From breast to bottle

With a new baby in the house, I don’t easily give up a chance to sleep during the night. But yesterday I opted for a night in front of the computer instead of in bed.

I had one of those Google-emergencies. At midnight I decided I had to start expressing and give a bottle instead of the breast. I’m working my way trough the list of breastfeedng problems, and my latest diagnosis is thrush on the nipples, making it very painful to breastfeed. I was desperate to find an alternative to having Baby Girl latched on the breast, and decided to take the breast pump out of the cupboard instead.

The issue was that I had no idea how to feed Baby Girl with a bottle. I hadn’t been planning on feeding her with a bottle before she was four weeks old, and I also hadn’t been planning on changing my feeding methods in the middle of the night.

This was certainly not Plan A. But it worked. After watching a video of how to use the Medela Calma bottle, reading about how to calculate the amount of milk a baby should take per feed, and researching bottle-equipment sterilisation processes, I was good to go.

Perhaps even more than good to go. I had 150 ml of expressed milk at hand, and felt a real sense of achievement. It was almost like putting a monthly issue to bed an hour before deadline

Tags: Bottle-feeding, Breast pump, Breastfeeding, Expressing, Medela Calma, Thrush