Life with children is a blessing… yet exhausting, especially in the first 6 weeks postpartum.  Healing through the transformation your whole body, mind, and soul experiences over a childbearing year takes a lot of patience and a lot of support, especially when baby needs you so much.  In the first 6 weeks, at least, all other tasks need to be handled by someone other than mom so she can have the ability to focus on learning how to breastfeed this child.

While our baby might have reflexes, they’re born with to help them crawl up your belly and latch on, you’ve been shaped by your life experiences, which may not include nursing a newborn.  Nursing a newborn is not the same as nursing a 3-month-old baby when you both already have it figured out.  It’s so important to learn the optimal tips and tricks with the first baby so you have good muscle memory.

Your baby needs to nurse, a lot!  Breastfeeding is not just about nutrition and weight gain.  It:

• gives fat to nourish a rapidly changing brain
• maintains blood sugar
• develops their digestive and immune systems for life
• stimulates the vagal nerve to allow and develop nervous system regulation for life (which is vital for digestion, hormone balance, and detoxification) develops the hard and soft palate, nasal passages, tongue, necks muscles and ligaments… it’s the

Breastfeeding is the baseline of growth and health. Not breastfeeding (using a pacifier or bottle, stopping a session before baby is done, refusing nursing for comfort, or any other reason to not breastfeed on cue) is changing the baseline of health and growth for this baby.  The first 3 months are an important time when baby should be experiencing rapid developmental change.  Not just in their body, but in their brain as well.

In the first six weeks, baby has many developmental spurts.  A baby that is able to breastfeed on cue to a mother that is resting and nourished well, not having issues with latch, and supported to focus on learning how to breastfeed, will:

• almost never lose weight after birth
• almost never lose more than 10% of their birth weight even if they do lose weight
• not fall asleep while nursing (only if they’re truly full and then they’ll unlatch first)
• gain birth weight back by 1-2 weeks postpartum even if they did lose weight, and double birth weight by 4-6 months

Babies need more nervous system regulation (nursing) in times of stress (i.e. change, discomfort, home stress or busy-ness…etc.), illness, and brain development. In the first six weeks these growth and development times coincide with approximately:

• Days 2-4 as the immune system develops and breastmilk starts to increase
• Weeks 1, 2, 4, 6-8  &  Months 3-4, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18… whew… it’s a lot!

In those first few days, your colostrum is your baby’s immune system which helps protect against everything new a baby encounters and will be the basis of their microbiome for life. Their almost constant desire to nurse in these first few days helps your hormones change so that your milk starts to meet their specific needs, based on saliva feedback in your breast, and to expand to feed as many babies as you have birthed.  In fact, if you have twins that you only nurse on the same side each time, each breast will make different milk for each baby.

If you aren’t holding your baby enough, your baby will cue (lip smacking, noises, latching on fists, or crying) to affect your hormones to make you want to hold and nurse them more. This is when parenting begins and now is more about you learning to be giving and patient and meet their needs than it is about you “teaching” them not to rely on you because you don’t think they need to nurse a lot.  Babies cannot survive, let alone thrive, without their mother’s warm skin and milk available, often.  In a few, short, years they’ll be ready for more independence.

But 6 weeks is golden.  Around this time, baby can see more than the distance between your arms on your face, soothe easier as they become more comfortable in their environment, and their growth and development slow down for a bit.  Your hormones and thyroid should be past their most significant fluctuations, making it easier to manage sleep and stress.  Hang in there; these days are long, but the years are short!