@kars My little guy also had a hard time gaining, although we only had one big drop the first week and since have been closely monitoring his weight. He has been gaining well after seeing an osteopath. He was also checked but multiple paediatricians and LCs and we were told no ties. He has a certain type of one that can’t be seen the the osteopath can feel it, it’s caused by tension and is affecting the way he transfers milk from the breast.
We also found out he’s so tense he’s been in pain, poor little guy he’s 3.5m (2.5 adjusted and doing much better since we took him.
@kars Don’t beat yourself up, every baby is so different. I think pumping and feeding for a while is perfectly fine to see what she’s taking in. I honestly did this a lot in the beginning with my LO because he was a NICU baby and they constantly talked about making sure he was getting at least 45ml when we left the hospital so the pumping helped me make sure he was getting enough and I was producing enough. After a while I moved to EBF when I felt confident that I was producing and he was eating enough. Then of course had to go back to pumping once daycare started but if you pump and see that you’re not producing enough then okay you know you can work on options to increase supply but if you’re pumping enough and she’s just not eating or is eating but it isn’t leading to to right weight gain then maybe there’s something else going on that the doctor needs to determine. And hopefully through this process you can get back to EBF asap. The one thing I’ll say is please don’t feel like a failure or you’re doing something wrong because you’re not EBF. At the end of the day the most important thing is you and baby are happy and healthy and you’re happy when she’s healthy so take the journey as it comes. You’re doing great!
@kars Our baby came two months early at less than 2 pounds and we received a ton of advice on how to avoid him getting a preference for bottles if we were really interested in breastfeeding. One of the major ones was to feed him on his side with the bottle horizontal to the floor so that he had to work for the milk instead of just feeding him on his back! We were able to easily switch between the two but ultimately I ended up just switching to exclusively pumping for reasons that just made sense to me! I also found that I still had that bonding experience when he used the bottle and it also eased my anxiety a lot knowing how much he was taking in.
I use the Bellababy portable pump and absolutely love it. I found the customer service to be great too as one of my motors died in the first month and they immediately send me a replacement. I’m based in Canada so we don’t have Spectra pumps here but I did read in a comment somewhere that the Bellababy portable pump was similar in suction strength as the Spectra. I may get hate for this comment but I exclusively use my Bellababy portable pump over my main plug in pump because I get soooo much more milk from it, I don’t constantly have to hunch over when pumping, and I can pump AND feed my baby a bottle at the same time. It sounds super overwhelming to pump and feed baby separately (and it truly can be! It’s not all sunshine and rainbows) but you can do it! You find what works best for you and babe and just push forward!!
he’s 3.5m (2.5 adjusted and doing much better since we took him.