Ever wonder how hormones and the gentle warmth of skin-to-skin contact can shape your newborn's first feeding experiences? We'll explore how the birth process influences the onset of lactation and the significant role immediate post-birth contact plays in stabilizing your baby's vitals and encouraging that important first latch.
Discover how your newborn's natural reserves support them through potentially sparse initial feeds and how continued skin-to-skin bonding can boost milk production while keeping your infant primed for nourishment. Whether you are gently arousing your sleepy baby or hand-expressing colostrum, be empowered with practical advice and insights to make these treasured first hours of breastfeeding a harmonious start to a lifelong bond.
Visit our website, here: https://birthlearning.com/ Follow us on Facebook at Birth Learning Follow us on Instagram at @birthlearning
Show Credits
Host: Angie Rosier Music: Michael Hicks Photographer: Toni Walker Episode Artwork: Nick Greenwood Producer: Gillian Rosier Voiceover: Ryan Parker
Ever wonder how hormones and the gentle warmth of skin-to-skin contact can shape your newborn's first feeding experiences? We'll explore how the birth process influences the onset of lactation and the significant role immediate post-birth contact plays in stabilizing your baby's vitals and encouraging that important first latch.
Discover how your newborn's natural reserves support them through potentially sparse initial feeds and how continued skin-to-skin bonding can boost milk production while keeping your infant primed for nourishment. Whether you are gently arousing your sleepy baby or hand-expressing colostrum, be empowered with practical advice and insights to make these treasured first hours of breastfeeding a harmonious start to a lifelong bond.
Visit our website, here: https://birthlearning.com/ Follow us on Facebook at Birth Learning Follow us on Instagram at @birthlearning
Show Credits
Host: Angie Rosier Music: Michael Hicks Photographer: Toni Walker Episode Artwork: Nick Greenwood Producer: Gillian Rosier Voiceover: Ryan Parker
Speaker 1:
Welcome to the Ordinary Doula Podcast with Angie Rozier, hosted by Birth Learning, where we help prepare folks for labor and birth with expertise coming from 20 years of experience in a busy doula practice Helping thousands of people prepare for labor, providing essential knowledge and tools for positive and empowering birth experiences.
Speaker 2:
Hello, this is Angie Rozier. I am your host and this is the Ordinary Doula podcast. We're hosted by Birth Learning. Go check us out at birthlearningcom.
Speaker 2:
So today I want to talk about a component of breastfeeding that's very important to understand about. We are going to talk about what is normal in that first 24 hours of life. So babies are born lots of different ways, right? They can be born after an induction of labor. They can be born after spontaneous labor, after very long labor, very short labor. They can be born after cesarean and, believe it or not, their birth, the way they were born and their labor process will impact breastfeeding. If someone has a C-section, then likely their milk will take a little bit longer to come in. If someone has spontaneous labor, like labor started on its own, their milk will come in more quickly and this is all a hormone response that the body goes through after the birth of a baby. It's all very awesome and normal, but when the body starts the process, the body responds a little bit better to milk production. So babies are born and we have one, two or three hours of an alert awake period, especially that first hour.
Speaker 2:
Babies go through quite a process when they're born of getting used to their new environment and all the differences about that being on the outside breathing, smelling, seeing, having, you know, bright light. There's a lot of changes physiologically as well for that baby. There's some anatomy changes that happen inside of their systems as they get used to being on the outside and those happen, you know, pretty right away so that the babies can adjust to things. And during that alert awake period the first hour being the most important is a great time to get the baby on the breast for those who are applying to breastfeed or chestfeed. So this would be doing skin to skin after birth immediately is ideal and spending as much of that first hour or more right on the mom's chest so that the baby can get used to everything and it will be right there ready to eat. Babies don't come out ready to eat right away but they start to want to suckle. They have an instinct to suck that comes on pretty quickly after they adjust to being on the outside. So skin to skin is ideal for the baby and mom afterwards. Skin to skin is so cool for so many reasons for babies and we'll have to do an episode all about skin to skin. But being skin to skin helps the baby regulate their temperature after birth, helps them regulate their breathing, their heart rate, and nothing that's not the mom's body makes sense to that baby at that point. All they've known their entire existence of you know 40 weeks or so has been the mom's body, how it smells, how it sounds. So that's her heart sounds, her breathing sounds, even her digestive sounds. That's what the baby's used to.
Speaker 2:
So when we help the baby transition in its most familiar environment, it will transition pretty well. Not every baby gets a chance to do that. We have some extenuating circumstances, of course. If babies need additional help or they're preemie babies you know, super preemie then they may need to be transitioned for additional help somewhere else. But ideally we want the baby to be right on the mom for delivery right after delivery no-transcript alert and awake one, two or three hours Watching for signs that the baby is ready to latch. So I have some couples that I've been at their birth and they're like, okay, is the baby ready to eat? And it's like three or four minutes old and no, they're not quite ready yet.
