The Nursing Chronicles Part 4: Beating Thrush & Gentian Violet Tips

With August being National Breastfeeding Awareness Month, I decided to write a series of posts with respect to my breastfeeding experience as a first time mom.  In my first three posts, I detailed our struggle from latching to thrush to Sami's frenulectomy procedure.  If you'd like to catch up, you can check out Part 1, Part 2, & Part 3.

The Nursing Chronicles Part 3: Tongue & Lip Tie + Frenulectomy

Over the last two weeks, I've been detailing my breastfeeding experience as part of my Nursing Chronicles series.  I left off last week in Part 2 where it was confirmed by our second lactation consultant that Sami had both a tongue and a lip tie.  Thanks to that at-home lactation visit, we were finally encouraged to book an appointment with an ENT to have his ties revised.  If you'd like to start at the beginning of our journey, you can check out Part 1.

The Nursing Chronicles Part 2: Thrush & Tongue Tie

Last week I posted Part 1 of my Nursing Chronicles, where I detailed the first 2 weeks of our breastfeeding experience.  To sum up my last post, Sami had chronic latch problems due to a number of factors.  In addition to our latch issues, I developed mastitis within one week.  After being prescribed a round of antibiotics to treat the infection, I began noticing little white patches in Sami's mouth which I suspected were oral thrush...

The Nursing Chronicles Part 1: The First 2 Weeks

For over a year now, I've had some miscellaneous thoughts regarding my breastfeeding experience scattered in a single blog post that has sat as an unfinished draft.  However, with it being National Breastfeeding Awareness Month & World Breastfeeding Week, I felt like it was the perfect time to share my story & all the challenges we went through to get to where we are today.

Currently, Sami is almost 16 months old & we are still nursing about 3-4 times a day.  I always said I wanted to make it to a year, but somehow that year came & went and here we are still going strong.  I'm so thankful that it's like second nature for us now, but it was not an easy road in the beginning.

Being a new mom can be extremely lonely & isolating, and it's nice to know that you're not the only one going through those tough times.  I hope that by sharing my story I can give encouragement to other mamas out there who may be going through a rough patch.  It will get better!  I'm also hopeful that my story might inform & educate new moms on topics they should be aware of for their own sake - there were SO many things I didn't even know to look out for until it was too late.

So where to begin?  As I sat down & tried to recall all the different topics & stories I wanted to touch on, it became clear that I actually had a lot to say about the ups & downs of breastfeeding.  I decided to break up my post into a mini blog series instead.  Part 1 of this series will cover the first couple of weeks after Sami was born.  Who knew so much could happen in just 2 short weeks?  Here we go....