Please help me with my feeding woes
I feel like I've gotten myself into trouble with feedings, and I need some advice. I'm not able to consistently tandem feed, so most often I'm feeding the babies one at a time. Here's how it goes: I put on the one who is screaming, and he eats. During his time eating, the other one starts screaming. The first one loses his latch when he needs to burp, and is settled enough after the burp that I set him in a staging boppy while I switch to the other baby--even though I know that the first baby isn't yet done eating. I do this because I hate the screaming. While I'm feeding the second baby, though, the first one starts screaming in the boppy. And repeat.
The result is that I am topless all.day.long, with babies latching on and off for short, inefficient feeds. And that there is always one baby screaming beside me.
I am slowly getting the hang of tandem, but like I said, it's not consistent. And I find it utterly impossible to burp one while the other is still eating in a tandem setup, which means that tandem falls apart as soon as I hit the first burp need.
Help?
Re: Please help me with my feeding woes
I never could tandem well, so what we did in the beginning is feed one after the other. We kept them on staggered schedules for a long time. It does mean you're feeding all day long, but at least there are no hungry, screaming babies.
Also, at the beginning if anyone else was around, I passed the just-fed baby to them to be burped.
I hear that being able to tandem feed is great, but maybe it's worth setting it aside for a little while until they are older?
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I went through the EXACT same thing. Your post brought back the memories of my frustration and tears and the sound of my LOs screaming. Hang in there. This will pass and it does get better.
I would try to finish Baby #1's feeding and continue the feeding after the burp. There's no point in both babies having to scream. Next time, switch who is fed first. What I found helped sometimes was to put a baby in a bouncer at my feet, turn it on vibrate and also bounce the bouncer pretty vigorously with my foot. This usually soothed the waiting baby while I fed her sister. It seemed to work better than having them sit idly in a boppy. Hope it works. Don't give up!
Ditto Meshell! I found tandem nursing SO difficult at first and thought I'd never get the hang of it. Finally at around 3 months, we all just sort of "got" it. Having the right pillow was key for me..I started off using the Ez 2 Nurse pillow and hated it. I am petite, so there would be all this space between my body and the pillow that the babies kept falling into, and it meant they were too far apart and my breasts had to stretch to meet them! I went to a lactation consultant and she got me a new pillow, and helped me adjust my posture. That helped a lot, but honestly, it was just practice.
You are doing a FANTASTIC job...don't stress and don't give up. The first few months of nursing was one of the hardest things I have ever done, but if I could go back in time and tell myself one thing it would be "don't stress! It all works out great!"