Breastfeeding Guest Post - A Man's View.

Jydan will be SIX MONTHS in just over a week. To celebrate that I've been feeding him for (almost) six months I'm doing a 'guest post call out' on the topic of; BREASTFEEDING! Until Jydan turns six months.
If you want to write a guest post check out my original guest blog post here.

My husband, Tim, has joined in and has written a guest post on breastfeeding and it's REALLY worth a read. Really interesting to read and understand a man's perspective... Take a look :)

 

Harley had always said that she wanted to breastfeed. Not really knowing a great deal about the whole thing I was not going to argue, especially knowing that the only obvious part of it all was that it was free and that was the thing that had sold me. After all I didn’t know how we were going to afford to survive on one wage with Harley being off work for so long. So that we could both learn some more Harley enrolled in a breastfeeding class at the hospital and dragged me along to it. I wasn’t real comfortable with this at first cause I thought that I would be the only male there and felt weird about it. We found out that friends of ours that were pregnant around the same time we were had enrolled to do the same class on the same night. I thought this is great but my mate didn’t end up going only his wife so I was still a bit apprehensive in going to this class. We went along to it and when we got there I wasn’t the only male in the class there were about 4 other guys there, thank god. But when the class finally got under way the nurse that took the class had this strange way of making all the males feel a bit uncomfortable at the start by trying to break the ice with them. After a while all the guys in the class including myself were a little less uncomfortable about the whole thing. This information session taught us a lot about the benefits of breastfeeding.

It wasn’t until Jydan was born that I had to deal with Harley breastfeeding our baby. It was straight after the cesarean in the recovery room that Harley attempted to first breastfeed him and he wasn’t interested is all he wanted to do was sleep. The first few days were really tough on getting him to breastfeed because he had a tongue tie and wouldn’t latch on properly. After we had his tongue tie corrected he didn’t have many problems latching and could quite easily be breastfed. When we had trouble with Jydan breastfeeding the midwives would help Harley to express the colostrum. It’s a weird experience to see your wife sitting their being milked like a cow by a nurse to give your child a feed. Even weirder was the fact that one of the nurses was male and that made me feel uncomfortable. After a while Harley become better at breastfeeding Jydan and didn’t require help to do it.

When we first came home with Jydan and would have visitors Harley would feed him in our bedroom cause she wasn’t comfortable feeding in front of friends and family. Now Harley has become very confident in feeding around people.  But it hasn’t always been smooth sailing with it, at one stage we believe Harley’s milk had began to dry up. If it wasn’t drying up it was possibly just a growth spurt from Jydan which had made it difficult for her to feed him. It was getting quite bad so rather than let her give up on the breastfeeding which she had been adamant on doing for a long time I encouraged her to buy a breast pump and to pump between feedings to increase her milk supply. If I had not encouraged her to do this she probably would have given up on the idea of breastfeeding at this point. Now as Harley has gotten more confident with breastfeeding she has found it to be a lot easier to feed in front of family, friends and complete strangers. Although some strangers still find it weird. Breastfeeding has become a normal necessary part of our lives that it no longer seems strange to me.

If there is one it of advice I can give expectant dads out there with wives and partners who want to breastfeed is all I can say is be supportive of them and even if they think they can’t do it at times support them through it and encourage them to persist with it. As it is not only your finances that are benefited by not buying formula but the many benefits that your baby receives from being breastfed are outweighed by the reasons for giving up and using formula. Not only is good for the baby and your finances but mothers really enjoy feeding their baby this way so support this decision and encourage them to keep trying when they think they want to give up guys.

-Tim