Before I got pregnant, my friends with children would always talk about the initial woes of breastfeeding. They would always say that breastfeeding was a nightmare in the early stages with a newborn and they’d recount their experiences of night chills, fever, sweating, nipple pain, nipple cracking, and so on.

I always swore that I would never breastfeed my kids because the thought of it made me uncomfortable and a lot of women would talk about how hard it was. I thought, if it’s that painful and stressful, why not just give my baby formula and call it a day? Of course everyone around me tried to discourage me from exclusive formula feeding by suggesting that I breastfeed for at least the first few months of the child’s life because of all of the benefits that it has for a child. My OB/GYN also tried to encourage me to breastfeed but I adamantly told everyone that it just wasn’t my cup of tea.

Around the sixth month of my first pregnancy, I started to waiver on my stance on breastfeeding. I started thinking about how I wanted to give my child the best and, for the first time, I thought about how I didn’t want to give my child formula if there was the natural, more organic option of breastfeeding. It was during this time that I started to research on how to make my breastfeeding journey easier.

I honestly can say that I had such a smooth breastfeeding experience because of the tips that I applied. The best piece of advice that helped my breastfeeding journey as a first-time mother is this:

RENT A HOSPITAL GRADE BREAST PUMP FOR THE FIRST WEEKS AFTER BIRTH

This was the BEST and MOST USEFUL advice that I applied! It was a game changer! At the end of my pregnancy, I watched a YouTube video on Jeannie Mai’s channel where she talked about how hard her breastfeeding journey was and, if she could go back and change anything, she would have rented a hospital grade pump from the hospital right away instead of waiting for her breastfeeding journey to be difficult before renting one.

So that’s what I did. By the time I gave birth, I hadn’t yet bought a breast pump as I had first planned to rent one from my hospital. When the nurse came in and told me to start pumping, I told her that I wanted to rent a hospital pump which she went and got for me. It was really cheap! It was only $25 for the duration of my stay at the hospital. Different hospitals provide different brands of hospital grade pumps. At my hospital, they provided the Ardo breast pump and I loved it! You can check it out here:

Keep in mind that I ended up giving birth by C-section almost a month early because I was told that my baby wasn’t moving as much during a scheduled ultrasound appointment. The nurse warned me that I probably wouldn’t start producing any breast milk for about 5 to 7 days since my body hadn’t gone into labour on its own and she encouraged me to pump every 3 hours. I was too lazy and tired to pump every 3 hours so I honestly only pumped like 2 or 3 times a day while also going to the NICU to visit my daughter to perfect the latch before she was bottle fed formula by the NICU nurses at each feeding. To my surprise, I started seeing milk after only about a day and a half! It wasn’t a lot – but it was something!

What I also think helped me is that I didn’t put myself under immense pressure. Since my baby was in the NICU and was fed every 3 hours with formula by the nurses, I knew that my baby was eating regardless of whether I breastfed her or not. This helped me relax and just focus on taking my breastfeeding journey one day at a time.

By the time I left the hospital after 5 days, I was combination feeding with both breastmilk and formula. I tried to continue renting a breast pump from the hospital to take home with me but all the hospital breast pumps that could be rented for home use were already rented out and there were none available. I decided to buy the same brand of hospital grade breast pump to continue using at home because, when I did some research, I realized that it was almost in the same price range as the standard breast pumps.

I continued the feeding schedule that the nurses at the NICU had started. Before every feeding, I would breastfeed for a bit (since I had a limited supply of breastmilk) and then I would formula feed my baby to make her full. There were some feeds (especially at night) where I wouldn’t even bother to breastfeed and, instead, would only formula feed.

Day by day, my breastmilk supply increased. My doctor and nurse told me that I could start exclusively breastfeeding if I stopped skipping breastfeeding sessions at night so, at six weeks postpartum, I decided to work towards exclusively breastfeeding. I cut out formula feeds a little at a time and I ordered lactation cookies to increase my milk supply. By the end of my sixth week postpartum, I was exclusively breastfeeding!