World Breastfeeding Week: Sharing our journey

Both my girls have been breastfed into toddlerhood – Jessica until she was 17 months old and Sophie is still going strong at 21 months with no sign that she is planning on stopping any time soon! I’ve always been quite determined where breastfeeding is concerned – with Jessica it felt very much like the one thing that I could do for her that no-one else could and during those days when I felt helpless seeing her on PICU, even just expressing for her was a big comfort. With both girls, breastfeeding has been challenging at times. I’ve blogged in the past about the challenging moments on our breastfeeding journey and as this week is World Breastfeeding Week, I’m sharing them again here:

• In the beginning – the start of our breastfeeding journey: expressing in the early days with Jessica and the struggles with latch and positioning with Sophie.
• Stress and supply – realising that not looking after myself whilst Jessica was in hospital was affecting my milk supply.
• A ban on mummy milk – the post-op complication that meant Jessica was not allowed to have breastmilk for six weeks.
• Expressing and sharing – six weeks of exclusive expressing and donating my milk to the milk bank.
• Back to the breast – trying to re-establish breastfeeding when Jessica was allowed to have my milk again.
• My baby, the vampire – the joys of teething!
• Night nursing and restless legs – has anyone else suffered with this?
• Milk blisters – how to treat them.
• Breastfeeding acrobatics – the challenges of trying to feed an active toddler!
• Breastfeeding and anti-depressants – the two don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
• Night feeds – a poem about the beauty of those snuggly nocturnal feeds.
• The day I flashed Santa – stopping expressing in a hurry is never a good idea!

The ‘Keep Britain Breastfeeding’ scavenger hunt is running across several blogs during World Breastfeeding Week with bloggers sharing their experiences of breastfeeding to help encourage other mums with their breastfeeding goals and promote breastfeeding in a positive way. There is also a giveaway running as part of this. As I only found out about World Breastfeeding Week after it had started, this post isn’t part of the official blog hop, but you can find out more about it here.