There was one feed on a very full train up to Mount Rigi last weekend, where I’d have to disturb my sleeping toddler, my comfortable baby and about four other people in order to get my supplement bottle, so I just tried to keep taking deep breaths, using my hypnobirthing techniques, and I wanted to see how we’d go. We did fine! No supplement required. The fact that my toddler was asleep and I could focus solely on this little one here probably helped… 

The magic boob-only feed

Yesterday, he needed only about 50ml. I feel as if he could have taken more if I kept offering supplement, but I didn’t and tried to believe in my milk production for the first time since week two. I got anxious every time he cried, though, presuming he was famished, but it was usually more so that he had dropped a toy (we are at that phase now!). 

So far today, he hasn’t had any. And it is 5.52pm. I’m tipping milk down the drain (blasphemy! Gah!) because I get it ready and then it isn’t required. I am feeding him perhaps every 90 minutes, both day and night, right now, so I must admit I am pretty exhausted, but wowsers. 

So I just had a little moment. He was screaming his little guts out, which he never does (Okay, unless he is in the car. Then he plays ‘cry it out’ just for fun.). I had been feeding him very often all day long. I have been feeding him both to sleep and upon waking for each of his naps today, rather than just putting him in the carrier until he falls asleep, just because I feel like it. Because he isn’t on his Mama, his sleeps haven’t been longer than 20minutes all day. 

Then came the screaming. I was so anxious that he was hungry. And I really swore that I would not let my baby go hungry. So I had a bottle ready, and then I braced myself, put him in the carrier and started pacing. Maaaybe he was just tired again… much earlier than usual… but maybe? And I started singing. Usually I sing him a song that I made up in the hospital on that one awful sleepless, heart wrenching night where we paced the halls all night long: ‘Little Harvey, my little Harvey, who you gonna be, my little Harvey? Maybe you’ll be a …’ etc. But this time, for some random reason, I started the chant that we do at the beginning of yoga: ‘Ong namo guru dev namo’. Only after singing this perhaps forty times did I realise that I was singing ‘I bow to the infinite wisdom in me’. And then, just at that realisation, he fell asleep. 

How beautiful is that? I trusted that infinite wisdom inside of me that he was not hungry, and he wasn’t. 

Yay for slowly building my confidence along with my milk!