Warning: breast feeding story

You recently read about our adventure with the wanna-be car thief. After that story posted, I noticed blog attendance went up. People I barely knew were on the blog reading about the incident and also my labor story. Uh-hmm. It is a little embarrassing when your dad, pastor, uncle, and male cousins know such intimate details. The story was preceded by a warning, which apparently none of them heeded before they trudged on through the gory details. I am now going to post a story about breast-feeding and hope that either the labor story scarred the male readers off or, this time, my warning will be sufficient.

Mandy is not an easy child to feed. I am not a big fan of the whole breast-feeding thing to begin with, but she makes it even more difficult. Now I am sure there are women reading this who remember breast-feeding their wee ones with fond memories and you will leave comments with links to the La Leche Leage to try to convince me that it is beautiful thing. Hopefully I can adequately explain to you why I don’t enjoy the whole process and you will be able to summon up the memories when you didn’t hear angels singing as your baby suckled on your breast.

I’ve try my hardest to get Mandy to eat a full course meal so she can wait a good 3 hours between feedings – this is ideal. After that 3 hours she wakes up hungry and must believe she will never see food again by the way she “shovels” the milk into her mouth. She glurgs like a starving person for about 3-5 minutes until she coughs and sputters in a very dramatic fashion. As she is gagging and coughing, I try to burp her on my shoulder. She gags, sputters, coughs, and gasps some more until she finally relaxes against me. It is when she relaxes, nuzzled against my neck that a huge belch comes out along with spit-up, running down my chest. The contented sigh that follows says, “I just want to snuggle, mommy.” I have succumbed to her snuggles and let her sleep snuggled against me countless times and always pay for it later. She wakes up about ½ hour later hungry again and wants a snack. If l let her continue in this pattern, she would be content to eat/sleep every ½ hour all day and night long. As the one providing the food, I don’t like this idea and think of nursing like a trip to the Olive Garden. Sure you can fill up on bread-sticks, but you waited an hour for your table, had to put up with a overly-cheerful waiter (that is me, the mommy, in my analogy), so you should wait and enjoy the entrée as well. If Mandy were at the Olive Garden of breast-feeding establishments, she would be asleep on the table before the waiter even brought out the chilled plate for salad.

So, my mission is to get her to wake up and eat more! It is not easily done, although a diaper change after her coughing/burping/spitting-up/sleeping incident usually works. I change her diaper, she gives me a dirty look for waking her and then she is ready to eat again. At this point I put her back on the breast and she starts eating again, very, very slowly. She slows to a halt and poops in her clean diaper. The exertion of the poop usually lulls her back to sleep and I have to wake her up again. I refuse to change her diaper again, so I resort to baby torture (i.e. tickling). After another 10 minutes or so, she finally wakes up again and gives me another dirty look. She is eating again, now fully awake and eating at a steady pace. If we make it to this point, it is like a home run, or perhaps I should say, the waiter asks if she can bring out dessert. Mandy, would say, “No, just the check please.” We happily complete the feeding time with another not-so disgusting or messy burp and Mandy is all sweet smiles. She is alert and happy for about an hour and then goes down for a nap. It is only about 2 hours later that we start this process all over again, but it sure beats doing it every 30 minutes.

Now perhaps you can understand why I don’t hear angels singing while I am feeding my child. I wouldn’t mind the angels if they would somehow sing loud enough to keep Mandy awake the entire time!