Breastfeeding Baby #2 is A Different Story

Breastfeeding Series Part 2: Nursing

Our second baby came three weeks early on a vibrant and warm October Sunday, just after 4 p.m., as the sun’s golden rays streamed into our peaceful little spot in the corner of a relatively quiet L&D department. I pushed for about five total minutes with one midwife, one nurse, my husband, and my mom in the room. Baby girl came out bursting with perfect healthy cries and a great APGAR score. I held her to my chest for over an hour before she was weighed and measured and all that good medical stuff. For us, it was the perfect birth - the stuff of dreams or movies or novels. It almost felt impossibly good. The contrast to my first delivery, just 15-months prior, could not have been more stark.

Not our baby :) Photo by Christian Bowen on Unsplash

I think most birthing parents who have delivered more than once will agree that no two birth experiences are the same. Of course, the mystery of how your birth will go is one that many moms ponder in their endless third trimester days. We claw at the details of our own prior births, our friends’ birthing stories, or those of random strangers on the internet, trying to find some sort of stable footing - a baseline set of expectations we can anchor to, so we can remain calm as we dive into a big and uncertain medical event. Perhaps the desire for control in an ultimately uncontrollable event is what drives so many moms to want to pack the perfect hospital bags…just a hypothesis.

So, why am I writing about giving birth in a breastfeeding article? Well, I hate to bear bad news, but I think birth and breastfeeding share some parallels, with one major difference being how much less time we spend planning for breastfeeding. After the complexity of my first birth, I learned the hard way that establishing a breastfeeding relationship is actually just as mysterious, unpredictable, and challenging as giving birth. And in both instances, we moms want more control than we have.

Before I share more of my own story, let me skip to the points I really want to make here:

Ultimately, your experience feeding your baby will look different with each kid. The success you have in latching or bottle feeding or both is a joint-effort between you and your baby.

If you had an effortless experience feeding a prior baby, you may struggle with subsequent children. If you had a terrible time latching one baby, you might be able to latch a different one more successfully.

Don’t shoehorn your current approach to fit a previous version of what worked. Do what works for you and your family today.

I’ve previously written about my experience exclusively pumping for my son. In his instance, a voracious hunger combined with his early time spent drinking from bottles in the NICU to create a certain level of angst and confusion anytime he so much as approached my breast. During those fleeting attempts to latch, I would shake and cry out with the pain of his shallow bites. He would wriggle and scream in hunger, impatience and confusion. He was communicating clearly. Why wasn’t I listening?!

I (wrongly) blamed myself over and over again for failing to latch my son successfully. We made daily attempts for almost two full months before switching full-time to the pump. Yet, I’m actually more proud of myself for persevering to pump for 6 months with him than I am as I approach 6 months of nursing baby girl.

When it came to build my breastfeeding plan for baby #2, I had major doubts about my ability or willingness to even attempt nursing a second time. The experience had been so bad with my son. My husband was more than supportive of whatever decision I made. He seemed almost giddy at the idea of formula feeding baby girl from the jump and avoiding the constant clock-watching, pump part cleaning, and the recurrent mastitis I’d experienced in round 1. The thing that pushed me over the edge to try again at latching and nursing a baby was actually the season of her due date and the fact that we had a kid in daycare. Sick season. I wanted to protect this tiny vulnerable human as much as I possibly could during her first weeks on earth, especially as they coincided with big family gatherings and the holidays. The antibodies in my breastmilk would do that.

I knew not to have any breastfeeding expectations going into baby girl’s birth. So, when I felt her instinctively inch her way along my chest and over to my nipple as she rested on me in the moments after being born, I felt electrified by the first flutters of some hope.

Photo by Wren Meinberg on Unsplash

That’s not to say that latching baby girl has been effortless. Its been constant work. In fact, about 24-hours into having our sweet newborn earthside, latching her became an excruciating ordeal, as her chomping instincts took hold. She had a shallow and intense latch - one that the hospital lactation consultants commented on with a certain degree of astonishment, as they used their gloved fingers to “suck train” her.¹ Truly, for about 12 weeks, at least one of our daily nursing sessions would be searingly painful. She still has her “baby shark” moments at 5-months old. Lactation experts would advise to unlatch and relatch with some manual assistance (adjusting the boob further into her mouth) in those instances - and yes, I would do that as much as I could. But, as with all things baby, breastfeeding is an art and not a science. Its always a fine balance between hunger and frustration, and a “good enough” latch to let baby get what they need.

