All About Breastfeeding Podcast: Breastfeeding|mothering|parenting|pregnancy|postpartum|birth|expert Advice

Karey Northington is the owner of Northington Fitness and Nutrition. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in both Nursing and Psychology and is a certified personal trainer and nutritionist though the ISSA. She is passionate about helping others achieve their goals without restriction. Karey is also an IFBB professional athlete who competes in the bikini division and a published fitness model. Most importantly, she is a wife and mother of a sweet 6 year old boy, Nolan.

Can it be that some mothers do make enough, but think they don't?   Can it be that some mothers do make enough, but they want to make lots more? Can it be that some mothers don't make enough milk for their babies?

Betsy is a Native Texan and was born in Dallas, Texas. Her dad is an  episcopal minister and her mom is a Christian education director. She has 1 sister who is 22  months older. Betsy describes her family as a very loving and very supportive family for which she is grateful for. She had a great childhood and was always told that she could do anything in the world that she wanted to.  Betsy said that she always knew she loved babies almost from birth. She played with a lot of babies and babysat a lot  when she was a teenager.  

Very simply put, the way medications are passed on to the baby during pregnancy and during lactation differ.  The gestational age and doseage during pregnancy is taken into consideration.  The infants age and doseage is considered during lactation.  At one point, your baby may be old enough to handle a certain medication taken at a certain doseage and for a period of time.  However, the same medication, duration and dose would not be safe as it crosses the placenta and affects the baby more actively in utero.

 Amy is from Massapequa, Long Island, which is in New York.  Which was a huge and wonderful surprise to Lori as she also grew up in Massapequa.  We grew up about 10 minutes from each other!  We had fun going down memory lane for a few minutes before carrying on with the rest of the show.   We talked about what the culture was like in the 1950s and 1960s for our mothers and the reasons they did not breastfeed, which were for similar reasons. Amy left Massapequa to go to college, then lived in New York City, until moving to Sweden in 2000 Read More

 Your baby should have been gradually gaining back any weight loss from the first 4 days, until they were back to birthweight at 2 weeks old. Breastfeeding should not be painful for you. Your baby comes to the breast and feedings are comfortable for you.  You should not be experiencing any breast pain or nipple pain. When your baby is breastfeeding he should be relaxing at breast, focused on feeding, staying put and not coming on and off, multiple times during the feeding. Your baby should be feeding about 8 times a day.  Perhaps it is 7 or perhaps it is 9 somewhere in there would be normal. Read More

Helen has 2 daughters,  ages 24 and 20 years old.  She did breastfeed both of her babies and tells us that it was a very important experience for her and it really formed a lot of her thinking about the research that she did in the early days. 

There are actually quite a few reasons why you can struggle with early breastfeeding.  Here are some possible scenarios that you might find yourself dealing with a baby who is not breastfeeding well:    Probably the most common reason for a hard start is a premature birth.  When babies are born early it can make it more difficult for them to breastfeed. The reasons can be numerous so it is not helpful at this point to conjecture.  What we really want to do is say.. okay, this is the situation, now what do we do about it. Ohhh, I love this question because it is probably one of the most easiest questions I get to answer.

Engorgement is the swelling or congestion of body tissues. When we are referring to breast engorgement, we are describing the painful swelling that occurs when the breasts become  very full and very firm.  Sometimes the breasts are actually hard and all these sensations lead to very painful breasts.  They can feel very heavy, sometimes throbbing, you noticed your skin is quite stretched and sometimes this fullness and firmness leads to your armpits.  Engorgement can affect one or both breasts. 

