World Breastfeeding Week

It’s World Breastfeeding Week and I realized that I never shared these from our family photo shoot last August when the photographer caught a shot of Vivienne nursing between more posed photos. Vivi was the hardest of my four girls to nurse. I struggled immensely with supply during the first 4-5 months of her life, likely because of stress from returning to work and trying to take too much on too early. She ended up below the 1st percentile for weight and is the only one of our babies to have been given formula. The moment I finally broke down and sent Chris to the store for formula was heartbreaking for me. I was exhausted, having been nursing and pumping around the clock, and I felt like I was failing her. I cried when he fed her the bottle. In the end, Vivi had a grand total of one can of formula spaced out as one bottle a day for a couple of weeks. I spent three or four weeks after that first bottle in regular appointments with an IBCLC, doing weighted feeds, power pumping, taking supplements, obsessing over a copy of The Breastfeeding Answer Book leftover from my lactation consultant days, and trying to follow the exact same advice I used to give to moms in my LLL groups – especially the part about not beating myself up about supplementing. I kept thinking back on the first week of her life and what I could have done better. After a month, I was able to increase my supply enough to stop supplementing and return to exclusively breastfeeding. By the time this photo was taken, 6 months later, Vivienne was well back to nursing like a champ and you never would have known how tiny she was earlier in her life. Now, at almost 21 months she’s still nursing and I am thankful for every moment of it. With all my training and past positive breastfeeding experiences, I never thought that I would have to supplement, but I did. And despite what I may have felt at the time, it wasn’t the end of the world. It also wasn’t the end of our breastfeeding relationship. If you’re a mama struggling with keeping your baby fed, don’t forget that. It may feel overwhelmingly hard at the moment but you can get through it and you can continue breastfeeding. You got this. ♥️