When will I have milk?

Your real milk will appear on the second or fifth day after the birth of your child, depending on whether it is the first child, the level of fatigue after childbirth, how well your child learns to take your breasts, and how oftenand how effectively your baby sucks. Until your real milk has appeared, your child receives colostrum, a precursor to milk, very rich in protein, immune factors and other ingredients that bring a lot of benefit to your newborn. About a week you produce transitional milk, the composition of which gradually changes from predominantly colostrum to predominantly milk. By the tenth-fourteenth day after giving birth, your milk becomes mature. The following factors will help your milk to appear sooner and relieve you of many problems:

• mild birth;

• cohabitation with one's child in one ward;

• application to the breast as soon as possible, as often as possible;

• refusal of additional food from the bottle, if not necessary, caused by the state of health;

• counseling by a lactation specialist;

• reliable husband, friends and healthcare workers.

How often and for how long should I feed the baby?

"Look at your child, not on the clock" - this is the advice of experienced specialists in breastfeeding. Breastfeeding is not about solving mathematical problems;as one lactating mother put it: "I do not count the number of feedings, just as I do not consider the number of kisses."In the first weeks of breastfeeding, the baby sucks with varying degrees of intensity, chaotically and sometimes for a long time - even by the hour. Most often the child falls asleep during feeding, and then wakes up in half an hour and requires that it be fed again. Remember, the frequency of feeding more than the duration, stimulates the production of your hormones responsible for the production of milk.

Your nipples will not get sick because you feed too often, provided that you take the right position and your baby takes the breast correctly. Skip past the ears such advice: "Start with three minutes on each side and gradually increase the time by one minute for each feeding, until your child sucks for ten minutes on each side. Ten minutes is enough. "Not children wrote these strict rules, and not experienced nursing mothers. Often, two minutes of sucking may be enough to activate the milk-output reflex of a young mother. Mature, strong newborns may need more time to get a hearty meal, while greedy eaters can empty their breasts before the expiration of ten

minutes. After several months of breastfeeding, when the mother and child are in harmony with each other, many children are able to get all the milk they need in the first ten minutes, but most of the babies are still lingering to suck longer. Remember that the pain in the nipples is caused by a wrong breast grip and wrong sucking, and not the duration of sucking. Even three minutes with the wrong sucking or wrong capture of the breast is enough to make the nipples sick.

In reality, expect that during the first month or until the age of six weeks your child will take the chest on average every two hours day and night. Then the frequency of feeding gradually decreases. In the first weeks when you and your child set the appropriate level of milk production, allow your child to take the breast as often and suck for as long as he likes and how your rhythm of life allows. Once the level of milk production has been established and you and your child have arrived at a mutually convenient schedule, although frequent breastfeeding without a schedule is still preferable, your child may also agree to other forms of comfort, besides frequent attachments to the breast.