“It’s been a really long journey. Having helped and supported many families that have had challenges and antagonistic medical professionals, I have to consider myself extremely lucky because I didn’t have pain and we had no latching challenges.
I feel extremely privileged in that I didn’t have to breastfeed uphill. Basically, it flowed naturally for me. But I was shocked at how like all encompassing it is. Before you have kids, no one’s like; ‘you should cluster feed.’
You go to the CLSC and they tell you, you need to breastfeed every two hours and you’re going to be fine. You’ll breastfeed starting on one side this time and starting on the other side next time and you’ll time it. And I was like, ‘Cool, I can do that. I’m super organized. I can get some apps, we have some alarms, it’s gonna be fine.’ But I think all that does is just make you really nervous about it.
I was obsessively logging every nap, every nurse, every pee, every poop, everything. Because you go to doctor’s appointments and they’re like, ‘How many dirty diapers?’
But the moment I stopped tracking was the moment I started responding to my baby’s actual behaviours.
The thing is, they say it’s every two hours. But then if we’re doing that, do we ever learn what our baby’s body’s language looks like when they’re asking for nutrition?
This time around, I was like, I actually think I know more than you do right now weird nurse. ”