Music—Mounika.•Long Silent
Video imported from Instagram @sarva.rosewater

If your baby is struggling with nipple confusion between the breast & bottle, maybe this will inspire some new ways to try.

But even if you aren’t able to ever breastfeed, you and your babe are still perfect.

My story—

The first 2 days of Tulsi’s life (my 3rd baby), he had no suckle reflex & was excessively lethargic. He was born with a rare genetic condition, but we didn’t yet know this. If anything was put in his mouth, he would gag or just fall asleep & not be able to wake up.

He was born at home at 4:15 am & by 7 pm that evening, I sent my husband to the store to get a manual breast pump. I had none and it was finally sinking in that I couldn’t feed my baby.

I started manually pumping colostrum and used a glass dropper I had to drop it in his mouth and let it run down his throat.

That + a lot of other factors, sent us to a high level NICU when he was 48 hrs old.

In the NICU he stopped gagging & learned to bottle feed for no explainable reason which felt like a miracle!! For a little while he was able to do a partial breastfeed with a nipple shield but that stopped after about a week. I could still get him to put my nipple in his mouth solely for comfort and fall asleep.

At 9 weeks old he had a major surgery. He ended up with a 5 day pediatric ICU stay after an “extremely unusual” reaction to anesthesia & pain meds from which is nearly lost him. During that time the nurses gave him Sweet Ease (sugar water) on a pacifier every time they poked him for a blood draw or put in a new IV, etc, which was practically continual.

When he got home, he would only scream when I tried to put my nipple in his mouth & would coo with comfort when I’d give him a pacifier.

I thought this is just SAD. Now my babe has been trained with sugar to have a better relationship with the pacifier than my nipple.

And then it hit me — it only took 5 days + sugar water in the pediatric ICU to establish that. What if I did that with my nipple?

Instead of sugar water, I used vegetable glycerin which is as sweet as sugar but is not sugar. I have a flower essence called Peace formula in a base of veg glycerin which soothes emotional distress.

I put that on one nipple, started pumping the other breast so that my milk would start dripping. Then shoved the veg glycerin nipple into my screaming babe’s mouth.

He noticed the sweetness and started suckling, the milk was already coming out so he kept suckling. At 11 weeks old he had his 1st successful breastfeed session. It took 3 times with the veg glycerin until I didn’t need it anymore & I have never had to pump since.

He is my miracle.

Consult your child’s primary care physician before trying something like this, of course!