The Ordinary Doula Podcast
Welcome to The Ordinary Doula Podcast with Angie Rosier, hosted by Birth Learning. We help folks prepare 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.
The Ordinary Doula Podcast
E62: Breastfeeding Method: Dinner Dessert
This episode explores the intricacies of breastfeeding, focusing on the timing and duration of feeds. Listeners learn to embrace intuitive feeding methods while considering the importance of community support for their breastfeeding journeys.
• Importance of understanding breastfeeding history and cultural practices
• Encouraging skin-to-skin contact to facilitate breastfeeding
• Introduction to the "Dinner and Dessert" breastfeeding method
• Clarifying how breastfeeding duration varies over time
• Fostering patience and understanding in feeding practices
• Promoting the importance of seeking lactation support and community
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 Frampton
Voiceover: Ryan Parker
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 and welcome to the Ordinary Doula podcast. I'm so glad you're here today, wherever you are, whenever you are listening, welcome, welcome to our little podcast. We try to provide information about all kinds of topics surrounding birth, pregnancy, labor, um, postpartum, lactation all that cute little package of life. Some people will do this once in their life and it's a big deal. Some people do this several times in their life and it's a big deal. This is an event that takes your attention right, like being pregnant, having a baby, um, that's something. That's not an experience that just slides right by. It kind of gets our attention. So people do give a lot of focus and we hope to be a space and a place that can provide some valuable information and focus during this time. Hopefully you find something useful here and or skills you could take into the rest of your life and find. The empowerment is my favorite piece of this. But the joy, the empowerment, the knowledge, the information that can follow into pregnancy, birth, postpartum and breastfeeding. So today our topic is going to be kind of breastfeeding oriented for sure. So I'm going to talk about the timing of breastfeeding. There's a lot of scripted ways to feed a baby. There's schedules. We don't want to go too long between feeds or you don't want to be feeding too close together and the amount of time that we feed. It seems like a whole lot of recipe type stuff that we're doing, like you have to do it, like this Very formulaic, and that that might be the case. Yes, there's some scripted things you want to do and I like to.
Speaker 2:I always like to think about back, like what did they used to do before? We had this knowledge, this information? How were we different when we did that? And I think back before, when you know when breastfeeding was and I've studied the history of breastfeeding. I think it's fascinating. I actually did a thesis on it about 25 years ago, um, and it's shifted so much over the decades, right, um, but back before there was all of the stuff around it, right, the surrounding equipment with pumps and um bottles and efficient bottles anyway, and, um, all like nipple shields, haukas, we've got all this stuff bottle warmers, bottle sanitizers, um schedules and apps, like people just kind of fed their baby whenever, whenever the baby showed signs of hunger. So that's one method, right, that's, um, a very, entirely fine method to look at in most cases, like, just be intuitive about it with you and your baby.
Speaker 2:You do have to spend a lot of time with that baby to read the baby's cues, and I think that people in other parts of our society and history and certainly still other parts across the world, that baby is constantly with a caregiver, generally the mother, so they can do very intuitive feeding and they're not scheduled. However, so many times in our culture and society we are pretty prescriptive about um feeding things. So we're gonna talk about breastfeeding and um, just one little component about it and that's the timing of a feed and not as far. Not we'll talk about later about how frequently, but I want to talk about um, and we probably actually already have in an episode, but I want to talk about the duration of a feed. Um, so in the beginning, with breastfeeding, for someone who's setting out to breastfeed, we need that milk to come in right and that milk production is based on breast stimulation.
Speaker 2:Breast stimulation can be done with a baby skin to skin. That's one method and it's a pretty incredible one. It's pretty effective actually. So skin to skin, like baby doesn't have clothes on, maybe a diaper, for sure Mom doesn't. The baby and the breasts are totally in contact. A lot of cool communication goes on there between mom and baby to help milk production and to help baby be able to breastfeed easily and well. Then we also have how frequently we're feeding, so early days that tiny little tummy we're going to be feeding every two to three hours. And then the timing, like how long to feed people. When I work in the hospital you know we're with brand new babies in the hospital. They're hours to a day or two old. The milk's probably not in yet. That usually happens on day three and a lot of times people will do which is totally fine, equal on both sides, right, we're just getting colostrum, low volume of colostrum, it's all the baby needs, which is great. So maybe we do 15 or 20 or 30 minutes on one side and on the other side. Fine, it's equal, equal. That's great to bring the milk in.
Speaker 2:However, a lot of babies, after that milk comes in um will shift, even like on their own. They'll kind of work into this little pattern of what I call dinner dessert. So they might start on one side um of feeding and after that milk is in, I encourage you to just let that baby go as long as they will on that first side, till they come off till they fall asleep. In the beginning that might be 10, 15, 20, 30, 35, even 40 minutes. We hope not if 40 is kind of long for just one side, but it might. You know, the time varies for sure. But let's say an average of 20, 25 minutes on that first side. And, yes, take them to the second side, which I can almost guarantee will be much shorter than the first side. So we might have a total of 30 minutes for this feed. But the first side was 23 of the minutes and the second side was seven of the minutes.
