ILX Parenting 6: "Put Some Goddamn Pants On Before You Go Outside!" is a thing I say now

I supplementary fed both my daughters, it was a pretty cool time late at night and also allowed my wife some much needed sleep. The breast milk militants can go fuck themselves, obviously it's good food for babies, but shaming people who are already in despair is ugly and helps nobody, especially the babies.

Thirded on the BF militants. Like I said, Whatever Works is the absolute #1 rule.

I'm sure that I've written about it before on here, but just want to add this personal anecdote to the breast-feeding advice. My wife was trying to breast-feed our daughter and she was doing okay for a while with a few struggles. At some point, her doctor cleared her to go back on birth-control and in our frazzled new-parent brains, we didn't think anything of it. Immediately after she resumed birth control, her milk supply ceased and never returned. We had to switch to a full-formula diet after that. So just in case docs are still giving out that terrible piece of advice, don't listen!

formula is good. my daughter was 5lbs 1oz and stayed at the 1st percentile for weight until 3mos when we started supplementing with formula. she immediately got swole as fuck and has been around the 50th percentile for the last 3+ years.

Whatever Works is the motherfucking motto for sure

thanks, guys; it’s super-helpful to hear other people’s stories. My baby was v small at birth, too, which made feeding extra-hard for her, plus my supply is not overflowing, judging from pumping sessions. I am happy to supplement with formula, and have been for a little over a week on the advice of her pediatrician. The fact that it’s impossible to know how much she’s getting from the breast is driving me a little crazy; I hate the idea that she might be going hungry, but at least we have a plan. The lactation consultant isn’t thrilled we’re regularly supplementing with formula, but she’s not telling us to stop. She did want us to use a syringe thingy to supplement at the breast rather than bottles, but she was unable to get it to work in the office, so the chances that I’m going to figure it out on my own are nil, I’d say.

Scrolling to the bottom to be the voice from the heavens to say: formula is a god damn modern miracle and it is right and good to use it. You can use it to supplement your own milk production. You can use it because pumping is a punishment from the third circle of hell. You can use it because you don't fucking feel like breast feeding. Your tits, your baby, your choice.

And congratulations!!!! Baby Horseshoe!

I assume you named her Horseshoe?

Okay I've read and caught up.

1) anti medical bias in her comments about pediatricians and hospitals (baby was born in a hospital and I was pleased with the care I received) 2) intern who interviewed me being a white girl with dreads.

I'm not sure which is grosser.

My body was very bad at making and carrying a baby to term, but once we managed to get the baby out into the open air? It's like making milk was what I was born to do. The nurses at the NICU stopped accepting my milk deliveries because my tiny baby could not eat everything I was pumping, and they ran out of room in the fridge. But because my nips were like high pressure fire hoses and Ivy was a wee preemie, to avoid waterboarding her I had to use a nipple shield and damned if I didn't catch some shit for that from the militant breastfeeders. Like, I could shoot milk up her nose? Or I could feed her. WTF. Also I still supplemented with formula occasionally because sometimes I just didn't want to fucking deal with it all (and we didn't have room in our freezer for all the damn pumped milk either). And there was the whole "She's just using you as a pacifier" people, which always annoyed me because that's fine? I would like to comfort my child?

Anyway my only advice born of experience is that sleep training is probably a good idea at some point unless you don't mind having a seven year old who won't sleep without you and who I can only assume will still be sleeping with me until she goes to college.

Maybe if I hadn't used a nipple shield she would be happily sleeping in her own bed now.

My wife works in maternity and is a breastfeeding specialist and she is literally next to me saying 'ffs, do what works for you!' She struggled, particularly with our second baby, and still felt the pressure so it is hard to ignore the bullshit.

Congratulations on your baby!

thank you, carl! she’s a real beaut!

lol I can’t even believe anyone gets enough in the weeds of breastfeeding militancy to hate on nipple shields—like, why? it starts to just seem like control for the sake of control. Or unthinking rejection of anything that’s not “natural,” which, given the amount of scientific intervention we needed to even get pregnant in the first place, is kind of a non-starter to me. in general, the most intense evangelists for breastfeeding (which I understand the benefits of and would like to continue to do!) strike me as slightly out of touch with reality. my lactation consultant keeps telling me I shouldn’t be feeling any pain while breastfeeding, for example, and I just want to be like, well sorry I’m doing it wrong, but I am!

