Motherhood Mumbo Jumbo Part 1

So, if you are consulting with a fancy hospital in a city, I am pretty sure you and your partner would be asked to attend few knowledge sessions. On pregnancy nutrition, physical activity, labour and lactation. I think these have their heart in the right place but if you ask me, a better format or better attitude would help the mother. Maternal anxiety needs very little nudge and any imposition would only make it worse.

Anyways, my opinion is its actually a much better idea if you ask me, to give these sessions to the support system, aka mothers, fathers, mother in law, father in law or similar folks. A lot has changed in the last decade regarding child care and the norms, hell of a lot and its so hard to explain to the elders. Better it comes in this form straight from doctors, though most elders believe, doctors/gynaecologists/paediatricians know nothing about child rearing.

Here are few terms that mothers will hear a lot in postpartum.

Category - Infant Feeding - All thats about food for your infant

Latching - This is what will give most new mothers nightmares. What's latching? So the baby needs to hold on to nipple plus areola at least 50% of it to effectively drink milk. It's really easier said than done. But both the mother and the baby have to go through a steep learning curve anyways. My baby latched the first time she was at breast. I could not believe I was that lucky. But no thats a fluke. For the first couple of weeks, they need to be taught to latch the right way or else they wont feed effectively, that could effect their weight gain.

Expressing milk - So I didnt know this before taking the classes during pregnancy, apparently you can extract milk yourself. I thought only babies could do that through sucking. I still didnt believe hand expression upto few weeks of postpartum until some "well meaning" lady asked me to press the areola to see if my milk supply has gone down. I didnt know about clogged pores or anything that time or much about expression until after I met with lactation consultant on instagram. So yeah, in conclusion you can express milk either with your fingers or with a breast pump. Collecting expressed milk will be a hassle if you are using hand.

Breast pump - I was at first scared of this but bought one when I was hell bent on feeding breastmilk exclusively. It hurt a lot when I used it without knowing the process, but it should not. If it did, its counter productive. Its stimulates the breast and extracts milk, mimicking the baby. Babies first stimulate your breast through quick motions and then do the sucking. So in manual you need to do that using the handle. For electric, the two functions are given to operate. Its best to get help from professional before using yourself. The electric either comes as single or double. That means either one breast at a time or option to express from both breasts at one. There are more options based on the need like cordless.

Sterilizer - Sterilization is the process of adding the infant milk bottles to boiling water, the bottles need to stay below water surface. But for convenience now we have sterilizers that do it much faster and with less hassle. They use vapour in closed apparatus for similar effect and they come in different sizes. If you are only supplementing, going with just 2 bottles capacity should be fine. If you are exclusively feeding formula, you would need larger one, especially first few weeks.

Bottle feeding - So whats bottle feeding? It's as simple as it sounds, either pumped/expressed milk or formula, if you are feeding to your baby in a bottle, thats bottle feeding

Spoon feeding - So some professionals suggest feeding formula or expressed milk to your baby through a spoon. This is to avoid latching issues if you are also breastfeeding, especially if your baby is less than 6 weeks old.

Did I miss anything? Let me know.