Breakthrough!

At Day 13, my milk supply has caught up with Amanda's demands. Hooray! I am so glad my efforts had paid off. All the extra pumps in between feeds, even in the middle of the night when my body feels like its breaking, has been worth it. 

So I have gladly stopped Amanda on formula milk, after 7 days of supplementing. 

Night times are a long affair now. Firstly, with breast milk, she wakes up every two hourly, two and a half if we are lucky and she is sleepy. This is compared to the three and a half to four hourly interval she does with formula milk. Every feed now starts with (1) bottle feeding her expressed breast milk (2) changing her diapers (3) putting her to sleep (4) pumping out milk (5) washing the pump parts and sterilizing them. This takes slightly more than an hour to complete, and I sleep for an hour before she wakes up again and the cycle repeats.

I try to latch Amanda directly for day time feeds in the hope I can do away with all the pumping and washing. That will save a lot of time, especially at night when sleep is precious! However, she is not good at it, and often even after 45 minutes of direct latching, she would have only taken in a little, and we would then need to bottle feed her further.  And the whole steps (1) to (5) above repeats.  I need to work harder on latching but its really tiring and time consuming.

But the good thing with expressing out my milk is that often there would be surplus, so even at less than a month, I have managed to freeze up quite a bit of milk.

Anyhow, I am just really thankful that my supply has increased. It has made me really happy and I hope Amanda will reap the full health benefits that comes with being breastfed.

P/s Thanks to my mom for praying for me (that my supply would be adequate for A), it touched my heart knowing you knew it mattered to me.