We do plan on sleep training her around 6 months, although I can already tell I’m going to be worthless at that task and my husband will have to be the stickler.

thanks, guys! we’re sort of struggling with feeding right now. Baby was slow to gain weight, but we had a good gain at the pediatrician’s today. I am *anxious* about my milk supply and her ability to transfer it. right now we’re supplementing with formula…part of me wants a voice from the heavens to tell me it’s okay to stop trying with breastfeeding, but I’m going to see how it goes up until she hits six weeks and reevaluate. if anyone had similar experiences, i’d love to hear how it went. (if people can even remember the first six weeks!)

― horseshoe, Monday, July 12, 2021 4:10 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

hi this is very similar to our experience (baby was born in march). she dropped too much weight after leaving the hospital, my wife was struggling with feeding, and we began supplementing with formula before switching to formula only at maybe 6 weeks. breastfeeding was making her miserable and adding a lot of stress and tiredness that just didn't see necessary for the supposed benefits. the switch was great tbh, we can regulate and track all her feeding and i can help out a lot more with feeding. we are still tired and stressed but generally speaking it's not because of feeding.

we did one LC appointment and i was really, really not a fan. i'm hesitant to say too much from my position as a dad but broadly i agree w/anti-medical bias and i think they take an oppositional position to pediatricians in part because if they didn't, it would be hard for them to justify their existence. (sorry to chinaski's wife and anyone else in this field lol)

Aw, congrats on your baby, cad!!! glad the switch to formula is making your family’s experience better!

I am willing to believe there are reasonable LCs out there, but the place I’m going is extremely woo woo and power of positive thinking-y, and it’s just a bad match for me.

congrats to you too btw! very happy for you.

my lactation consultant keeps telling me I shouldn’t be feeling any pain while breastfeeding, for example, and I just want to be like, well sorry I’m doing it wrong, but I am!

Oh, this has just reminded me that I had *intense* pain at the start of every feed for several weeks after birth. I kept hearing ‘if it hurts you’re doing it wrong’ from everyone but it turned out it was nothing to do with the latch, it was something to do with the let-down. I had to google it myself to find out, despite having on-ward BF specialists for the first six days (I was kept in with high blood pressure so they were on hand to get me started). Anyway, I would grit my teeth through the first couple of minutes until the pain went away, and then after month or so it didn’t hurt at all. Then there was no stopping us. Our son refused to take a bottle, despite us wasting £££ every single type of bottle on the market and that was a major pita for me, I can tell you.

The first thing I was going to write in my previous post was "everyone said 'if it hurts you're doing it wrong'" which is LIES, lies I tell you. The latch improved but yup it still hurt enough to nearly make me give up, both times. No-one mentioned nipple shields even once with my first when I was struggling, then mentioned while I was still in hospital with my second (with all the serious-face caveats of course) and they made ALL the difference.

Also, I tell everyone I can about D-MER because it's fascinating and also something no-one in any of my many breastfeeding classes/advice sessions etc ever ever mentioned (until I googled 'desperate depressed feeling when breastfeeding' - it's a really physical thing, let-down causes this very specific, fairly brief, but significant dysphoria)

I think one of the things I hated most about being a new parent is the sheer amount of bullshit, old wives' tales and general confused ideas etc that people happily feed each other over and over, and when you look into it it's unproven or just made up or really unhelpful (one of mine refused to breastfeed after about 10 months, and the amount of crap I heard about that made me really anxious).

I'd second advice to be 'consistent' with naps/sleep once you start getting into a regular nap schedule etc. Looking around at my friends there seems to be some correlation with that and having good bedtimes/sleep as a toddler/older child. But, it could be that they are just more resistant to attempts to regulate their sleep!

Babies' sleep changes so much in the first year that personally I don't think formal 'sleep training' before about 12 months would have been beneficial for us but we (well, spouse) did it with one of them around 13 months (I think there is even a thread on here?) and I've never looked back. Obviously depends on your own needs too e.g. going back to work.

I liked the lactation consultants at the hospital we delivered at, but they’re only available for phone consultations right now because of COVID. also, they did give us different advice than the nurses in the hospital, who gave us different advice than baby’s pediatrician. And the lactation consultants we’re seeing now are giving us a fourth set of advice.

just want to say this is really resonant as well. we were in the hospital for 5 days due to c-section and they had multiple lactation consultants roaming in and out, they were all nice but all said completely unrelated/contradictory things. the pediatrician who was on rotation toward the end of our stay was supremely unhelpful as well, suggesting a breast + formula by wire approach that we ignored because it was way too many moving parts for new parents + hungry newborn.

