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Maker's Monday

Trying out a new weekly thread idea.

This would be a thread for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers. We can coordinate weekly standup type meetings if their is interest.

@ArjinFerman, @Turniper, and myself all had some initial interest.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

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Congrats! How difficult is teaching nursing? I've been reading up on it a bit since my wife and I are planning on having kids soon, however it seems opinions range from impossible to as easy as breathing. Breastfeeding would certainly be my preference given the benefits.

It varies a fair bit.

As far as I can tell, my milk supply comes in kind of slow, but the babies' metabolisms boot up really fast, so they all lose more weight than expected, hurt my nipples, just absorb everything and don't poop, or in the case of this baby, he has accumulated too much bilirubin, and is now laying under blue lights for 12 hrs (related to the not pooping thing, and happened to another daughter as well). Then after about a week everything is fine. Others' experience may vary.

Sometimes babies have tongue tie, and need intervention, or sometimes there's a longer term issue with milk supply, but usually it's just sore breasts and cluster feeding for a couple of weeks, and then it gets easier. Most birthing units have lactation consultants who will look at what's going on and offer suggestions, which can be helpful.

I wanted to chime in but realized that even though my kids are still under 10 my memories of their infancy are super vague. Must be the sleep deprivation, lol. Anyway, I'm pretty sure both learned quickly and without too much trouble. The only problem I recall is that the first one had a tendency at first to get a nipple at just slightly the wrong angle, so she'd get milk but would give me a blister in the process. But once I figured out how to correct that I think it went smoothly.

I'm using the Mayo Clinic Guide as my reference, and it looks like there are various different poses you can use to get the right angle as it were. Trial and error seems to be the word. On another note, sleep deprivation is going to be tough I think...my wife really does like sleeping.

Yeah that's pretty much the range. Some kids get it immediately, some really struggle. Our 3 kids were all pretty easy in that regard (though not necessarily in others), and I think the average kid gets it quickly enough. Stick a tit in their mouth and see what happens.

I have to remind myself that it's something humans have been doing pretty successfully for forever. IDK if you could call it a lost art but it does seem like it's made out to be more complicated than it is.

That's pretty much all of parenting. No one really knows what they're doing to start with but we all muddle through. As long as baby stays alive you're doing something right.