This week is Breastfeeding Celebration Week here in the UK!
As the best way to celebrate breastfeeding is by normalising it, we are offering a massive 50% discount on our Breastfeeding Friendly Scheme to businesses and venues across the UK!
The scheme is a great way to show you support breastfeeding families on your business premises or at your events. Find out more here or to buy click here. Enter the code BFF2021 by 30/06/21 to get the reduced price of just £7.50 for a full year!
Fancy getting your craft on and making your own keepsake footprint craft this Fathers Day? Download and print our templates for free below, then grab some poster paints and a packet of baby wipes and you’re good to go!
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#weloveourvolunteers is actually one of our favourite hashtags here at BfT….because we really really do!
Our volunteers come from all walks of life… we have teachers, shop workers, bar staff, stay at home mums, paramedics, singers, dancers (those who think they can sing and dance but team night outs have proved otherwise 
) beauticians, drivers….and just about everything in-between. All very different, but what is the same is their passion, their commitment to families and how they strive to make a difference to each and every mother, parent, pregnant woman or person they come into contact with!
Breast milk. It’s white right? Or perhaps a bit more creamy or yellowy in those early days, but we do generally think about milk being within that vanilla colour scheme. It can be quite a surprise then, on expressing that that’s not always the case, and if it isn’t does that mean something’s wrong?
Nope!
Let’s file that beautiful colour variation under perfectly natural and pretty amazing. Human milk comes in a variety of colours, with a variety of causes which can even change from one feed to the next! –
So we’ve already talked about what to expect in the early days and how newborn stools change in the first week or so of life, but beyond that we still get loads of questions asking about poo and what’s ‘normal’ particularly regarding colour! Like most things, what’s normal for one baby might be quite different for another, things can even change from day to day (even hour to hour!) and there is a veritable rainbow of colours which can all fall within the realms of what we would expect to see!
This is one of those things that no one really warns you about (unless you attend one of our Pregnancy Sessions of course) As a new parent, you are never going to talk about poo so much!
You’ll probably take photo’s of it to show us, and may even hold onto old nappies ready for when the midwife pops round! After all the contents of your new baby’s nappy are really not much like the poo you know, and really not like much else on earth!
And we’ll let you into a little secret- we’re all a little bit obsessed with poo too! In those early days of breastfeeding, it’s one of the best ways for us to see what’s going in- by looking at what comes OUT, in the form of wee and poo!
The first poo your baby will pass isn’t actually poo. It’s meconium. This black, sticky, tar like substance is in your baby’s bowel whilst you are pregnant, it helps to keep their bowel sterile, but after it’s just not needed so out it comes- in fact that first feed helps to get it moving.
Imagine if someone put marmite in a tube of toothpaste and just kept squeezing- that’s meconium! It keeps on coming and takes copious wet cotton balls to actually remove. Expect at least 1-2 in the first 24- 48 hours- although prepare for many more!!! 1-2 wet nappies at this stage is also all we would be looking for. Their tummies are tiny and don’t hold much- around 5-7mls, so they won’t create much wee yet.
Eventually that meconium is almost all gone, and babies’ poo changes- we even call this a changing stool. It’s the end of that meconium and the beginnings of the digestion of breast milk. Its green and quite ‘bitty’- think mint sauce or pesto!! Again, from around day 3 we’re expecting a couple in 24 hours. Wet nappies continue to show us baby is taking enough too, by this stage we’d want 3 or more heavier nappies alongside that changing stool.
Often, we then have a little journey through a few shades of brown, finished with the grand finale of poo on around day 5….
chicken korma or English mustard!! This soft yellow poo is a great sign baby is feeding on your mature breast milk, and another bonus is it smells kinda nice- Quite sweet smelling really! We’re still wanting 2 poos a day, whether it’s a £2 coin sized splat, or a full chin to back of neck ‘poonami’ (more on those later!). Although there’s no upper limit, and many breastfed babies will poo after every feed. Wet nappies should also have increased to around 5+per day by now and around a wee per feed as they get bigger.
Breastfed babies’ poo is often very loose. They’ve not got the runs, it’s just what their poo is like! It doesn’t ever really form into a stool until you introduce solid foods though adding formula can make the stools a little darker and thicker or more ‘paste’ like (we’re talking peanut butter here!)
Wet nappies continue to always be a really good indicator of effective feeding as does poo, but only up until around 4-6weeks.
Beyond that, some exclusively breastfed babies can go up to 10 days without a poo! They aren’t constipated, they’ve just become more efficient at feeding and there’s not as much wastage in breastmilk.
So, if you are ever worried about what’s going in, focus instead on what’s coming out!!!
Are you celebrating your little ones first Easter this year? Why not have a go at making a keepsake footprint bunny! All you’ll need is a drop of poster paint, a ball of cotton wool and a spot of glue (and maybe an extra pair of hands to help you hold baby while you paint those little toes!) You can download and print our template here-
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If it’s your first mother day, why not have a go at making your own keepsake card? Click the link below to download our templates for printing, grab some paint or use a pen to draw around those little hands or feet.
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There’s a whole lot of ongoing research going on surrounding Covid19, the associated vaccines and how they interact with breastfeeding. We’ve spotted a couple of really interesting reports this week…..
First is a very small study, yet to be peer reviewed but yield’s very promising results. Knowing what we already do about how breastmilk works, we’ve long suspected that any vaccine would create antibodies which could then be found in mothers milk. This study forms the start of proof for this! Read more from the original document here
We are excited to announce that our Breastfeeding Friendly Scheme is back!
This is perfectly timed following this weeks announcement from the UK government with their ‘roadmap’ out of current restrictions. Over the coming months more businesses will be reopening and new mums will be able to get out and about, many for the first time since giving birth! We know that the UK has some of the lowest breastfeeding rates in the world and this can make breastfeeding in public, or in front of others a very daunting prospect for many new mums, and even mums of older babies too.
