I am in need of some support to get breastfeeding established, as I feel like I am losing my mind.
We had a rocky start with my LO, born small for gestational age at 37 weeks. Around 2nd percentile for weight.
She's now 3 weeks, and for the first 12 days at the hospital she would not latch at all. We had daily visits from lactation consultants, who managed to get the baby latching just twice with a nipple shield, enticed with colostrum. Baby was also checked by a physiotherapist to assess any potential muscle/jaw problems, but everything is good. No tongue/lip ties as well. They said it was probably just a stress thing, with the hospital and all the sensors and the limited skin-to-skin.
So during that time I started to pump, every 3 hours, then added combo feeding to get her back to the birth weight and get jaundice out of her system.
Since we've been home, we finally managed to get her to latch, which made us so happy! And she has been steadily gaining weight, now well past her birth weight.
But since then it has been chaos.
- Sometimes she wants to snack every 30 minutes, sometimes she goes on sleeping for 4-5 hours. The long breaks cause me to worry about my supply being impacted, but if I try to wake the baby to eat she only snacks for like 5 minutes before falling asleep again. And I am afraid to keep pumping, I want to avoid getting an oversupply.
- Sometimes baby really does not want to latch, comes in with the rooting reflex then after a couple of seconds she pulls away arching her back and screaming. It is tiring and distressing, as it keeps going for very long also with multiple positions and also if I try to hand express a bit to reduce the pressure. But other times everything is completely fine!
- When she is finally at the boob, she's happy to stay latched for an hour or longer. Midwife says to get her off and offer the other boob after 20 minutes, but I worry she has not got enough milk...
- Every night at around 10 pm she starts to have insatiable hunger. 45+ minutes on boobs plus up to 80 mL of pumped milk or formula to get her to finally settle, this over the course of 1.5-2 hours. This makes me believe that I might not have enough supply, as the boob does not seem to be enough to calm her down and get her to sleep
- My nipples hurt a lot, but my midwife has checked the latch and says that everything looks good, that we should try not to use nipple shields, bottles or pumping, and to just give her the boob as often as possible, that nipples just need to get used to breastfeeding. Is that really a thing?
I feel like I need some help in understanding what is "normal business" for a newborn, and what would need improving, and whether I need to keep pumping, stop giving her the boob for so long, or anything else...