Speaker 2:
But within the first 15, 20, 30 minutes we can start looking for signs that the baby is ready to eat and we can recognize that by the baby's mouth and the baby's head and what they're doing and their hands. So their head is going to be searching, their cute little head is going to be searching for something to suck on. And when the baby is on the mom's chest there are little glands called Montgomery glands around the nipple that are on the areola and they actually put off a scent that the baby is going to recognize and it'll be very familiar to the baby. The babies will still have amniotic fluid scent and amniotic fluid remnants on their hands because they were just in amniotic fluid and Montgomery glands give off a scent. That is the same, so it's going to be a familiar place to the baby, give off a scent that is the same, so it's going to be a familiar place to the baby. And the areola for many women turn pretty dark, maybe enlarge and turn dark during pregnancy. This is to help the baby recognize where to go. So babies have kind of fuzzy vision when they're first born their vision is a little blurry to about 12 to 14 inches, which is oftentimes the distance between the breast and the mom's eyes, which is kind of cool. But they're going to be able to see those dark, large areola and kind of focus in on those, and so they'll smell it, they'll see it and with their hands they might have busy hands A lot of times.
Speaker 2:
Babies, they have some control of their hands in utero and may have their hands at their mouth very often and their hands are going to be busy working on that breast as well. So maybe they're just wiggling their hands, pushing their hands, kind of kneading the breast, trying to get their hands in their mouth. So we can watch by what they're doing with their head. We can also watch by what the babies are doing with their mouth. Their mouth is going to open, their tongue is going to start lapping around and searching for something. Those are signs that the baby's ready to be on the breast. Now there are.
Speaker 2:
You can do self-attachment methods. You can do guided attachment at this point to help that baby to latch. There's something called the breast crawl. That is pretty amazing that babies can do and they really will just kind of move, literally move their bodies to find the breast, bob their little heads, I would say, a lot of times. In the United States our postpartum care isn't quite set up to facilitate all the time and patience needed for the breast crawl. It does take quite a bit of time, but more often we are finding facilitated latching. So maybe that's the mom placing the baby on the breast, maybe a nurse swoops in and helps with that and does a lot of guided, like you know. Grab the breast, grab the baby and help those come together. There's no right or wrong way, it's just what you prefer.
Speaker 2:
So babies will hopefully latch on in that first hour. And a cool thing about that first hour is that the breast stimulation that happens in that first hour, ideally done by a baby, but in some cases, if it's hand expression or a pump, if we have babies that are going to the NICU or something, we can do this with a pump or hand expression. But that first stimulation in that 60 minutes impacts the breast milk supply for up to six months. So it's important in any situation to get breast stimulation within that first hour. So we guide babies to latch, sometimes more than others, and babies will hopefully latch onto the nipple and start sucking. Sometimes it's a perfectly good latch, sometimes it's not, but it's exploratory. The fact that the baby's shown some interest and has a desire is hugely successful. So every situation will be a little bit different. Like if we have a mom who's breastfed before, things might go really smoothly. If this is first time for mom and, of course, this baby, things might, you know, not be perfect, but that's okay.
Speaker 2:
The idea is to have effort here. So if we can get a good latch in that first one, two or three hours, that's going to be our sweet spot, because babies are going to go into a pretty deep sleep. For the rest, like for another 24 hours, almost to the hour that they were born, which is kind of interesting. So we want to take advantage of that awake time because they're going to be super sleepy During that sleep period where it's hard to rouse them and people like oh, we have such an easy, quiet baby. You do on day one, most people do on day one. Some babies will squawk and cry, but most are pretty quiet and pretty sleepy. They've just been through labor and birth. However, that was for them and they're kind of recovering and their bodies are built to have what we call brown fat stores. So they have the calories that they need for that day, even if they don't eat well, even if they don't latch very often or very successfully. So the brown fat stores will keep them satiated, keep them nourished for that first 24 hours. But a good rule of thumb is to offer the breast every if they're awake. If they do wake up, offer the breast. They're going to be rooting around looking for something to suck on. If the baby's not awake, try to wake them and we'll talk about some tricks on how to do that and offer the breast every two or three hours in that first 24 hours and for a lot longer after that actually, but offer it every two or three hours.
Speaker 2:
Now, baby's stomach size on day one is about the size of a marble. That's about the volume that their stomach can handle. So it's small. It's very, very small. That's like drops, right, and there's drops of colostrum. That's all we get. These feedings in the first day are anywhere from two to 10 milliliters. That's just drops. That's a tiny little feeding. So there's not a lot coming out of the breasts at this time. Usually it's colostrum. Sometimes there's nothing like. We don't see, we don't get a visual on anything. That's okay. That is okay. Don't be alarmed by that. Um.
