How To Rock The Bottle: Part 1

(Disclaimer: I’m not a doctor or nurse, nor do I possess magical healing powers. The following is not a substitute for advice from your healthcare provider. It’s opinion and before you apply any of it to your life you should print this blog post out, take it to your doctor, and make sure I’m not completely full of crap.)
(Warning: There is a brief mention of blood and bodily injury that could possibly creep you out a little. Also, this post discusses breastfeeding and will therefore obviously discuss breasts. If that offends you- please leave my blog and return when you’ve matured.)

This is the 1st post of a 3-part series. Stay tuned for parts 2 and 3.

MJ is 4 months old now, and he has been formula-fed for 3 of those. Actually probably closer to 3 and a half, if I’m honest. I had this beautiful picture in my head of how breastfeeding was going to go for us. I had the pamphlets and was a Facebook member of the local LLL group. I owned a breastfeeding pillow, 2 nursing bras, 2 nursing tanks, 3 different types of nipple cream, and I had “lactation stations” set up throughout the apartment full of bottled water and healthy snacks. I read the books, I studied positions, I had a Pinterest board stocked full of recipes to help increase my milk supply. A Pinterest board! I was prepared. Then, MJ arrived, and plans had to change.

We had a lot of the same struggles that many moms have with their babies. My cesarean kept me from being able to move like I had planned, he had to have phototherapy while in the hospital, I had blood patches performed twice for the spinal headache I got from the epidural, both of which required 12-24 hours of flat-on-your-back bedrest. He was dehydrated in hospital and we supplemented with formula. None of my nurses had ever breastfed, and therefore had no idea how to help me. The closest thing to advice I got was when I, frantic and crying because I had just fished a piece of my own nipple out of my infant son’s blood-filled mouth, made D go and ask them what to do. The nurse looked up from her paperwork for .7 seconds and said, “That’s normal.”

I met with a lactation consultant the week after being discharged and rented the best breast pump money can buy. At this point, due to flat nipples on my end and a disinterest in nursing on my son’s, they said the best case scenario for us would be to continue trying to nurse, but focus on pumping. It wasn’t expected for MJ to ever be able to exclusively nurse. I danced the exhausting dance every pumping mom does.

Pumping sounds fairly simple when you think about it. Instead of the baby getting the milk directly from you, you attach the mechanical milking machine and then give it to your beaming bundle of joy via bottle. What no one told me to expect, however, was that babies will rarely be hungry the same time you pump. So instead of what I had imagined (pump, feed baby, both of us sleep) it looked like (pump, put away pumping supplies and walk towards bed, hear baby wake up, feed baby, start walking towards bed again, hear pumping alarm go off, repeat.) It was exhausting, but I figured hey, this won’t last forever. I just have to tough it out for a month and things will mellow out.

The LC had me pumping, then nursing MJ at the end when he wasn’t starving (and consequently screaming his fool head off.) In the three weeks I breastfed, the damage to my nipples never fully healed. They didn’t have time to. So nursing, and pumping, hurt from beginning to end and every minute in between. I had plugged ducts twice, and at the end of week 3 it turned into full-blown mastitis. I started on antibiotics, healed the infection, only to then get thrush. In my nipples. Yeah, that’s a thing.

At this point. I sat down, bawling my eyes out to D, and said “I’m done.”

When I was initially planning on breastfeeding, I had only ever planned to make it to the 6 month mark. Before getting pregnant, I was taking 2 medications for pain that I had stopped while TTC. One of them has had zero to no studies conducted on how much passes through breast milk and how much is safe for newborns. I was willing to wait to start those medications again if it meant giving my baby the best start, but at the end of that first month, I knew I was finished.

Now, here’s the thing. Nothing I experienced is uncommon. Lack of education and support, difficulty breastfeeding after surgery, flat or inverted nipples, nipple confusion, and nipple trauma are things that many a woman have dealt with. (To be clear, I’m not saying those things are normal or that they should be expected. Breastfeeding may be uncomfortable at first, but it should never seriously hurt. If it does, please, please see a Lactation Consultant and get some guidance. I promise there are hundreds of newfangled products and time-tested tricks you may not have heard of yet!) My point is that for all the “breast is best” and “eat local” t-shirts you see, the fact remains that currently in the US, less than 40% of mothers are exclusively breastfeeding at 3 months. Which means the large majority of little ones are going to be getting formula at some point in their life.

Hospitals and local communities are working very hard to increase that number and it is rising as the years go by. That’s awesome. I don’t know a single person who would argue that.

