Breastfeeding Blues..

Today has been rough. Last night was rough too. I started coming down with this weird pain that I've had a few times since I've been pregnant.. I was hoping it'd go away with the pregnancy but I've had it twice now since Floaty has been born. It starts in my chest, below my rib cage.. it's sorta a tight feeling that spreads to my entire upper back. It feels like a huge muscle spasm, like if I could relax enough it'd go away or something.. and then it gets hard to breathe, all I can do is take short quick breaths. During my pregnancy it only would last about 20 minutes or so and it wasn't THAT bad. Last night it lasted almost an hour and it was worse than the pregnancy pains.. We were at my mom's house for my birthday so she told me she'd take the baby and that I should go hop in the shower. I went and got in the shower and had my husband sit outside the shower on the floor "just in case". He fell asleep while waiting for me - and I ran all the hot water out.. I still didn't feel better, in fact by that time I was getting shaky and exhausted. My husband had to help me get dressed and walk out to the kitchen where I sat on a chair and almost fell asleep in a matter of seconds. Mom took hubby off to the side and talked to him for a minute about me - I think.. (he was a little buzzed and tired so he was having trouble staying awake, poor baby). He took over the baby and mom took me into her room and laid me down on the bed.. she told me that she thought I was having a panic attack (I'm having issues with breastfeeding and it's been stressing me out like crazy) which made me start crying. I cried for a few minutes and then sorta just laid there.. she laid there with me for a few minutes and then sent my husband in to lay down next to me. He and I laid there for a few minutes and were both passed out on the bed before very long.

I woke up about 3am and needed to get a drink so I wandered out to the kitchen where all the lights were on and my mom was sitting up.. I freaked out a little bit thinking she'd been up the whole time with the baby! I'd gone into her room to lay down at about 9:30pm.. Anyways, the baby was laying on the couch sleeping and my mom was sorta just watching him. She told me that she had just been getting ready to come get me and wake me up cause he was acting like he was gonna wake up hungry. So I grabbed him and fed him for a bit and then took him back to bed with me where we slept for another few hours. All in all it worked out okay I suppose.

So now the baby is being bottle-fed. I'm having a hard time with it because I was SO excited about breastfeeding. It's my own fault that we had to stop though. He wasn't latching on properly to begin with and I let him learn to latch on the incorrect way which resulted in INTENSE pain in my nipples during let-down and then throughout the entire feeding. Mitch told me that it was fine if I needed to stop breastfeeding, he didn't want to see me stressing out about it. We decided that we were going to bottle-feed him formula for 2 or 3 days until I could build up a decent supply of breastmilk and then we would start feeding him breastmilk. After a week or so of doing that, if my nipples are healed up again we will go back to trying the boob - if the bottles haven't made him 'lazy' about latching on. Essentially I am still breastfeeding, just using a bottle to do it. It makes me sad though cause when I feed him with the bottle I can see he's already learning to suck at the bottle differently than he sucks from me. It's a bit hard on me but I'm getting better. The first day we used bottles I cried every time I fed him with one, I couldn't look at him without crying.. especially cause he didn't take to the bottle to begin with, he could smell me and wanted to feed off of ME and he was mad cause I wasn't letting him.. talk about HEARTBREAKING!

It is day 2 of pumping up a supply.. I had planned on starting to feed him breastmilk tomorrow but I have a BUNCH of running I have to do and it wouldn't work.. The breastmilk is frozen and has to be kept cool until he's ready to eat it. I have to go buy a little lunch cooler thingy to tote breastmilk around with me... so I suppose we will have one more day of building up a supply and then start him back on breastmilk on Thursday. I'm slightly worried that he won't want the breastmilk but just as I was typing that I think I am silly.. babies don't have tastebuds at this age so how will he know the difference? I'm sure he can smell it, babies have an increased sense of smell.. I hope he'll be happy to be back on breastmilk. :)

That's all for now..