You can start lactating before! And no one is drinking it before
Do your nipples have a weird yellow crust on them sometimes? Or thick or thin stuff? Or any blisters?
Do you even know where the milk comes out (I didn’t and tried to get people to explain and still didn’t)?
Yeah, I started leaking milk around week 22. I was sitting up in bed eating breakfast and watching tv and Ry was leaning over on me. I actually asked him if he had spilled his tea on me, or drooled on me. From that point forward I had to start wearing nursing pads in my bras because I leaked every day from that point forward.
I would say be prepared if it is hard for you and go deep on the science now from the entire spectrum - super crunchy to super conservative, because you don’t want to be doing it while sleep deprived, in pain, or emotional. You want to have some.plan B’s in place and people who will support you where you are (whether that’s breast is best or fed is best), and probably some formula on hand. There’s lots on breastfeeding and it’s so wrapped up in emotions, politics, the role of women, incomplete science because sexism. IME, the flood of hormones and sleep deprivation and love and fear are next level and just making one less big decision and having a plan would go a long way.
Sorry if this is out of line, i just felt very manipulated and misled and always want to give so much love and support and empowerment to women to choose how to do this, if at all, and all the info on the why’s.
ALSO super cool apparently maybe your baby’s saliva goes into your nipples and this is how your body knows what to change in your milk for the baby which i thought was super amazing
Last I heard this was sheer speculation without a plausible mechanism in the discussion of some paper that got turned into gospel by people with an agenda, so grain of salt and all that.
I just spent a week in an environment where there’s a lot of visibility and like “obviousness” about breastfeeding and of the five babies under 2 (including three EDIT: four! over 1) every single one was latched on at some point. So there are definitely clusters of better experience and worse experience which can likely affect overall outcome.
It’s definitely true that there are systemic factors which can make things more difficult, but physiological ones aren’t as rare as some voices would have you believe, and no amount of maternity leave and lactation counselors is going to change that fact. So I’d be wary of the more stringent crowd and even the “not one drop of formula” stories because that shit can get into your head in the literal and hormonal dark of night, no matter how intellectually you try to approach it.
And we have amazing safe formula and milk banks for when that happens!
Thank you for saying this. I don’t want my bad experience with breastfeeding (and i didn’t it for a year so i technically did it 
) to make me seem entirely anti a very normal thing. I just really thing the huge breastfeeding push is doing bad things to moms and to babies. Maternal health matters to babies more than boob milk does!!!
Uuugh i really wish the science communication was better 
sorry for spreading a plausible mechanism as more proven than it is.
FWIW I highly recommend locating a lactation consultant in your area for 1 session pre-birth and 2 sessions post birth if you want to try breastfeeding, and possibly even if you don’t just so you can comfortably help your body stop producing milk if you decided not to.
Wow, I didn’t know this thread was here! I felt dropped by the pregnancy thread with nowhere to take my breastfeeding and recovery and skin questions 
For @noodle - I think for a lot of people, breastfeeding is a sort of proxy for postpartum angst in general. The books/classes/etc are a lot of information overload (most of which most people won’t need) and there can be a fair amount of troubleshooting involved when you’re tired and your hormones are out of whack. And it’s often physically painful at first.
My most helpful approaches this time were Googling specific challenges and going to one of those support groups run by an LC with a baby scale.
Just want to put in a shout out to Soy Lecithin capsules for plugged ducts!
The first time I heard about them I was like “well that sounds fake” but they made a huge difference in clearing things up for me, even once I’d progressed to mastitis. Buy yourself a giant bottle if you plan to breastfeed, just in case.
Also @noodle, if you do breastfeed and get mastitis, don’t bother trying to power through it, just go get antibiotics. Not worth the fever and pain, and it can get bad really quickly.
Do you mean sunflower lecithin? I’ve heard of that working really well but hadn’t heard about soy.
I started eating sunflower butter on toast most mornings and never got a clogged duct again after that.
I just watched a YouTube video about using the hakka (sp?) with warm water and Epsom salts to alleviate clogs. Sounded cool
I think they’re equivalent for this purpose, yes. I’ve only seen Soy Lecithin in stores around me. That’s super cool that sunflower butter works well enough for you!
I tried ALL THE THINGS for plugged ducts. Pumping, dangle feeding, putting my boob in a bowl of hot water, ice and hot compresses, lots of anti-inflammatories, massage, vibrators, only nursing on one side. They’re so terrible. Lecithin is the only thing that I’m sure helped, other than antibiotics.
I really loved the hakaa period! Especially for getting a good supply of stored milk!
It’s on my registry—seems like a no brainer to at least try it. I love a simple, inexpensive tool like that.
How did you and your partner discuss what kinds of parents you would be? Was there any kind of framework you went through together, video series you watched, book you read, etc.?
We’ve taken a couple classes together. Feeding Littles, and (part of, lol) Big Little Feelings. I also send him tons of stuff on IG and we discuss it. It probably helps that I already had a bias toward a lot of specific parenting concepts, and read most around those. When I read a book I think would be valuable for him to read too, he tries to get it on audiobook and listen on work trips.
How do you find those specific parenting concepts initially? I don’t know where to start! Unfortunately/fortunately no Instagram for me right now but if there’s a compelling reason I suppose I could get back on it
HMM good question. I’ve always been interested in this stuff. Plus a close friend as a mom was always very intentional in her parenting philosophy development,
A lot of it grew out of my existing biases. I prioritize outside time and natural movement, so the transition to stuff like “grow wild” was pretty easy.
Some other stuff was from my career. As a peds home health nurse I went to a lot of feeding therapy appointments and did lots of therapy work with patients. So Ellyn Satter’s ideas (and as taught by Feeding Littles) easily flowed from that.
I’d probably look at what you already believe and value and let it grow from there. Heading into newborn phase, some of the important things to get on the same page with, for yourself and a partner, are things like- are you comfortable with cry it out methods? Feeding goals/priorities? Safe sleep versus planning for some risk reduction sleep strategies. Getting on the same page as a baseline, and starting the convo, so you know your and their starting points for further conversation as everything evolves.
YMMY, but I found that a lot of the Instagram pages are siloed and focused on their one thing to the point of inducing anxiety and shame.
Silly example: does it matter whether you use an open cup versus sippy cup when doing water/drinks? Not for most kids, no. Are there some kids who will have issues with feeding/speech such that a specific cup will matter in their therapy? Yes, and they will be identified in the process. But if you ask some IG accounts, giving anything other than a specific (and usually affiliate link) cup is substandard.
But I got tired of it, because it can be really hard to differentiate good advice from that kind of hardline approach. So, bring your salt shaker.
As for parenting philosophies, it’s fine to dabble in different ideas to see what you like and what’s kind of a good consensus, be wary of manufacturing anxiety to sell you something (almost anyone with a “course”), and there’s basically no need to be a purist in anything if it doesn’t suit, aside from the very basics (don’t hit, shame, belittle, humiliate, or compare your kid).