But do you know what isn’t getting any better? Information and resources for those who don’t breastfeed. When I first decided to make the switch completely, I found nothing. At least, nothing that wasn’t funded by Enfamil or Similac. My hospital didn’t offer information on formula feeding. Why? Because they don’t want to encourage it. Which, if I’m honest, irritates the living heck out of me. With over half of our country’s mothers giving their babies formula, there is an appalling lack of information available, which leaves mothers relying on life experience from their mothers and their mothers’ mothers. My mother is a genius, don’t get me wrong. But our understanding of babies and their needs, as well as our ability to create formula that is closer to breast milk than it ever has been makes advice from 50 years ago irrelevant and possibly dangerous. I’ve been told (not by my mother, thankfully)

-to water the formula down to make it last longer
-to widen the nipple and add rice cereal as soon as we get home from the hospital so the baby will sleep longer
-to add (insert magical herb) to solve (some problem that never applied to us in the first place)
-to start solids at 8 weeks because formula fed babies need to eat more
-to prop the bottle on pillows during feeding times so that I can multitask

In case you were wondering, all of that is bad advice. But, I didn’t know that at first. I had no idea how to weed out the gems from the constant stream of well-meant dirt I was receiving.

So, in hopes of saving someone from the 3 days of panicked Googling and intermittent crying that I muddled through, I decided to write up a mini-series. My next post will be a list of resources I’ve found, and the following will be a few ways to make the absolute best of your formula-feeding journey.

Because whatever you’re reason for formula-feeding, you deserve to have the facts and tools necessary to make it an enjoyable experience.

If you formula fed, what is one thing you’d say to a new mother just getting started? Leave it in the comments!

Our First Few Weeks

                                                                            MJ and Daddy at the hospital

Sorry for the lapse in posts. MJ and I are slowly finding our routine, and I hope to be posting regularly again soon.

Like I said, MJ and I are figuring each other out. I feel like we had a rough start with getting to know each other. I didn’t connect with him right away like I was told I would. I cared for him, I knew he was my son, but I didn’t have that overwhelming feeling everyone talks about when they describe birth. Maybe it was because he came by c-section, maybe it was all of the medication running through my veins, maybe it was the obstacles in recovery afterward… who knows. What I do know is that the feeling came eventually. Instead of hitting me all at once like it does to some, it crept up on me. It worked its way into my heart little by little over the course of the last few weeks. Then one moment, I looked at him and realized I had never loved anyone more. We’re getting there. This boy has been a lesson in humility and faith like nothing else in my life so far. Every day brings with it moments where I doubt my ability to love him, provide for him, and protect him. In this job with no instruction manual, I constantly feel like I’m failing. I didn’t give him the natural birth I had prayed he’d have, we struggled through our attempt at breastfeeding with LC’s, nurses, and midwives until finally the formula I had been supplementing with took over. I didn’t burp him well enough, I let him sit in that diaper too long, I relied too much on the swing yesterday…. you get the picture. When you’re entrusted with something so innocent and perfect, it feels impossible to do the job right. There’s always something to improve upon, something to do better.

That’s an exhausting place to be. I don’t think it’s healthy or realistic to live in a state of “not good enough.” The fact of the matter is that last fall, when D and I were praying together on the mattress we shared on the floor of our new apartment (we hadn’t purchased a bed frame yet) God was listening. He heard us ask for this child, and knowing how this would all play out, he gave him to us anyway. He knew how MJ would have to be born. He knew how we would struggle with latching and supply and nipple confusion. He knew the newborn sized prefolds would be far too small by the time D and I felt coherent enough to start using cloth. None of this is a surprise to Him. He saw how we would struggle and trusted us with this beautiful boy regardless. If that doesn’t make me feel capable and “good enough” for this child, nothing will.

I started this blog with high hopes. I had a vague idea that motherhood would be messy, but I didn’t yet know what that would look like. Now that this journey has started, I hope this blog can be a place of transparency and sincerity. I will do my best to be an open book, and maybe that will help another new mama trust herself with this beautiful gift she’s been given.

If you’re having a hard time believing that you’re the best mother your child(ren) could have, please believe me, you are. You are enough and then some. You are the sun in your precious baby’s life. Everything you do is enough.

MJ’s Birth Story

On September 19^th at 8pm, I started having contractions. I was 40 weeks and 2 days. They were a little stronger than the prodromal labor I had been having for the past three weeks, but I was hesitant to think much of them since I had been wrong so many times before. I took a bath, drank some water, and went to bed around midnight. At 2:30am the contractions were seven minutes apart and lasting a minute and a half. I took another bath and got up, since they were too strong to sleep through. Around 6:30am I woke my husband up and he spent the morning with me in the living room. I called my mother around 11 and told her I thought we might be having a baby that day.

