When Do You Start Breastfeeding After Birth

During pregnancy, these previously dormant cells kick into action and the body also grows some new ones. When baby arrives and is shoved on the nipple, the sucking action stimulates the mother's pituitary gland, near the brain, which sends a hormone to the breast: this is the milk order, with a note for a couple of extra pints. The raw material for the milk is already in the bloodstream. I have seen it said that milk is essentially blood without the red blood cells, but that's a rather unappetizing thought.
 

When Do You Start Breastfeeding After Birth

Although not as unappetizing as the milk itself. Go on, have a slurp. Human milk is watery and sweet, less creamy than even the lowest fat cow's milk. (If your baby has a tooth, it will be a sweet one. Newborns actually have more taste buds than adults. As well as the ones on the tongue, the palate, the tonsils and the back of the throat, they also have a few on the insides of their cheeks. Our grown-up taste buds recognize five distinctive tastes; babies' identify only sweetness. Anything else tastes disgusting to them.) 

Curiously, smaller breasts are better designed for feeding than the truly monumental. (I am assuming that the breasts are, indeed, a hundred per cent human breast and not augmented by artificial implants. Porn breasts may be good for male masturbatory purposes but they can be bloody useless as breasts.) Some mothers with substantial (real) breasts report that their baby is "fighting at the breast'. They worry that the baby seems to be resisting the feed, whereas in truth the poor little bastard is struggling for air. 

If your mouth is full of nipple, and your nose is impeded by breast, breathing is always going to be a challenge. All breasts are a combination of fatty tissue and glandular tissue. It's the glandular tissue that feeds babies, and the fatty tissue that tends to enrapture their fathers. If there was only glandular tissue, women would be flat-chested when they weren't suckling their babies - rather like chimps and monkeys. Yet another reason, in case you needed one, not to be a chimp or a monkey.
 
Still, both chimps and monkeys know that the best time to feed your babies is when they are hungry. Until relatively recently this is not what mothers did. For many years, convention had it that babies should only be fed at precise intervals.

Some experts said every hour and a half. Other experts said two hours. A third group of experts, anxious to show their independence from the first two groups of experts, insisted on two and a half hours. After a few weeks, mother and baby would settle into a routine of four-hourly feeds. There was only one problem with this. Baby couldn't tell the time.
 

So when it was hungry, baby would cry. Mother, instructed not to feed baby until 2.45 whatever happened, would have to listen to these desperate wails until the clock clicked 2.45 and the baby got its stomach-full. The theory was that baby had to 'get used' to the mother's regimen, as though it had previously been plotting and planning to overthrow the household like a tiny communist agitator. The result was that baby was made miserable and insecure, and when it finally did get to feed it wouldn't stop feeding, because it knew it wouldn't be getting the milk it would need the next time it was hungry. To find out more, you can check out When Do You Start Breastfeeding After Birth.