My Breastfeeding Woes

This past week was my first full week back to work.  I was fortunate enough to only work 3-4 days the first two weeks back.  This week, I'm definitely noticing a change in our nursing relationship, and not a good one.  R2D2 takes about 4 bottles a day and then I nurse her 3-4 times when I'm home.  This week the first feed she's almost always not taking a big enough latch and then often biting and pulling away.  Not fun!  I know that with her age, it could be that she's more easily distracted, but I definitely think it's laziness/nipple confusion because by our morning feed she has the pattern down again.  To help support my worries of laziness/nipple confusion so more, after having only the breast since Friday night and it's now Sunday, she's back to efficient and effective nursing.  I adore being able to nurse her, so I'm determined to make this work.  I have a medela pump, so right now we're using the medela bottles.  I thought about buying Calma Nipple but reviews state babies generally won't take it if they're already had other nipples since it's so much work.  Plus that darn nipple is expensive!  Others have recommended Avent, so last night I bought some Avent Natural bottles from Target.  The nipples are definitely wider than the the medela nipples so I'm hopeful.  I've also heard good things about Breastflow and Tommee Tippee, so those are options too.  I never thought I'd spend so long in a bottle aisle analyzing the shapes of nipples.  Again, such is the life of a working breastfeeding mom.

Oh! My other breastfeeding excitement for the week, I left my pump supplies home Friday!  Friday morning I pumped before going into work, washed my valves and flanges and put them by the sink to dry.  At work I go to pump in the morning and uh oh, no flanges and valves!  There was a Target about 15 minute from work, but I was carrying three pagers and it wasn't quite feasible to leave work for an hour.  Fortunately our hospital uses Medela for our breast feeding moms and our lactation consultant had extra parts.  That being said, we couldn't meet up until about 7 hours after my last pumping session.  Yowsers.  I know some moms hand express, so here I am in our resident work room looking up a you tube video on "how to hand express."  Thankfully no medical students walked in while I was watching that video.  But again, a breastfeeding mom does what she needs to do.   For some relief, I ended up trying to hand express.  Yeah, hopefully that will be the last time I have to do that.  It's not very easy trying to contain the milk and it's definitely a lot of work to get a little bit of milk.  All in all, I was still able to pump what she took by the bottle while I was at work, so that worked out and now I'll be carrying an extra set of pumping supplies in my bag.