For the rest of the day I labored at home, waiting for my contractions to pick up in intensity. At around 8pm they did and we headed to the hospital, now fitting the 5-1-1 rule. I was checked for dilation and was completely unprepared when the nurse told me I still hadn’t dilated at all. But I’m in labor!  I thought.  REAL labor! We stayed on the monitors for a while and they gave me a shot to help me get some sleep, then sent us home.

heading home from the hospital- still very pregnant.

I tried to lay down in bed for a few hours but the contractions got stronger quickly and I wasn’t able to lay down anymore. I went into the living room, lit some candles, turned on Pandora, and labored alone until around 3am. At that point they were 5-10 minutes apart, almost 2 minutes long, and strong enough that I was needing to vocalize and stand up to get through them.  I woke my husband up again and he sat with me in the living room for a few hours while we tried to decide when to head back to L&D. He finally decided to call the midwife and she told us to go ahead and come back in, and said if I still hadn’t progressed there were a few things we could try. We headed back into town (which was by far the most painful car ride of my life) and D somehow managed not to wreck the car through all of my yelling.
We were wheeled up to L&D at 5am (I think?) and found I was 5cm! I was elated. The shot they had given me hadn’t helped me get any sleep like we had hoped, but It had helped me relax enough for my body to get things moving. They got us a room, hooked up my IV, and let me labor for a short while. I had planned on having a natural and unmedicated birth, but after getting to 6 centimeters I was sure I didn’t care about that anymore. D did as he had promised and reminded me of the reasons I had initially decided not to have any drugs or an epidural, but reminded me that he supported whatever decision I made. I consented to IV Stadol and that helped me enough to be able to lay in bed so they could get the baby’s heartbeat on the monitor. I was checked at some point and had made it to 6.5 when the Stadol wore off. They recommended not using it again, since it rarely worked as well with the second dose and we didn’t want the baby to have too much in his system when he was born. I asked for an epidural and a little bit later the anesthesiologist showed up. They asked D to leave the room which I thought was odd, but I was so desperate for them to get it placed that I didn’t argue it. It took a minute to get the epidural placed and the nurse had to hold me still during a few contractions, but we finally got it and the relief was almost immediate. I was checked again as soon as it was placed and found out I had dilated to 9cm without it! I felt really good about that and expected to reach completion fast. My midwife told me they would let me rest for a while and I would be ready to start pushing within the hour. I closed my eyes for a few minutes and got some blissful sleep before some nurses came in and told me the baby’s heart rate was getting a little too low for their liking (in the 60’s during contractions.) They propped me onto my left side and and had me rest that way for a while. They checked me again and found I had a cervical lip, so they propped me onto my right side to see If the change in position would help and also started me on a low dose of pitocin (I still have no idea why. I remember the nurse telling me but I can’t remember a thing from that conversation.) 30 minutes or so went by and they switched me back to my left side. (It was around this time that the epidural had completely lost its effectiveness. I vaguely remember begging for them to “make it start working again” but I think the nurse just rolled her eyes at me.) The midwife came in and explained that baby’s heart seemed to be having a really rough time (in the 40’s during contractions now) and they wanted to get him out asap. They got me prepped to start pushing in a matter of minutes and a nurse helped me through my first few practice pushes. Let me just say, I thought pushing would be something very simple to get the hang of, especially since I had full feeling by then. That wasn’t the case. The nurse was attempting to manually push back the cervical lip during pushes (OUCH) and the pain from that coupled with the fact that I just really didn’t like this nurse had me distracted. We weren’t getting anywhere when the midwife came in. I felt more comfortable with her there and she walked me through how to push well enough that they at least told me I was doing it correctly. With each push, the baby’s head would move back. I wasn’t getting any closer to completion and my cervix had begun to swell.  For some reason his head wasn’t making it into the birth canal. The midwife walked over to the front of the bed and told me we were going to try for a few more minutes, but after that we needed to consider “plan b.” They held my legs for me and told me to get angry and push as hard as I could. I was so scared during contractions, I could hear his heart beat on the monitor and the length between beats just kept getting longer. At the time, it felt like 5 minutes, but my husband says I actually pushed for about 45. The midwife walked back up to me and put some counter pressure on my back through a few contractions while she explained how the c-section would work. They stopped the pitocin and put something into my IV that was supposed to slow down my contractions until the surgery but it ended up not working. Anesthesia was busy and took another 45 minutes to get up to our floor. This was the only part of labor that felt longer than it actually was. If you asked me, I would have said I was writhing in that damn labor bed for half the night.  Not the case. My husband held my hand and let me scream into his shirt the whole time while I worked through the urge to push with every contraction. That pressure is no joke, holy crap. I felt like I had lost all control. Eventually though, the anesthesiologist came up and put more medicine into the catheter in my back. I gave him a tearful “thank you” and the L&D floor was spared from the sound of my yelling.

