If you are a breastfeeding mother and you read material that is handed out to you, then you would undoubtedly know that the food that you eat effects the milk that your breasts produce. It is quite a simple system really, and hence there exists a substantial list of foods and food types you should avoid if you want a happy, healthy baby.
But of course, seeing as we are all human, we do tend to forget – and make mistakes sometimes, which is exactly what Chantelle and I did this past Easter period!
As we all know, commercial Easter is about selling, purchasing and consuming chocolate – in huge quantities, and because we have a situation in the family where every sibling buys for every other sibling and parent Easter eggs, soon we had amassed a decent quantity of delicious and delectable chocolate here in our kitchen – which we of course devoured like a ravenous pack of animals over the course of my holiday week.
At the same time, Capetonians would have noticed that the temperature dropped quite drastically as well, thrusting us straight into winter which of course has the affect that more coffee is suddenly consumed.
Again not such a good thing if you remember your breastfeeding 101.
As far as we can tell (and it is a bit of guesswork at the moment, but definitely a theory that fits the foot best right now) is that the sudden surge in chocolate and coffee consumption (which are recognised stimulants) had a direct affect on mommy’s breast milk because from a baby with absolutely no problems, we shot straight to a baby suffering from horrible colic each and every night for the past week!
Basically every evening, from about 19:30 onwards, usually straight after the evening feed, Jessica would start howling in pain, crying and screaming her little head off with nothing we could do to console her or make it better. Deep, deep seated winds were stuck in her gut, and every little wind that did dislodge, did so at the cost of great pain to our little one.
This horrible experience backed up with non-stop crying would last for at least an hour or two, before our exhausted little one could finally go to bed and actually fall asleep, though this didn’t mean she would always sleep through the night as what she had done up to now.
In other words, really not a pleasant situation for baby, mommy or daddy.
After tearing our hair out for a bit and doing some digging around and trying to change a few things, we are pretty sure we’ve nailed the cause for this problem down, and a sudden stop on all things chocolate and coffee related from mommy has had an almost immediate positive result on Jessie’s well-being.
So yeah, moral of the story, when the nurses, doctors or certified reading materials suggest something to you, be a dear and jot it down – you really don’t want to forget at a later stage!