When pregnant with my third child, I was determined to breastfeed her. I had breastfed my other two children, having combi fed my first, and then stopping at six weeks with my second due to reflux, but I was so sure that with my last baby it would be different.
After having a planned C Section with Elsie, I tried to get my her to latch on to me as soon as we were in recovery. Almost instantly I realised it wasn’t working, so I started expressing milk for her, which luckily I have never had any issues with. I spoke to midwives, health visitors and breastfeeding support workers over the following few weeks and they unfortunately made me question myself and my baby. All the while i was exclusively expressing milk for her.
When my baby was six weeks old, she was eventually checked for a tongue tie after I had requested this to be checked a number of times, and she was found to have a posterior tongue tie. She had this snipped, but unfortunately it reattached. By the time we got a further appointment for it snipping again at a specialist children’s hospital, she was 18 weeks old. Throughout this time I had carried on trying to latch her every single day, but by this point she wasn’t really interested, and was comfortable with the bottles of expressed milk.
Although this was hard, I was glad she was still getting breastmilk. I always had an oversupply, and after filling up two freezers with milk at home, I decided to start donating milk to the Milk Bank at Chester.
By the time Elsie was 9 months old, I had donated 13.5 litres to the milk bank, and when Elsie was 11 months old I calculated that there was enough milk in the freezer to reach our 1 year goal of exclusively breastfeeding. At this point, I started weaning off the pump slowly but surely.
I pumped milk on holiday, at the park, whilst cooking, on the train, at a theme park, on an aeroplane, in a toilet cubicle, on a boat, in the car, at the pub, in a bridesmaid dress… there was nothing stopping me making sure my daughter was getting fed!
Our breastfeeding journey looks different to a lot of others, and it was honestly one of the hardest things I have ever done. It was time consuming, painful, heartbreaking at times, mentally exhausting, physically exhausting having to do the night time wake-ups, getting Elsie fed/changed and then taking half an hour to express milk etc, but I have never been more proud of my resilience and my body than I was when I was exclusively pumping!
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