breastfeeding

In this post, I hope to sum up my experience breastfeeding. It is a pretty large, wide topic, but I'll try to sum up the major points as best as I can.
For me, breastfeeding sucks. It is in no way fun or easy for me to sit there and be patient while the baby eats. However, I am going strong at 8 months. Why do I do it if I don't like it? Because I know it's best for my baby, and that is good enough for me.
Engorgement. I did not feel even remotely normal until like 6 weeks after delivery. My boobs looked so big, I felt ridiculous and had no clothes that I look remotely OK in. Even now, after 8 months, I still feel super self conscious. At least now, I no longer leak all the time. For the first 5 months after delivery, leaking was a constant in my life. I would start spraying milk everywhere before I even had a chance to jump in the shower, and I would keep dripping once I got out of the shower. So annoying to deal with. I would put a spit up cloth under my boob while feeding so that when Ben unlatched I would not get milk all over me. That's how bad it was. Thankfully, after like 5 or 6 months those issues have pretty much vanished.
Beginning of breastfeeding. I used a nipple shield the first couple weeks, to allow my nipples to adjust and Ben had an easier time latching to the nipple shield than the nippled itself. After a couple weeks I started to try it without the nipple shield. It took like two days and we were nipple shield free and doing it all on our own. I was very proud of myself for that.
However, once the nipple shield was off, Ben took a lot longer to nurse. For the first 3 months, I would say Ben took 45min to an hour to nurse at each feeding. He was super slow, which made it super not fun for me. Plus for a couple months I was feeding him every two hours (because he has reflux, which I will talk about later). So, it was basically, breastfeed for 45 min., burp for 15 mintutes, awake for 15 min. Baby naps for 45 minutes and then do it all over again. It was on again, off again...it was torture for me.
Finally, at like 4 months old Ben was ready to go to a 3 hour schedule and he only took like 20 minutes to nurse. Once he made the transition, it was wonderful. I felt just a little bit freer! Yeah! These were the good days of breastfeeding.
Then, once Ben was like 6 months old, nursing became harder and harder to do because he would get super distracted. Now, at 8 months old, I cannot even feed him with my husband in the room. Any sound Corey makes and Ben is like what was that? Same thing with the dog, the dog needs to stay out of the room. And Ben sees his dad and the dog everyday. So imagine how hard it is to feed him elsewhere, like at church or in the car. Super frustrating. It makes it really hard to tell when he is full and whether or not he is just distracted.
I did take the time to show Ben how to drink from a abottle when he was like 5 weeks old. And once he got the hand of it, Corey could feed him a bottle while I went out for a girls night and it allowed my Mom to feed him when we would visit her. I would always pump, so he only had breastmilk in the bottle. However, between 5 months old and 7 months old we never bothered to give him a bottle because schedule wise and I was never gone when he needed to eat. This was a big mistake, because then when I tried to give him a bottle, he was like NO WAY!!
So, now I have an 8 month old that will not take a bottle. We are working on the sippy cup, but it is slow going. This is super sad for me because I was kinda hoping to wean him by the time he is 10 months old in hopes of enjoying a family vacation without the worries of nursing. I haven't given up hope yet, afterall I have a few more weeks. But, the fact that he does not seem to like formula makes it even tougher.
If I could do it over again, I would have given him a bottle more frequently and slowly mixed in formula so he could get used to it's taste. That way when weaning time comes it would be a smoother transition. For the next one I will definately keep this in mind. For Benjamin, we will just have to see how things play out over the next couple months.