They wheeled me to the OR and D stayed behind to get dressed up in his mask and booties. The anesthesiologist there was different than the man I had met earlier and she was a godsend. She walked me through every step and let me know that every sensation I was feeling was normal. The epidural gave me the shakes so my husband had a hard time holding my hand when he came in. It was such a comfort being able to look at him the whole time. I’ve always been terrified by the thought of a c-section, but he and the whole team of people in there with me were so supportive. They delivered our son and I got to hear him cry for the first time before D walked over to see him get cleaned up. They brought him over to me and let me kiss his forehead before he and D left for the nursery. I fell asleep while they were stitching me up and really can’t remember how long that took. Actually the next few hours are a big blur. I vaguely remember holding our son, but I couldn’t tell you if that memory was the first or fifth time I held him. They told me later that the umbilical cord had been wrapped around his shoulder and waist like a seatbelt, so he wasn’t able to descend far enough to make it into the birth canal. Each contraction constricted the cord and he had a bruise on his back from the pressure. But his APGAR scores were good and other than a little jaundice he was perfectly healthy.

I had to have two blood patches for the spinal headache I got from the epidural, so I spent more time in the hospital that I would have liked, but a few short days after he was born we finally got to take our little boy home.

So, readers, meet MJ. Born 7 pounds 12 ounces and 20 inches long at 2:52pm.

A Lesson in Faith

Today is my Estimated Due Date, and while I suppose it’s possible I could go into labor before midnight, I highly doubt that will happen.

I knew before getting pregnant that first time moms often go past their due dates, and I also know that due dates are more educated guesses than an exact science. It’s something I thought I had been mentally preparing myself for over the last ten months. However, when that day that you’ve had marked on the calendar for so long finally comes… and then goes, it’s hard not to feel frustrated.

Everyone knows that person who delivered two weeks early, and everyone knows that person who just never seemed to go into labor on their own. The further away from that first scenario I get, the more nervous I become that this show’s simply never going to start, at least not naturally. I have a midwife appointment in three hours where we’ll be discussing induction, and a large part of me is very, very sad about that.

I trust my body to deliver this baby when it’s the right time, but unfortunately my Midwife’s insurance doesn’t like to leave things unresolved, and my insurance isn’t too keen on the idea of me ignoring my Midwife’s recommendation. So if this baby doesn’t come before next week, someone is going to get my body going for me.

It’s not the birth I wanted.

I’m trying to prepare myself for that possibility, though I know (and hope) that I could go into spontaneous labor at any time. I don’t want to show up at the hospital still in disbelief that my body didn’t comply with the timeline set for it by others. I need to be ready for that.

But to be honest, I don’t know how to be. I don’t agree with the sentiment that all that matters is “healthy mom, healthy baby.” I think, in most cases, mothers should be able to ask more of their healthcare teams than simply not killing them. I don’t think it’s selfish or unrealistic for a mother to have a say in how and where she births her baby. I had a beautiful vision for this birth, and it seems like there has been a hiccup or obstacle around every corner. That’s hard to come to terms with. A large part of it is in our financial situation- we can’t afford to pay out of pocket for prenatal/maternity care right now, so I’m stuck with what our insurance will cover. That doesn’t leave a lot of options, especially for someone looking for a less medicalized birth. I knew that, getting into this, but I hoped and prayed I would find a provider who would work with me as best she could.

Now that I’m one week away from having this baby (I’m not allowed to go over 41 weeks) I’m saddened by how little say I have in this process. I’m overjoyed to meet my son, but I feel like I’m betraying an agreement between us by not allowing him to choose his own birthday. He doesn’t know he’s on the clock. He doesn’t understand the concept of “birth.” His only job right now is to grow and develop and be. It seems forceful and wrong to pull him out of this season of his life before he’s ready.

But that’s my only option. That or refuse care and have this baby in my bathtub (I think D would pass out.)

So… I’m wrestling with this. I know many inductions that went beautifully and ended in happy mothers and healthy babies. I’m hoping for that experience. I’m going to do my best to fight for forms of induction that I feel are safest for me and my son, and I’m going to give him as much time to come on his own as I’m able. I’m going to continue to spend time in prayer over this, trusting that no matter what happens, my son and I are in the hands of someone much wiser than me. Whether this baby comes on his own or with help, I am still so blessed to be the one who brings him into this world, and regardless of how his birth occurs, we’re going to celebrate that beautiful day every year for the rest of my life.

Anyway you look at it, that’s pretty awesome.