Friday, August 19, 2011

The milk comes out of where??

I was blog hopping this past week and came across a forum where mommies were posting a list of things they wish someone had told them about going into labor. It was pretty funny and some of those I agreed with too. There are things that happen down there in the land of giving birth that you wonder... what the heck is going on here and why didn't anyone tell me! (I've got stories.) But one that really made me chuckle and was directly related to breastfeeding, and, well, this here Chichi Power blog being about BF, is the one I wanted to write about today... Where is the hole and when does it come in? LOL! Okay, backtrack, so when I was still pregnant with little bambina, I, as you know, had already made the decision to BF since before she was even conceived. But when I was pregnant, I never really noticed my boobs get any bigger or filled with milk. Like the milk never "came in" until way after I gave birth. (Hence my struggles with BF but you already know my sob story.) I would examine my breasts and nipples from time to time (wait, doesn't everyone do this?!) since I was preggers and doing research on all things preggers and BF, and I would look at my nipples an wonder, hmm, where exactly does the milk come out? I thought our nipples were just like baby bottle nipples, and there was a hole in the middle and that's where milk came out. But I looked at mine and didn't quite see a hole. Umm, I think this is it here, but I'm not sure. When I squeeze, nothing comes out. Well, my BF mamas, it turns out that we don't have one single hole in the middle of our nipple, but there are in fact, tons of little holes all around our nipples where the milk comes out. Ohhhhh, that's how it works! Oh, how, um, weird! Right?? But yes, unlike a baby's bottle, a real nipple has more than one hole, or port (duct). It actually may have as many as 5 to 25 holes or pores, usually one for each lobule in the breast. No wonder some babies have such a hard time transitioning from breast to bottle. They're like, yo, dude, this has one single drip when I had a whole bunch of milk coming out before. What gives? 

Oh, another thing I learned, was that when you have sore nipples from BF, yes, you can use that purple cream Lansinoh (which was my "breast friend" when I was first starting out oooh weeee!) but you can also just squeeze out some breast milk and rub it on your nipples and that will self heal the sore nipples. Who knew? Our bodies, ladies. Like I've said before, our bodies are amazing, aren't they!? As far as poor, weaned baby, luckily, there are some baby bottles that are at least close to the real thing. Like the Tommee Tipee for instance. Or the Mimijumi bottles. And, well, that concludes the TMI post. Sorry if this was breast and nipple TMI but I'm like that sometimes. I have very few inhibitions. If you've birthed a baby, you know how that kind of goes out the door... whether you want it to or not! 

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