Home Forums Breastfeeding Breastfeeding Yay for abf'ing!!

Our baby boy came home to us on 3/8! He's now 8 weeks old and nursing like a champ!

We picked him up on a Thursday night and by Saturday afternoon, he was latched and hasn't had a bottle or formula since.

My partner and I are both nursing him, so figuring out the schedule of who should nurse when is challenging, but it's still way easier than bottles. We don't even have to supplement at all.

I want to tell you all the way we got him latched. We used a syringe full of bmilk and squirted the milk over my nipple so that he got some in his mouth. He was willing to put his mouth near the breast, so when he did, he got lots of milk. It took about 1 minute of this for him to realize what was going on and then he just latched on!
He needed the syringe to get going for another day, but since then he's figured it all out and latches like a pro.

We know we got lucky, but I'm not sure it would have been this easy if we hadn't lucked upon this approach. We were going to try to wean him off bottles onto finger-feeding or cup feeding, but I'm so glad we didn't! And we didn't have to try a supplementer, which we really didn't want to do.

I'm so glad that we came across the idea of abf'ing and the protocols and everything. We look forward to a long nursing relationship with our son.

How great that you were able to get him to the breast so easily. Sounds like everything is going well. Keep us posted on your progress, it is such an encouragement to all of us.
Refresh my memory did you and your partner both do the full protocol?

He's still doing very well. He loves to nurse. Sometimes he seems to prefer one of us over the other, but such is life.

I did the accelerated protocol: bcp & dom for 6 weeks, then pumping, dom, fenugreek since Thanksgiving. Stopped fenugreek when I got up to 20oz/day because that was my limit for comfort. Pumped between 3-6x/day, depending on my mood and work/school schedule.

My partner didn't do bcp or fenugreek. She started dom & pumping in Oct. and pumped 3-5x/day getting up to 15oz/day max.

We started out doing a 1am pumping, but stopped that sometime in December because we needed the sleep and figured we'd lose enough sleep once the baby came (which is true!)