When I started out on my first breastfeeding journey after my daughter was born, I thought it would be so easy. It’s natural, right? So that means baby and I should be able to just automatically get the hang of it and we would have a beautiful breastfeeding journey together. Right?

Wrong. The first 6(!?!) months of breastfeeding were terrible. Mac was tongue-tied and by the time it was snipped 5 days later, she had done so much damage to my nipples that it took me months to heal. I’m talking super painful breastfeeding, cracked and bleeding, scabs being ripped off, not even being able to wear a shirt sometimes because it hurt when it rubbed and pumping part-time because it didn’t hurt as much as nursing.

Now, there is a happy ending to this story. I ended up nursing Mac until just past her second birthday. By then, it was only part of the bedtime routine, but it was a nice way to end something that started so painfully for me.

As I write this, I gave birth just two weeks ago to my son and our breastfeeding journey so far has been totally different. Of course there was some discomfort at the beginning and it took some time to get the hang of it. But we asked them to check Leroy right away to see if he was tongue-tied also. He was and we had it snipped while we were still in the hospital. And we are already totally in the swing of things.

Looking at my two stories, I was curious what the differences were. The one thing was flawed breastfeeding advice. Before I had my first baby, I read all I could about breastfeeding and there were two pieces of advice (one biggie!) that kept popping up. And the advice wasn’t wrong, but it was definitely flawed. So I’m hoping I can help some other first time mom and her poor nipples by correcting that advice.