Speaker 2:So what's good about this, the dinner dessert method, is that there's always milk in the breasts. It might be, you know, drizzling, kind of just dripping. It might be gushing, depending on how long since the baby's eaten, but there will always be milk in the breast. So when that baby starts a feed so they haven't eaten for two or three hours, they're ready for some food, right? They're they want, they want to eat, they're hungry, and that the the milk that is in the breast. It's kind of like the soup of a seven course meal. So if we just did 10 minutes, 10 minutes that baby's going to get a whole lot of soup. Now, I love soup, but, um, maybe you want a little bit more substance to your meal, so this might be like I don't know, really kind of weak soup, a broth or something right. Um, the milk that gets made in the breast as the baby starts to suck comes a little bit later in the feed.
Speaker 2:So we have what's called a letdown. Probably you're familiar with that term. I had a client one time the dad, english was not his first language and I was doing some postpartum lactation visits with them and we were talking about the letdown and it was the cutest thing. The dad. He had this little shocked look on his face, a little bit sad. He's like, oh, we're letting the baby down. I said, oh, no, no, no, not like that it's. It sounds literally yeah, let down sounds like that. But let down of milk is different. It's just as a gush of milk and the breast will create gushes of milk or let downs, sometimes several times during a feed. So the baby, the first let down, generally happens within 60 seconds or so. Sometimes it's fast, sometimes I work with babies I'm like we got to let down in 10 seconds. A lot of times you will hear that let down. You'll hear the baby gulping, trying to.
Speaker 2:I call it milk managing. They're just managing the milk that's suddenly flowing. So that first let down might be that fore milk, that's the milk that just kind of sits in the ducts. It's hanging out in the breast waiting to be eaten back in the other, the further back ducts of the breast, as the baby starts to suckle and do breast stimulation this can happen with pumping as well.
Speaker 2:Then we have what I call new milk being made. This is new milk that has higher fat content, higher protein content. The, the, the protein, the content of lactose, which is the carb, the protein and the fat changes throughout one feed. It also changes throughout the time of breastfeeding, whether that's two months, four months, six months, 12 months, whatever. That content of the milk changes quite a lot, but it will change in one feed. So we do want that high fat, high protein content milk to be getting into the baby.
Speaker 2:So let the baby have a full dinner. On that first side it might be 23 of 30 minutes. You may sense another letdown a few minutes later and then another one. They generally will get a little bit smaller as they go, but that's where we have really great milk coming in. So baby gets super sleepy. Or we've talked about how to keep a baby awake If you want to check out our episode on that. Keep a sleepy baby awake during a feed. Or they just come off after a while and they're usually pretty satiated.
Speaker 2:So after that first come off of the dinner side, you want to do some things, perhaps to rouse your baby. Great time for a diaper change, a little bit of burping or being upright, moving the baby around, let that digestive system kind of work itself into with some movement and then go to the next side and, almost guaranteed, this side will be much shorter. This will be your dessert side. So again, that milk in the breast is the four milk. It doesn't have the high nutrient content of the hind milk, but that's okay. The baby just got dinner so maybe baby might have dessert on the second side. So maybe we had 23 minutes first side, seven minutes second side.
Speaker 2:Very normal. We don't have to equal everything. And also some feeds are going to be short, some are going to be long, depending on the milk supply during the day, which also fluctuates during the day. We usually have highest supply in the AM hours and it starts dwindling, and we have lowest supply in the PM hours. So it's kind of a little rhythm that the milk production follows as well.
Speaker 2:Um, sometimes babies just want a little meal. They just, you know, feel like a snack. Sometimes I want a snack. I don't want a full meal, I just want a little bit. So, so kind of consider that dinner dessert method to be very normal and feedings in the beginning are going to be kind of long. We got 20, 30, 40 minutes for the entire thing. Sometimes it's longer if we're adding in diaper changes or sleepy babies, but that's super normal in the beginning and over time like the first week, two weeks, three weeks those feeding times are going to go down.
Speaker 2:But the cool thing is the intake volumes go up. You can still do dinner dessert method, and maybe we do. If we have a 12 minute feed, we do eight minutes on the first side, four minutes on the second side. So generally speaking, that volume intake time goes way down over the weeks of breastfeeding. I do get a lot of calls several weeks in where people are very nervous that their baby's only eating for seven minutes because it used to be 30. And that's a cool thing. Like you know, as things work out it gets more efficient. So kudos to you, good work. So dinner dessert method kind of expect that from babies are kind of going to organically just work to that. It's very normal in the beginning before the milk comes in first three or four days equal is fine. We're just we're working on breast stimulation there, but afterwards expect a little dinner dessertness going on. Hopefully that's helpful for you as you anticipate feeding a baby or in the midst of feeding a baby. That can be kind of a fuzzy time as we're, as you know, kind of in a blur of things.
Speaker 2:I've been helping some moms of twins lately. Super, it's all kind of a blur when they're it's like a full-time job feeding, breastfeeding twins. But you know what All of them the ones I'm working with right now are doing? Amazing. It's hard but they're doing it. They have plenty of milk. Babies are latching or learning to latch. We have got some of them in the NICU and they're making it. They're doing it. It's impressive every time. Hopefully that helps you a little bit. Dinner dessert for your baby very common, and good luck in your breastfeeding journey. Please reach out to someone if you need support or help. There's a lot of lactation help to be had in the community. So reach out and put out some feelers and see where you can get some help, because there is help to be had. Best to you on your journey and please, today, reach out and make a human connection, do something kind for someone else. You will not regret it. I will talk to you next time. Thanks for being here.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the Ordinary Doula podcast with Angie Rosier, 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. Thank you.