Got Milk? {Update!}

Ok, so in my last post I was raving about the wonderful little miracle supplement that is Fenugreek.  Well, I have a very important update!  Buyer beware!  Apparently my son is one of the rare cases where his stomach can't tolerate my milk with the Fenugreek :o(  Unfortunately I had to find this out the hard way.  

A couple of weeks ago I was putting my son to bed and I thought he felt a little warmer than usual so I checked his temp and it read 98.7 and his normal temp is around 96.4.  So, he was a little bit warmer than normal, but nothing to be concerned about ...or so I thought.  He woke up screaming around 12:30am and by the way he was screaming I knew something was wrong.  I rushed to his nursery to pick him up and he was BOILING HOT!!!  I immediately went into freak out mode!  I grabbed the thermometer to check his temp and he was 101.4!!!  I rushed down the hall to wake up my husband and tell him what was going on.  He's a paramedic, so it definitely helps calm this momma's nerves!  He said the best thing to do was to undress him and get him under a fan to try and cool him down and lower his temp.  Thankfully after about 30 min we were able to lower his temp down to 99.7 ...not great, but not over 100.  I nursed him and was able to put him back to sleep.  I camped out on the floor of his nursery for the rest of the night.  

The next time he woke up was about 1.5 hrs later ...not usual.  I checked his temp and it was still at 99.  I checked his diaper and he had pooped ...which he rarely does at night, so I thought that was odd.  My son's normal poop pattern was about once every 3-4 days since he was about 3 months.  So, I changed his diaper and rocked him back to sleep.  He woke up again within the hour and he had pooped again ...oh no, it's diarrhea!!  His poop was now super runny, green, smelled horrible and had mucous in it (sorry for the gross details)!!  Immediately we started doing research!  Unfortunately with babies every symptom they have could be a number of about 1,000 different things that could be wrong with them.  We narrowed it down to possible teething and the new supplements that I had been taking.

When you take Fenugreek supplements they are in fact magical because you can feel them working right away (or at least I did).  As I said in my last post, I doubled my milk supply within the same day that I started taking them!  But apparently the milk you start producing is more of the front milk (the sugary stuff) instead of the hind milk (the good fatty stuff that makes babies stay full and sleep longer).  It's funny because even my hubby had noticed a difference in the way my milk looked!  It looked more blueish/white (like skim milk) instead of a creamy yellow.  Poor little guy had his tummy full of sugar milk and he did not react well to it!  Now, this does not apply to all babies!  Some babies do not react to this at all, which is awesome, my little guy just wasn't one of them :o(

After about 2 days of my little guy's tummy being upset he FINALLY started acting normal again!  Before when he was sick we would talk to him and try to get him to smile, but he was just get the saddest look on his face and start crying :o(  When he woke up on the 3rd morning he was smiling and talking to me as if nothing had happened!  Talk about a sigh of relief for this momma!  The bummer was that I went back to only pumping 2-3 oz :o(

So, I started searching for alternative methods to increasing your milk supply.  The more I researched and read the more I learned that breastmilk is all about supply and demand!  Your baby tells your body how much milk he needs and while my baby was getting what he needed, I want to pump extra to have some stored up in reserves for him.  Thankfully I had a wonderful friend tell me about this wonderful little secret called power pumping!  It's a little demanding, but totally worth it!  What you do is hook yourself up like a cow to your breast pump for about an hour (best to do this at night or during nap time) and start pumping!  The trick is, you only pump for 10 min at a time.  Pump for 10 min, then break for 10 min ...pump for 10 min, then break for 10 min, and so on and so forth for the next hour.  It doesn't matter how much milk you're able to get in that session, but it helps to stimulate your glands to produce more milk!  After just one day of power pumping twice I was able to pump 6 oz on my own without any supplements!  Your body is truly an amazing machine that God designed!

Please let me know if you all have any questions about any of this!  I've done a TON of research and would love to help someone if they need it!  I'm pretty sure I'm going to look into becoming a lactation consultant because I really do have a passion for breastfeeding, other momma's and their babes!  I hope you all are having a fantastic week and Happy Friday Eve to all you working momma's out there (PS... I have no idea how y'all do it! LoL)