a couple weeks in we went to a different lactation consultant who suggested that our baby may need a tongue-tie procedure (which i'm extremely dubious of) while noting that pediatricians don't do that right now and we would need to go to a dentist or something. she also did a gotcha thing to me where she was like "show me how you hold the baby for feeding" and then told me all the things i was doing wrong, maybe this is personal but i loathe that style of instruction--i'm a rational adult, if you give me information i know what to do with it. in looking through her social and stuff i just found that in this case it was lactation consulting for well-off suburban moms for whom breastfeeding is a badge of honor/pride and that does not describe our family or what we're about.

wow fuck all that noise

lol we also had a lactation consultant trying to talk about the tongue tie! but the dr said nah

didn't mean to be at all disparaging re sleep training btw, it was more intended as "baby sleep be crazy" and great job if you can tackle it!

We had the tongue tie done as the lac consultant said it was borderline and we were at the extremely stressed try anything stage. Wasn't that traumatic (easy for me to say!) but as the main issue was milk supply it didn't really make any difference.

We didn't do sleep training and now she's five I've just graduated from sharing a bed to my own bed on the floor next to hers :)

Haha congrats!

We didn’t do sleep training but stayed in his room until he fell asleep up, then returned to ‘cuddle it out’ if he cried in the night. It was completely exhausting and I thought it would never end - there were some pretty desperate times. But since about age four he has mostly gone to sleep pretty quickly in his own bed after we’ve left the room, and he rarely wakes. The ongoing downside is that on the rare occasions we have needed to co-sleep, he has found it impossibly exciting and we’ve all had a terrible night.

One very helpful thing was Stet compiling a playlist of bedtime music, and then playing that every night after lights out, so he’d associate those songs with falling asleep. And it worked! We even had a CD of it in the car.

Adoption meant my son was on formula right from the start so we skipped all lactation related drama and had a very egalitarian care and feeding regimen. But we still ended up having to try a bunch of formulas to minimize his colic and ended up with the ultra specialized shit that cost us $300 a month purchased in bulk online and endless bottle washing (which were also insanely complex multi-part contraptions to minimize colic) and keeping track of how long half finished bottles had sat around before we had to dump it out etc.

But this all stopped five years ago and I never had to think about it again. And I’d be shocked if there’s any demonstrable difference between him and any breastfed kids

The whole tongue tie thing is…interesting. The LC in the hospital diagnosed our baby with it, and the LC I’ve been seeing post delivery confirmed that diagnosis. Meanwhile, the ped at her one week appointment (not her regular doctor, but another in the practice) didn’t see conclusive evidence of one. At her two week appt, her regular ped (who rules!) said that lactation consultants always diagnose tongue tie, and she referred us to a pediatric ENT specialist whom she trusts. She was like, he will be honest and tell you whether she has one for real. The pediatric ENT ruled also and took the time to explain what tongue tie was and why our daughter doesn’t have it; he showed us pictures and everything. I don’t think the LCs had any malign intentions, but it does seem like they overdiagnose tongue tie. It’s maybe symptomatic of making breastfeeding the ultimate goal of patient care rather than one of many worthy goals to balance. The harm would probably have been negligible had we taken the baby to a pediatric dentist to snip her tongue (I get the impression dentists are quicker to do this than ENTs), but giving the baby an unnecessary procedure on the off chance it might improve her ability to feed doesn’t really fit my idea of responsible care.

The whole tongue tie thing is…interesting. The LC in the hospital diagnosed our baby with it, and the LC I’ve been seeing post delivery confirmed that diagnosis. Meanwhile, the ped at her one week appointment (not her regular doctor, but another in the practice) didn’t see conclusive evidence of one. At her two week appt, her regular ped (who rules!) said that lactation consultants always diagnose tongue tie, and she referred us to a pediatric ENT specialist whom she trusts. She was like, he will be honest and tell you whether she has one for real. The pediatric ENT ruled also and took the time to explain what tongue tie was and why our daughter doesn’t have it; he showed us pictures and everything. I don’t think the LCs had any malign intentions, but it does seem like they overdiagnose tongue tie. It’s maybe symptomatic of making breastfeeding the ultimate goal of patient care rather than one of many worthy goals to balance. The harm would probably have been negligible had we taken the baby to a pediatric dentist to snip her tongue (I get the impression dentists are quicker to do this than ENTs), but giving the baby an unnecessary procedure on the off chance it might improve her ability to feed doesn’t really fit my idea of responsible care.

ugh sorry for the double post!

slightly off topic but are there any good 'having a baby' podcasts? i know there are millions of parenting podcasts but like an actual good one that cuts through the misinformation and weighs up different points of view (and makes you feel less crazy??)

interesting, horseshoe - I'm in the UK, didn't have any tongue tie issues but so many of my friends had it diagnosed I started to wonder what was going on. one had to go back for a second snip!

