Women are, as Maya Angelou put it, phenomenal. We have a super power that has such an amazing emotional connection: breastfeeding. This post will be a series discussing the past two years that I have spent either breastfeeding or preparing to do so.
While I was pregnant I came to the realization that I wanted, if I was able, to breastfeed. I started looking up any tiny bit of information that I could on the subject. Pinterest ended up being a big help on the initial research, there were a lot of blogs like my own.
The most informative though was the class I took through my hospital. If your hospital that you plan on birthing in does not offer it, majority of hospitals offer the classes for free, even if you are not delivering there. There were three people in my class that were not going to be using that hospital.
The retired nurse that taught my class had breast fed her own six children. A slogan that she said often (which came from her husband) is that moms are for food and dads are for fun. Which, obviously, is a joke, but it was very true for some moments of my daughter’s life.
During this class we learned about ways to achieve the perfect latch, things that breastfeeding does to the mother and the baby’s body, as well as helping some issues that may arise.
Did you know that the longer you breastfeed the less and less likely you are to have osteoporosis, ovarian cancer, and heart disease!! Your body absorbs nutrients like crazy while breastfeeding, which makes it important to continue your prenatal vitamins. Don’t be like me who often forgot to take any vitamins at all haha. This was just some of the information that was given to us in this class. For even more information on breastfeeding and how it is beneficial for both baby and mom here are some credible resources that have a ton of value added information:
There was a couple of things I did not learn in class or on Pinterest that I had to learn the hard way. One example is that breast milk does not contain Vitamin D, so you need to supplement Vitamin D into your baby’s diet by using drops. This was explained to me by my pediatrician at our second appointment when she asked if I was giving regular drops, and she saw my dumbfounded expression. Another thing I learned the hard way was that sometimes you can be doing everything right and still have a painful breastfeeding experience in the beginning. This was my life at first which lead me to going to a lactation consultant. But that’s for the next installment.
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Caroline
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