Baby Bibi (our first child) was born in the evening of 28th of Dec 2021 even though she was originally due on the 6th of Jan 2022. Both Bibi and I spent 48hrs in the hospital before being discharged. In the hospital we had trouble feeding as her latch was causing extreme pain, the midwives in the hospital offered us Cow and Gate newborn formula as Bibi was crying a lot due to hunger as despite my colostrum coming out, she had a large appetite.
On day 2 in the hospital she finished 150ml of the formula within an hour and she’s consistently eaten a lot more than we’ve been advised babies her age and size should eat. By our second day in the hospital, my nipples were already extremely sore from trying to breast feed, this is despite me attending breastfeeding classes to learn the correct latch positions But it seems that baby Bibi adjusts her latch once she’s been put on the breast, and the most painful part of her latch is when she attaches to the nipple, so constantly removing her from the breast and trying to get her to reattach properly causes so much pain.
Currently one nipple is already split with several sores that still haven’t healed despite me not feeding primarily directly on the breast for most of the 2 weeks. It feels like she chews on the nipple while sucking, also, I’m not sure if it’s due to the size of my nipple, but it seems she’s not actually able to put the entire nipple in her mouth, so one nipple is misshapen from her only sucking on one end of it. In addition, she appears to get very frustrated with the pace of the milk flow coming out of the breast as she cries a lot midway through sucking on the breast – she did this even very early on at the hospital.
Since being back home, we’ve been pumping breast milk and feeding her from MAM newborn bottles. On average she eats 100ml of breast milk every 3 hrs. Although on some occasions (I suspect around her growth spurts) she had taken 150ml within an hour and her most was 190ml within 2hrs.
Due to the volume of her consumption, I’m constantly pumping which has been really exhausting. And when she’s going through growth spurts and feeding more or more frequently, I’m not able to pump quickly enough to match her demand. We’ve been trying the baby-led paced bottle feeding to avoid over feeding her, and we’ve also learned that sometimes she gives hunger cues (sucking, fists raised, head turning and panting etc) when she’s not actually hungry, so we sometimes offer her a pacifier which she seems to like using to help her settle into sleep (even when being carried and rocked). I suspect she just got accustomed to sucking her fists whilst in the womb (as she had her fists by her face in most of the scans we did).
I would like to get help to get back to breast feeding directly on the breast rather than having to rely on pumping. In addition, I would like to get some help in understanding baby-led paced bottle feeding better and if we have been doing it correctly. Finally I would like to understand/know what to expect from a baby that clearly had a larger appetite than her peers, and how to ensure that we don’t overfeed to prevent her tummy from becoming distended.
She was checked several times and each time confirmed to not be tongue tied, however the health visitor referred us to a feeding support team who we saw over zoom and the lady we saw seems to believe that Bibi has a posterior tongue tie (which apparently is a bit harder to diagnose). It’s difficult to rely on that though because all the other midwives who have seen her in person confirmed that she was not tongue tied, whereas the feeding specialist gave her diagnosis based on a video we provided her (I’ve attached the video here again for Amanda). We’ve booked in with a tongue tie practitioner on Monday who will see her in person and potentially perform the required cut if she indeed is tongue tied.