Speaker 2:
So we want to take advantage of that first hour where that might be our best success in that first day. Offer the breast every two to three hours, um, and then ways to keep a baby awake, right. So skin to skin we talk about skin to skin right at delivery and that's amazing. But doing skin to skin throughout that first day as much as you can tolerate, right, the baby will be sleepy. But keeping that baby skin to skin, it's kind of like keeping the baby in the kitchen where they're going to be eating and they will soak up the information of that. Their body will soak up a lot of information there how things smell, how things taste, what it feels like, even the positions that they'll be in. And when their trunk especially that baby's core and trunk is touching the breasts, that is going to communicate with the breasts and telling them we need to make milk.
Speaker 2:
A hormonal response from the uterus. When the placenta comes off the wall of the uterus, that starts a huge cascade of changes in hormones, part of which starts milk production. Prolactin starts milk production. So we've got a lot of efforts there that are telling the body to make milk, and having the baby on your chest is one of them. So sometimes when I've worked in a lactation apartment at a hospital, would go into rooms and people got the cutest outfits for their babies newborn outfits, sweet little blankets and they were so excited to dress them in all these things. Sometimes it was layers. You know, we've got headbands and hats and adorable blankets that maybe someone in the family made and so they want to keep their baby in these cute things for pictures too. Right, a lot of people love to take cute pictures when their baby's brand new.
Speaker 2:
But I would encourage you to just do skin to skin. Take those clothes off the baby those first couple of days. Just keep the baby skin to skin as much as possible. It's cool to do skin to skin with another support person or family member, but obviously the milk benefit doesn't happen, but it's still good for the baby. So doing skin to skin will actually help a baby be alert and awake. Um, that will, you know.
Speaker 2:
And kind of rubbing their back. I kind of. I call it the fine art of irritation. So rub their back. We might think a back rub feels good. Babies usually don't like it. They'll squirm a little bit. Patting their feet like patting the bottoms of their feet, rubbing their head, kind of. You'll watch for their responses and a lot all of these efforts are just to kind of wake them up.
Speaker 2:
So we can also, oh, expressing some colostrum too. So if you hand express, just put your hand on the breast and kind of squeeze some colostrum out. Don't like pinch off the nipple or anything but back behind the areola, just kind of squeeze some colostrum out, and even those few drops will get the baby interested in the smell and the taste of the colostrum. And even those few drops are calories. Remember, their meals can be as big or as little as two milliliters at this point. So that can be really enticing for them to get some a taste of that and want more. Also the calories that it provides. If we have a sleepy baby who's just tired and that's they're kind of lethargic from from birth, then that gives them enough calories at that point to kind of perk them up and wake them up.
Speaker 2:
Sometimes we'll do hand expression in that first day or two and the hand expression is just manual pumping of the breast actually. So what you'd want to do for hand expression is kind of do some gentle breast massage around the areola, just like tap your fingers around. It doesn't have to be rough. Do that for a few seconds and then they will kind of start lapping with their tongue. We don't want to like dump it in, but have babies kind of invite that in. That teaches them too to use their tongue in eating and again those calories are going to be helpful for that baby and perk them up and in those that first day or two spoon feeding is sustainable, like that's all the food that they need. If you're spoon feeding on day four or five, that's, you know we need some other help. But doing some spoon feeding you can also do finger feeding. Just get some colostrum on a finger and put that on the baby's lips or in their mouth.
Speaker 2:
We talk about syringe feeding. I don't love syringe feeding or cup feeding, because cup feeding can be okay. But when we put the milk, when it's just such a small amount like two milliliters, when we put that in a syringe, we lose most of it on the sides of the syringer and the plunger. So using a spoon to kind of help the baby lap, or even a finger can be ideal to that. So we expect this first day to be sleepy. I've walked into many, many hospital rooms where the mom has said I can't get my baby to latch, I can't get them to wake up, they're not nursing, I'm just going to bottle feed. But when we know that that's normal then we kind of know what to expect. So you got a sleepy baby on day one. Day two is incredibly different, so we will talk about that in another episode. But know that day one is sleepy, do a lot of skin to skin, hand express if you need to, and that baby is going to learn how to breastfeed pretty well with appropriate support. Hopefully that helps you kind of know what to expect on that first hour, on that first day of after birth.
Speaker 2:
In regards to breastfeeding, if you want more information, we do have a class, a breastfeeding class you can take on our website at birthlearningcom. It's all recorded and it's in several different sections that you can choose what's applicable to you at the time or watch them in any order that you want. So check out our breastfeeding class at birthlearningcom and reach out if you need more support with the breastfeeding journey. A lot of people just need a little bit of help. A few tools and tricks usually is all it takes. A few little adjustments and they're well on their way to a successful breastfeeding journey. Thanks for being with us here today on the Ordinary Doula podcast. Go out and do something that helps someone else today. It'll make you feel great. Enjoy your day and hope to see you next time.
Speaker 1:
Thank you for listening to the Ordinary Doula podcast with Angie Rozier, hosted by Birth Learning. Episode credits will be in the show notes Tune in next time as we continue to explore the many aspects of giving birth.