100% of my kids were diagnosed with tongue tie by LCs after birth despite no difficulty feeding. we didn't do anything because our pediatrician told us we didn't need to. i don't think she even bothered to confirm the diagnosis beyond a glance and "yeah sure", and may have been on the verge of rolling her eyes when we told her what the LC had said about the first one. so yeah it seems like it's overdiagnosed.

yeah i did not think it was appropriate for the LC to be suggesting a procedure for my baby given their qualifications. amazing to hear how common this apparently is.

tbf in our case neither of the LCs suggest doing anything. they just seem to have "baby's a bit tongue tied" in their mad libs library.

We also had a LC telling us our kid was tongue tied and we needed to do something about it. We didn’t go back to that person (for that and other reasons). I had no idea this was such a thing with LC’s.

Whatever works is good. The first few months of having a baby was the most draining chaos I’ve experienced, and it was of course much worse for my wife. It will get better!!!

as an onlooker the misinformation on tongue tie is so crazy!

i would hate to know how many families pony up for the operation based on advice from an ill informed “expert”

i am outraged for all of you

(congrats on the babby, horseshoe!! <3)

thx VG!!!

Here's my woo woo anti-science story: we had a planned c-section at 36 weeks because of vasa previa, which is when the umbilical cord is between the baby's head and the cervix such that if you go into labor and there's any pressure on the cord, it will rupture and very bad things will happen. For me this was diagnosed at the 5 month ultrasound. So I panicked (I panicked so hard they ended up hospitalizing me overnight to pee in a jug because my blood pressure went through the roof) and began web searching immediately because I hate myself, I guess? I came across a message board for doulas/midwives/LCs and read a post where they were debating the merits of the five-month ultrasound. Someone pointed out that this is the scan where they catch vasa previa, so she recommends her clients get at least this one ultrasound. And the consensus response was that if some babies/mothers died from an undiagnosed complication, that was a small price to pay for staying true to the ideals of natural birth and allowing women to rely on their intuition alone. So that was cool.

Luckily nobody said that shit to my face, but that was roughly when I decided to fully embrace the medical model of childbirth (sorry Rickie Lake) and do what needed to be done to get my child safely into this world.

ohhhhhh my lord. First of all, I’m sorry you went through that: vasa previa is scary! second of all, I know medicine has its pitfalls when it comes to prenatal care and delivery, particularly for black women, but whenever I hear people waxing poetic about natural childbirth, all I can think of is the long history of women dying in childbirth in large numbers. I’ll take medicine, thanks.

Lol the LC I’ve been seeing took an inventory of my labor and delivery experience at our first appointment, and both she and the dreadlocked white intern couldn’t hide a Look when I related that I had an epidural. I wanted to be like, no regrets; the epidural was magical!!! Because it was.

jesus carl, some people are lunatics. I've always been pro-hospital, medicalise anything I need, please!

I played my boys quincy’s “dude” and sly stone’s GH today. 😊

i liked this http://notokensjournal.com/non-fiction/sunbeam/

may be of interest to parents of kids with tempers, kids of parents with tempers, parents of girls, etc.

I know it's not the point of the article but I don't really agree with how the way in which a baby was born gets written into/ becomes emblematic of their personality.

haha fair (although i suppose it's better than using tarot to divine the baby's personality, which is apparently the writer's other interest, admirably absent from the article)

lol oh dear, no wonder the kid is mad (angry mad not loco)

Yeah it kind of reads like the author holds a grudge about those early baby days. Babies can be really annoying but it's really not cool to hold a grudge against them for it.

"'She has to have things her way, or she loses it,' I complained."

It's been almost 8 years since I was frequently around a four-month old but I don't recall Ivy having a way that she insisted on getting. Like, she cried a lot but what was she supposed to do? "Mother, I understand you are trying to work, but I am hoping you will consider taking out a boob for me as I am feeling peckish. Also, I've shat myself again."

Yeah honestly there isn't really anything four month olds want that I can recall except boob/bottle, sleep, and comfort (being held, appropriate temperature, diaper change, either being swaddled or not depending on the baby, my first very much hated it). 95% of crying, if not 100%, was due to one of those things, and the more aware I became of that the easier it became to have a baby.

also, lol carl agatha

I have a temper and my 2nd kid has a temper. I felt this article a LOT. Thanks for sharing.