Breastfeeding Bliss for Bjorklund Boys (and Mama)

Breastfeeding has been challenging to establish for our family, but we are getting there! We have been doing "triple feedings" which consist of tandem breastfeeding for about 20 minutes, then giving the boys a chaser bottle of expressed breast milk or formula (hopefully mostly breastmilk) and while Tor is giving the bottles, I them pump in order to have more expressed breast milk for the next feeding, as well as to give my body the signals that it needs to produce more milk. Needless to say, it is time consuming and a whole lot of work...not to mention not very sustainable for when Tor goes back to work.

We rented a scale last week so that we could determine how much milk the boys were getting during breastfeeding. We weighed them before they ate and then after and the scale is accurate enough to determine the weight difference to the gram. One gram equals one milliliter of milk and 30 milliliters equals 1 ounce. Lars was consistently getting 2 ounces in his sessions at the breast, but unfortunately Odin proved to be only getting half an ounce in the same time at the breast as his brother. Armed with this data we went to an appointment with the lactation consultant on Thursday and we got the go ahead to feed Lars from the breast only and a referral for Odin for a speech therapist (no he's not talking yet...they just know what the mouth is supposed to do).

Since Thursday Lars has only been eating from the breast and is doing great! And since Lars hasn't been needing any expressed breastmilk in a chaser bottle, Odin has been getting it all...so that means no formula except for the one time I couldn't pump since we were on the road! Once we get Odin's sucking issues figured out, triple feedings will be no more...the boys will do all the work! Yeehaw.

Yeah, you knew with data I'd have to do something with it...these graphs show the chaser bottle data for 2 weeks before our appointment with the lactation consultant. The top graph shows Lars' data and it shows that he got more and more from the breast. Odin's graph shows that the volumes in his chaser bottles haven't really changed (he's not getting any more from the breast over time), but the amount of formula needed is decreasing. All good news!