When Eleanor was a few months old and a good friend of mine was close to her due date, I wrote up this note to let my friend know how well feeding on demand was working for us. To date, Eleanor still has never had a supplementary bottle of formula, and she's very high on the height-weight charts for her age. We think we've been successful because of a combination of determination, luck, and a good support system.
Eleanor feeds ... a lot. I don't keep track of how often (a symptom of breastfeeding on demand, I understand). She needs a meal or snack about every two or three hours, sometimes four hours at night.
I'll be honest here: at first, breastfeeding HURTS. It really hurts. It's not "discomfort"; it's "searing pain," and only one parenting book in a hundred is honest about it. Breastfeeding makes your back and some arm muscles sore because you're sitting in positions you're not used to and holding the baby up. It makes your nipples very sore, and massaging them before the birth doesn't help. If you need stitches, sitting down for a feeding will be bothersome. But! For me, the sore, red, icky nipple problems went away after about three weeks, once the tissue got a little tougher and Eleanor latched better. And now that she's larger and knows how to eat more skillfully, I can hold her better. I did the thing with rubbing milk into the nipples, but I'm not sure if it helped.
But for all the nipple trouble I had, I luckily didn't suffer from engorgement. I think I avoided engorgement because I let Eleanor feed whenever she wanted to. Except for one night when she accidentally slept through a feeding and woke up five hours later ... ouch!
The most important thing for successful breastfeeding is:
A support system from your family and friends.
If you're hungry, have someone bring you food. If you're thirsty, have someone else fetch it for you. If you need a footrest, make your partner get some large dictionaries and put them under your feet. Don't do housework. Send people out to the store for more pillows. Yell at people for harrassing you and saying, "Has your milk come in yet? Huh? Is it in yet?" or "Are you trying to prove a point? Your baby is starving!" or "Oh, I couldn't breastfeed either, when are you going to switch to a bottle?" or "If it hurts too much you can just give a bottle and have some rest."
Breastfeeding will hurt. You can do it, you don't need to switch to formula. You can tell if the baby is eating enough by counting wet diapers over the course of the day, weighing him at the pediatrician's office. Your milk will come in.
Oh, and just when you or your partner hits a wall of exhaustion at about two weeks, the baby will go into a growth spurt and want to feed for a day and a half without sleeping. But if you give the baby too many bottles of formula at this time, it may interfere with increasing your milk supply.
I've had about three friends now who couldn't breastfeed, and I think the biggest issue with all of them is that they didn't have a good support system. One had a bad La Leche League experience and another had a lot of needy family over at the time of the birth -- they were requiring too much attention from the new parents instead of helping them.
Here's an E-Z reference list for how we managed to breastfeed successfully:
Newborns are really disorganized and don't know from night and day, sleeping and awake, wet and dry. Yours may cry a lot and it's not because you have no milk -- it's because newborns fuss. Eleanor required a lot of walking back and forth in the first month for comfort (Tom was a great support system). Now she's large for her age and has had fewer colds than some of her peers, and she's never had formula.