Very often, when driving to a home visit, I get a message on my phone:
‘He’s hungry! Should I feed him?! Should I try to wait?’
I’m driving, so I can’t reply…
Then usually ten minutes later, ‘I tried so hard to wait, but he was just too hungry. I’m sorry…’ or, ‘He’s screaming so much… Should I just feed him?’
I’m driving, so I can’t reply…
So here’s my ideal situation:
I arrive at your place with a baby who, to your random guess, will probably be hungry in about half an hour. That gives us time to talk through the major issues and things you want to work on before putting them into practice.
If we arrive and your baby has just finished a full feed, that’s a bummer. It’s totally fine to feed your hungry baby (I don’t want to arrive to a baby who has been screaming for an hour! 😮 ) but try to cut your feed a bit short, if you can. If you can’t, and the full feed is done, don’t stress too much — that’s one of the reasons that a two hour appointment is handy: chances are that they will happily start another feed within that time!
If we arrive and your baby is crying from hunger, they won’t be willing or able to try new things. Here, I go with one of two approaches:
1. After a very quick discussion, if I know your bub is latching and won’t be finished a feed after just one side, then I get you to show me what you would normally do in this situation. Usually this means you’d start feeding them at your breast, which gives us time to come up with an action plan for side two.
2. If you have some pumped milk, we can give your bub just 10ml of milk to calm them, allowing them to THEN be willing and able to try something new. That’s what I was doing here with this beautiful mama and her tiny bubba, who was too hungry to attempt to latch in a new way.
In this situation below, we fed him this small amount, and then she managed to do a pain-free laid-back feed with shields, after weeks of pain and non-latching and pumping, where he self-latched! It was so beautiful!
Know, though, that we have seen it all. We know that babies are unpredictable, so trust that we can together find a way to make it work!
I won’t text you while driving, though, and I know you can understand that.
