Two Under 2
bribri5285
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nursing while pregnant with #2
bribri5285
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in Two Under 2
We just found out I'm pregnant with #2 and my son is 8 months old. I EBF and want him to be able to nurse as long as he wants, but I'm worried how the pregnancy with affect my supply. Any tips or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
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Re: nursing while pregnant with #2
I have found the book Adventures in Tandem Nursing helpful. It isn't exactly uplifting, but if you face a problem they probably address it! I found that it was helpful to focus on getting enough fluids and calories during the first tri. I am one of the people whose supply decreased a lot during pregnancy, but DS still enjoys nursing several times a day. We have had to supplement, but he is still getting approximately 16- 20 oz. of milk from me a day. I will say that I found the beginning of the pregnancy hard because of breast tenderness, but we are both back to enjoying nursing and will most likely continue after LO arrives. Speaking of which I had better go!
Edit- I forgot to say congratulations!
It was hard throughout, pain in first tri, dry nursing at the end if the second/start of the third but it was all worth it to me.
How will there be enough colostrum for the new baby? I don't know how that works...Do you have colostrum for so long or only a certain amount?
Read Adventures in Tandem Nursing. It answers this question and so many more. From what I understand, the colostrum will be there until your placenta detaches at the end of labor. That is what signals your body to produce milk within the next couple days. If you want to tandem nurse, you might want to limit your older nursling for the first day. Of course, plenty of the women in the book didn't either.
As far as my experience goes, I'm 9 weeks pregnant and nursing a 6.5 month old. So far my milk supply is great. However, I had a friend have two with the same spacing as mine, and her milk dried up almost immediately. Every woman is different. Just track your baby's output and growth, and you'll know if he's okay.
For us, I'm just going to exclusively nurse as long as possible. We introduced a sippy cup with water so that there is a way to feed supplemental formula if necessary, but so far DD doesn't have any interest in it. I'm usually a planner, but I realized this is one aspect of pregnancy and nursing where I really just have to go with the flow.
Congrats and good luck!
This
If DD was going to drink all my colostrum it'd be all gone by now as when I had her my colostrum lasted 3 days and then milk came in.
I'll spend about 5 days in the hospital (standard here) so DD'll come in every day and can nurse then but most of what I produce for the first few days will be just for the baby then when I get home DD can resume normal schedule. With DD she only needed one side per feed so I don't expect any problems with her sharing this time around.
I read the Adventures in Tandem nursing but found that a lot of the information didn't apply to me because DS was so young when I got pregnant. Thank The Lord, my supply has not been affected at all and I'm almost 21 weeks! I really just made sure I'm eating and drinking enough and hoped for the best. From what I could tell, if hormones are going to make your supply tank, there's really nothing that you can do to prevent it. I didn't pump at all and had no supply in the freezer, so I was devastated to think that I might not make it even to 1 year... I had planned to let DS self wean. It looks like so far that things are going great. My milk hasn't changed over to colostrum and DS is eating solids now and hasn't cut back on nursing, and things have been fine!
My only complaint was that for about 2 months, my nipples HURT so bad... but thankfully we are over that hump too and back to easy care free nursing again! Good luck and congratulations!!
had to change my sn
Miracle Baby #1 - March 2012