Competitive Breastfeeding

So anyone that knows me well knows that I'm a little competitive. I like to be the best at things and I'm a perfectionist (not in all aspects of life, but in some). After coming home from the breastfeeding class, my personality really shone through in my dreams. I had never ending dreams where I was in competition with the other women in the class - from latching to hearing the baby gulp down milk to losing the baby weight and putting weight on the baby. I was so jealous if someone was doing better than me. I hope I'm not like that in real life and it was just magnified in my dreams!

Other than the bad dreams, I'm very, very glad that we went to the breastfeeding class. I'm also glad that Jon went with because there were four other couples and I would have felt funny alone. He even admitted that he was happy that he went. It was a three hour class so I won't get into all of the details, but I did learn some great stuff. Our teacher is a lactation consultant at the hospital and she was wonderful - bright, funny, experienced, and realistic. I'll most likely get to see her when I stay in the hospital after baby girl arrives. That gives me some comfort. She also told us about the hospital's breastfeeding practices. They try to get a baby to breastfeed within the first hour after birth (everything I've read says this is very important). They don't supplement willy nilly and if they do need to supplement, they don't use fake nipples. Instead, they finger feed with a syringe so the baby is less likely to get confused. Basically, the hospital is VERY breastfeeding friendly and there are a lot of people there to help. I can even go in and see a consultant later on (free of charge) if I'm having problems. We practiced holding fake babies in good nursing positions and also got to see videos of good latching vs. bad latching. We went over the score card that the hospital uses to assess how nursing is going (hence the cause of my bad dreams - rubrics make me want to outperform). We looked at breast pumps and she told those of us that work for the hospital how we can get the pumps for free or basically free. I won't have to use mine that much since I'm not going back to work, but it will be nice to have some backup milk in case I want to go somewhere or Jon wants to feed his daughter. Oh, and I found out for sure that I can have a glass of wine or beer now and then while breastfeeding. White Zinfandel, yummy...

I hope Saturday's class is just as good. It's going to be long! Hopefully I'll get the same thing out of it that I did last night - Our hospital is great. They have a family-centered approach that will allow the baby to room-in with me. Hopefully that will really help with the transition home.

We didn't get around to taking a picture last night and Jon won't be coming home until late tonight so expect belly pictures for 34 weeks sometime tomorrow. I'm going to lay around and be lazy today. I did too much yesterday and my back really hurt. I want to be in top form for the class from 9am-5:30pm tomorrow.