of additional feeding his eyes began to droop and he finally fell asleep (because the little tyke was not only hungry but also tired, which added to his misery).

And when he finally was asleep and quiet, James and I just hugged each other like we'd came out on the other side of a natural disaster . . . and that was pretty much what it felt like.

Fun times tonight.