Grumpy on Demand

The modern wisdom of breastfeeding says that a child should eat whenever she wants and for as long as she wants. This ensures that she is never hungry and milk production is rapid enough to fit her needs. It might be difficult in the beginning but after about a month or two everything will balance out. The child will end up being eating the recommended six to eight times per day. She will learn to eat bigger amounts at a time and will sleep 4-hour stretches during the night. This means that the mother only wakes up once or twice depending on her need for sleep when the baby is one to two months old.

Theory is nice. The reality can be outright BRUTAL!!!!

My baby will soon be one month old and I wrote down her meal times. She ate 16 times in 24 hours - that's once every 30 minutes to two and a half hours. In general it probably wouldn't bother me so much, but 7 of those feedings were between 5 a.m. to 11 a.m. Oh my precious sleep time... In the morning I was so tired that I briefly considered closing her in the other room so I could sleep. And when I had postponed making coffee for three hours already I placed her in her bed crying and calmly walked into the kitchen to make coffee. No rush. If I can't calm her then the best I can do is to stay calm myself and my morning coffee is a great start.

The way I see it, this is just another problem to be solved. Hardcore breastfeeders would say it's not a problem, it's just natural. She must be hungry so she must be fed. But it is a problem because with so many feedings there is no way that I would be able to burp her every time. It would take two hours every night if I burped her every time. By 7 a.m. she's waking up because her tummy aches and she wants to eat to feel better. Eating also helps babies relieve themselves, so to them it makes sense to eat when they are in distress from eating. So as long as I let her eat every 30-60 minutes it can actually cause her pain and suffering... So it only makes sense to cut down the amount of her night time meals.

But as I mentioned in my last post, I think I know why she's fussing in the mornings. I think my not-enough milk issue turned into too-much milk issue. Actually it's called OALD or OverActive Let Down. Usually this condition is coupled with overabundance of milk. In the beginning of the feeding the rush of milk is so rapid that the baby ends up coughing, letting go and gasping for air, and struggling, trying to bite to reduce flow, swallowing a lot of air and eating too much too fast. The first milk during a feeding is always very watery and high in lactose concentration. If the baby fills up on the first milk (foremilk), then her body has a hard time coping with all that milk sugar and she gets gassy and frustrated but is still hungry because she didn't get any hindmilk, which is high in fat and protein content. Kinda ironic that my baby girl has issues with eating too many carbs... I told you carbs were bad!

Some babies cope with OverActive Let Down by having very frequent meals. This way the rush of milk is manageable for them and they can more easily get to hindmilk. So perhaps it's not by chance that she eats the most frequently early in the morning when milk production is at it's peak. Everything I have read about this condition explains the current situation and me and my baby have almost every single symptom they use to diagnose it. It will fix itself with time. All treatment is to reduce milk production but I wouldn't experiment with that after a mere Google diagnosis.

My planned solution - I will start postponing her night time feedings little by little. I will pretend not to wake up for as long as possible. If she really starts screaming, then I'll go to her but if she wakes up a little hungry then I will wait until she's very hungry so she'll eat more and then sleep for longer. It might mean that she'll start to eat too fast and she'll swallow air but since she always swallows some air and I'm already unable to burp her after night time meals now, it won't make things worse.

On the Internet breastfeeding activist consensus says that such a small baby must never be trained to sleep longer but frankly if I don't fix the situation now, I will end up so tired and frustrated I won't have any positivity to give her. I am convinced that happier mothers make for happier babies (and vice versa) so I see no reason to let her wake me up so often every night. It's for her own good if I sleep more.