Block nursing

Today I have been keeping an eye on the little milk spills from my baby’s mouth and they all  looked like foremilk. 12 hours on the same breast didn’t work! 😦 He is starving and my breast feels totally empty so I have to move him to the next breast. And I supposed he gets more foremilk again at the start of breastfeeding. I start to wondered perhaps I have not been nursing him long enough. Could this be the reason for not getting to the hind milk? Usually it’s by Cub’s cue that he’s off the breast. If I keep him too long on the breast, he would clamp me hard to stop the flow. Or he ends up falling asleep on the breast using me as a pacifier or the milk starts to drip off his mouth.

However after a phone conversation with my girlfriend, she reminds me that I should keep in mind that the wide variation of “how” the breastmilk looks doesn’t reflect on its composition, so how could I tell if my baby is accessing the hindmilk.

That brings me back to the usual suspect which is the oversupply issue. So is the block feeding working for my baby? My mum claimed she heard the fluid movement when the cub is crying for his feed around 8:45pm. Is this the sound of the gas buildup? So far today my baby seems to be hungry every two hours or so but I haven’t any ‘draws up his legs’ act and the poo is not as green and explosive as the day before.

Good news is he did not struggle as much in today’s nursing sessions so the block nursing must have work. Perhaps I should reduce it to 6 hours period.

New breastfeeding system

After 2 feedings 2 hourly, I’m totally awake and back to my insomnia problem. So it seems being a mum is equal to goodbye to good night sleep.

As usual, survival of sleepless nights are managed with my iPhone. More reading on breastfeeding to get to the root of problem. Yes in this case, question is how to get my baby to sleep longer through the night (so that mummy gets more sleep too!)

After some googling, it seems I’m the source of the issue. The oversupply issue results in foremilk/hindmilk imbalance. Foremilk is for the development of the brain and energy while hindmilk is for growth. No wonder my baby is constantly hyped up! My suspicions might be true after all. And the high lactose in the foremilk is resulting in gas eventually diarrhea with explosive greenish poo. My poor baby, what did mummy do to you! That explains his almost stagnant growth. 😦

So as I read along, I realized the only way to resolve this is a proper breastfeeding management system. Okay there goes the iPhone app of basic feed clocking! From this moment I’m back to good ole paper journal. Of course I dun mean I’m stopping my blog ;)!

To begin, I came up with the following in two pronged approach:

Fix
1. Change the breast milk content -Continual feeding on one breast for next 12 hours.
2. Consider feeding on one breast and pumping on another?
3. Manual monitoring of feeding with paper journal
4. Stick to regular feeding of 3 hourly interval
5. No more comfort feeding (should I introduce pacifier?)

Maintain
1. Get rid of the gas – Burp the baby each time after feeding
2. Pain – More application of Ru yi oil to help relieve the stomach pain or get rid of more gas

Let’s see how it goes for next 3 days and review again as we go along.

Any comments is welcome. 🙂