Nursing our second baby has not been a linear or effortless journey, but it has been one of redemption and perseverance.

My breasts have been so much healthier, being regularly emptied by a sucking baby, rather than a mechanical pump. I read that between each new baby your mammary glands further develop, which can lead to better supply and drainage, and I think that’s helped with my undersupply and mastitis issues.² Nursing baby girl has required tenacity to keep trying and keep feeding through the cluster feeding days with bad latches, using hefty amounts of lanolin and gritting my teeth through the initial pain, knowing it would subside after a minute or so and we could settle into our rhythm.

If I were to chalk up my daughter’s success at latching and breastfeeding to just a few factors, I would name these: My daughter had a willingness to keep trying at the boob, even if latching wasn’t working at first. This tenacity was likely bolstered by a recognition of my breast as her critical and only food source³. Notable to that second point, my daughter never spent time in the NICU, as my son did. She was in our room and in my arms from day one. We had lots of time to develop our bond and work on her latch together. I also felt less traumatized by her birth and more willing to return to the hospital for lactation support group sessions twice a week. Okay, now I’ve listed several contributing factors to our success…I guess ultimately its a million little and big things that make a breastfeeding relationship thrive or struggle.

Whether or not baby latches successfully, however, is not the only determining factor to decide on the right feeding mechanism for your family. And this is especially true if you are in a multi-kid household, or if you are caregiving solo. Consider the following, definitely non-exhaustive list of questions:

Today, a week into my return to full-time paid work, I relish in the moments I get to pause and nurse our sweet baby girl. Its faster than pumping and bottle feeding, and immensely more gratifying. I finally get to experience the closeness my mom described feeling with me during our own 15-months of breastfeeding partnership. For the longest time, I didn’t believe her or any other mom who told me they “loved” nursing.

For some moms, this love of nursing may never manifest. If that’s you, I want you to know I totally get it.

Even if the best emotion you can arrive at is ambivalence towards nursing or pride in committing so much of your body and your brain (because breastfeeding is intensely cerebral, too!) to an act of selfless love, I am so proud of you for trying.

Even if you decide you hate breastfeeding and want to quit just because you don’t like it - that’s reason enough. I’m proud of you for trying.

And if you decide to persevere in pumping or latching a baby when it hurts or when its not working, I’m proud of you for trying. But, in that last instance, I do ask you to question the effort and treat yourself like you would a close friend - with some compassion and logic to make the decision that is truly right for you and baby.

If you are currently pregnant and contemplating your feeding plans, I encourage you to do your research, take your prep classes, order pumping supplies and bottles ahead of time, and give breastfeeding a shot. It can go many different ways. If you’re thinking about breastfeeding after having a previously hard or unsuccessful experience, just know that you can have a redemptive experience and it can be wonderful.

Oh, and just to drop a major twist right at the end of this post - I have a lot more thoughts about baby sleep as it relates to breast- vs. formula feeding. But that’s a discussion for another day.

For now, let me wish each of you reading this and weighing your options the gifts of 1) confidently knowing your body and your baby better than anyone else and 2) coming to find peace in your journey and your decisions.

— LJ

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1. For inquiring minds, suck training is essentially attempting to deepen a baby’s latch by manually pushing the tongue down and positioning a digit appropriately far back and towards the roof of the mouth.

2. https://newsinhealth.nih.gov/2015/07/milk-gland-remembers-past-pregnancy

3. We did give my daughter some bottles of pumped milk overnight in the very early days, but she never saw a bottle nipple as anything “easier” than getting milk straight from the tap. Maybe we were lucky here. After a few weeks, I was able to make it through the night exclusively nursing and we never looked back. This has its drawbacks, too, as baby girl is now re-learning how to drink from a bottle in preparation for her entry into the world of daycare.