How I Induced Lactation and our Tentative Co-Nursing Plan

If you missed it – I’m inducing lactation and we’re planning on co-nursing our son (due in less than a week!). There is SO little detailed information about induced lactation and even less on co-nursing, so we’ll be sharing our story and progress on a regular basis.  

How We Arrived Here & Who We Worked With

If you saw our last post about co-nursing and lactation induction, you know we’ve been thinking about co-nursing for a while.  We did as much research as we could online, then we talked to our OBBGYN about it (yep – we go to the same OB, Dr. Nauzo, and she is AMAZING) and she said she would see if there were any ICBLC that had experience working with lesbian couple or non-gestational breastfeeding moms… in the NorCal Kaiser network there were a whopping ZERO so we decided to look outside of the kaiser network for someone with experience.  Luckily one of my BFF’s, Stephanie’s mom is a doula – she put the would out to her doula network and we received a recommendation for Janet Dombro.  Janet ended up being AMAZING!  She had experience working with both co-nursing moms and we put together the plan below.  I also reviewed the plan with Dr. Nauzo to make sure she was comfortable with everything (and she was.).

Lactation Induction Plan

There are many ways to induce lactation – we decided to follow a slightly modified Newman Goldfrap Accelerated Protocol.  Here’s what I did:

• 4 months pre due date: started taking birth control without placebos.
• 9 weeks pre due date: Started manually stimulating my nippes as many times as I could remember every day.  This would typically be when I was driving or using the lou.  
• 7 weeks pre due date: Started pumping with an electrip pump 1/day for 10 minutes on the “stimulating” setting.  Pumping sucks – and it hurts even more when you  don’t have milk coming in.  I ended up finding coconut oil worked awesome as a booby lube!.
• 6 weeks pre due date: started taking domperidone. 20 mg 4 times/day. Continued pumping 1-2/day.  A quick note on domperidone for my US readers.  Domperidone is not FDA approved.  Why?  Because it’s expensive… they are currently in the process of getting it approved as a ghost drug but it’s not currently.  This means that your doctor can’t recommend it or prescribe it.  There are some other types of doctors that might be able to prescribe it (but not technically for breastfeeding).  I ended up ordering mine from a NZ pharmacy, but definitely let both of them know I was ordering it and how much I was taking. If you live in any other first world country Domperidone is legal.
• 3 weeks pre due date: stopped taking birth control and started pumping 5 – 7 times per day for at least 10 mins per session
• 2 weeks pre due date: my milk started to come in!  This was literally SO exciting.  Starting increasing the section of pump and length of how long I pump.
• 1 week pre due date: This is where I am now at the time of writing this.  I am pumping 5-7 times/day for 10-20 minutes.  Currently producing about 1 oz/day and still taking same amount of domperidone. I’ll continue at this rate until our little guy arrives.

Immediately after Birth

As soon as baby comes out he’ll be placed on Tara (skin-to-skin) then I go after (or if for whatever medical reason Tara can’t go first then I will).  

Days 0-2

Gestational moms produce this awesome pre-mink goodness called colostrum. This is the perfect first food for babies, so we plan of Tara being the pretty much solo feeding for the first couple days.  The plan is for her to nurse, then once our son is done actually feeding, I will comfort nurse him or let him just sleep/hang out on my boobs.  This is often referred to kangaroo parenting/skin-to-skin time/attachment parenting.  Basically our goal is to have baby skin-to-skin with one of us all the time and to have him get used to both of us (our scents, touch and different nipples).

Day 3 – Week 6

This is the time period when milk supply is formed.  So we’re tentatively palnning on when one person feeds, the other will pump (and vice versa).  Tara will be staying home with baby for 6 months and I’ll be returning to work after 2 weeks, so it makes sense for her to be the primary feeder – but I’ll be there for all the snacks, desserts, and comfort nursing that’s needed.

Week 6 & Beyond

We don’t have much of a plan for here yet – there are SO many variables that we’re going to try and be flexible and see how things go.  We’ll be writing updates to keep yall posted on how things progress.  Stay tuned!

Have you Induced Lactation or Co-Nursed?

If so I would LOVE to hear all about it!  Please send me an email at hellolesbianmommies[at]gmail.com!  

How did the plan work In Real Life?

Get all the details in our post Our First Week of Co-Nursing IRL

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