bf class – Homeworks by Roan

I know once a mother always a mother. But I just had to say, this is my second time to mother a newborn and now turning 9month old baby body, who is my second and last child. This second time around, I want to make things right by exclusively breastfeeding my son and will use sustainable systems and materials in taking care of my baby such as cloth diaper, baby wearing and baby led weaning and baby sign language for better communication.

I have to confess my first born daughter was exclusively breastfed for only 1 month because I mixed feed (as per advised of my pedia) when I went back to work. I did not know that there were such thing as pumping or expressing milk to feed by baby and there are dangers in giving formula milk to less than 6 months baby. Thus, this second time as a mother to an infant, I decided to make this things better.

My first step is to get the right information. I attended breastfeeding classes under the breast feeding club of Ms. Abbie Yabot, which I will share here what I learned. Disclaimer, this is my personal understanding and I am not promoting my practice, I am just sharing them to all of you.

Here are the best practice and I can say by experience, worked very well in my success in breastfeeding.

1) Skin to skin contact to initiate breastfeeding bonding.
I gave birth in Baguio City, though we live in Quezon City. It’s cheaper to give birth in Baguio. For my CS and we stayed 4 days in the hospital in a private room, we only paid 9K since I have a Philhealth benefit of 19K and my son of 1.5K. It was really a blessing in the disguise that my sister who is a pediatrician do not health Philhealth accreditation hence it was her friend who attended to my son and made sure we had the skin to skin contact right after I gave birth. She was patient enough to hold my newborn until he was ready to nurse. She was amazed that my son wanted to nurse after 15 minutes as some babies takes about 30 minutes to do so. We had “unang yakap” covered and it happened when the doctors were closing my tummy from CS, making sure that no placenta was retained. Retained placenta will hinder breast milk production. My baby and I were reunited after 4 hours since I had to recover from my CS operation and he has to go through the newborn workup.

2) Correct latch
Since I attended breast feeding class, I have knowledge of correct latch to my baby. Also, the pediatrician visit us to see if our latch was correct and gave instruction on breast feeding. Also, she closely monitored my baby’s urine and passing of meconium. Click here for info on correct latching.

3) Supplementation
I continued my prenatal vitamins. I take the number vitamin and supplement of the world Nutrilite organic supplement. Please click here what other moms can say about Nutrilite Double X

I returned worked at 2 months of giving birth tough I was CS and I was manually pumping at work every 2 hours. And after 2 months of manually pumping I got really tired and it was taking so much time from my work.

Then, there was a sudden decrease of my output from typical of 2.5 to 3 oz. I was getting 0.5oz per pump which was alarming. I applied what I learned from my BF class and from internet research.

In my fourth month of ebf, I acquired Medela Freestyle Double Electric pump at Php19K by God’s amazing provision. I invested on this high grade pump since I plan to EBF my son for the next 19 months and beyond 2 years old.