Bed sharing is having the babies sleep in the same bed as the adults.  This is what I did.when my kids were young. I didn't know it at the time because it just seemed right and it helped me get some much needed rest, however,   Bed sharing was very common up to the 19th century.  People use to sleep in very close quarters to each other, places were small, sleeping with each other kept people warm at night.  What changed?    Houses got bigger, babies were given their own room, the baby crib industry grew and more and more babies were put in their own crib.  In the scheme of things, meaning bed sharing has been happening since the beginning of time,  This nightime habit is relatively news.  Bed sharing and co-sleeping has been shown to save babies lives, promotes bonding,and enables parents to get more sleep. Read More

Your baby is now 4-5 days old.  You are just beginning to get the hang of breastfeeding. Sure you might feel awkward with it all, however, you are now getting use to a baby feeding at your breast 8 times a day. You are continuing to experiment with different positions to find which ones seem to work best for you and your baby.  In some places you will find you need to use a pillow and a stool. Other places where you breastfeed, your set up will be different   Read More

The matter of need is somewhat open for interpretation, as are many things.  When I think of need as a modern woman, I think of - If for whatever reason, a mother cannot breastfeed her baby.  Whether it is because she has died she is too sick to breastfeed, she has been separated from her baby or she has no milk to provide for her baby. Need to woman centuries ago could have been defined as - She needs to get back to conceiving babies and the act of breastfeeding acts as one form of contraception.  Customs are for her to get breeding again as soon as she could.  The  need also arose from what was expected of her in society, which was to delegate all physical work to others to demonstrate her own and her family's high status.  

Bed-sharing is just one of the ways that a family might co-sleep, but it is frequently practiced by breastfeeding mothers. One of the biggest issues when it comes to bed-sharing is safety.   Some sources publicize bed-sharing as an unsafe practice, no matter how it’s done, but there are ways to sleep safely while bed-sharing if you follow guidelines for safe sleep surfaces and safe sleep sharing Read More

The first 24 hours:   If all went well with your birth and you and your baby do not need any special care, it is best if you do what you can to spend the first 24 hours just being with your baby.  We like to call it your "babymoon" time.  Your physical body and emotional mind has been through a lot of changes from pregnancy to birth to postpartum.  You have gone through a lot in the last 9 months.  Here is what you can expect the first 24 hours:   Read More 

The holidays are very stressful times with a newborn.

Becky Ramsdell is a Peoria, Arizona woman who is now a mom of two after going through 10 years of infertility and failed adoptions in the  process of building their family.  She had struggles with breastfeeding both of her babies but was ultimately able to work through those struggles and nurse each of them for their first year.  She went back to work when each of them was 3 months  old, so there was a lot of pumping and milk freezing involved.  Now she loves to share her story of hope and encouragement with other moms who are facing similar challenges with establishing nursing with their babies

In todays show, we are going to answer the question:  How do you tell If you need to be concerned about the latch. It is unrealistic to think that I can help you assess and fix the latch in this show, however, I find that education and prevention can go a long way.  I meet with so many moms who did not know the signs of a poor latch.  They just did not know anything was wrong until they started to have severe pain or until they went to a pediatric visit and found out there baby has lost too much weight.   Read More

Having worked with moms during 20 something holiday seasons, I have a pretty good idea about how stressful this time of year can be for you. On the one hand, when you realized you were going to give birth around holiday time, you had daydreams of how wonderful it would be to spend your baby’s first holiday season with friends and family. This evokes all warm and fuzzy feelings and excitement. This is absolutely true, it can be warm and fuzzy and so exciting. It also has a strong tendency to be anywhere between just a little bit stressful to kind of sort but doable stress and all the way to: this is so stressful I just can’t wait for all of this to be over. Read More

Lori talks about the fact that breastfeeding should not be painful. She talks about this a lot in her daily work. It is her working mantra:   If breastfeeding is hurting on Day 1, something is not right. If breastfeeding is hurting on Day 2, something is not right. And if breastfeeding is hurting on Day 3, something is definitely not right and I urge you to seek professional help right away.  This is her daily mantra to mothers, she says it many times a week.  Lori has  it on her website.  What Lori really would like to do is put it on every billboard, along every highway, in every town.  What Lori would like to do is put this mantra on her back car window shield.  She would like for this to be handed out to every mother in every childbirth education and breastfeeding class. When you enter the halls of the maternity unit or your birthing center or on the literature that your OBs and midwives give you, it would be great if this was  in big bold letters:    “Breastfeeding is not suppose to hurt“.   Her family h