u/Most-Earth-9187

Hi all. I gave birth a few months ago and am exclusively breastfeeding. It's all been going well baby is gaining weight, I'm also an overproducer but no so bad that it's unmanageable. The only downside is that my breast have grown to an insane size. I was a DDD pre pregnancy and already struggled with back and neck pain and self esteem issues with how clothes looked on me because I look rather unbalanced.

Now my breasts are double the size and I hate it. Everyone tells me they will shrink in size after weaning but I can't help but feel that they will just stay as saggy as they are. My grandmothee had size I breasts and had 5 llbs taken off of hee breasts after 4 children.

I wantna reduction so badly but doing that runs the risk of ruining my chances to breastfeed down the line and I really love breastfeeding! On top of that it feels a bit vain.

I dont even know if I'm asking for advice or just venting.

A little background informationt-

I found out I was pregnant with my first baby September 2025. My husband and I started searching for homebirth midwives in our state. After doing a few consultations we eventually settled on one who we liked because she gave us a very grandma like feel, and it felt comforting to us. We gave her a $500 deposit and had 2 appointments with her.

Then before our 3rd visit as I'm nearing my second trimester (this is in december which is important because this is when healthcare resets in the US) everything seems to go sideways. She canceled our third visit because her mom had some unexpected medical problems. At this point my husband and I are like "no biggie you take care of your family we will be okay for now.".

Then we reschedule appointment a 2nd time-canceled, a 3rd- canceled, a 4th- canceled. By the 3rd time I got a little nervous, because I hadn't had any bloodwork done so I was worried that something could be wrong that risks me out of homebirth and I wouldn't know about it yet and I had already hit my deductible for the year so I wanted my bloodwork done so I wouldn't have any out of pocket costs as my husband and I are not super financially well off. She assures me it's fine and she'll put a referral in for me to get bloodwork done by someone else. By the 4th cancelation which is the last week of December (at this point I'm now in my 2nd trimester) I send her message about how anxious I was about not having any bloodwork done and I beg her to submit a referall. The response I got was a single thumbs up emoji and she nevers sends in the referal.

We reschedule one more time and at this point I'm over the unpredictablity. I understand life happens, but to leave a client in a medically vunerable state such as pregnancy without medical care for 2 months seemed really unacceptable to me. She cancels for a 5th time and she calls me throwing out the option of ending our care with her and finding care elsewhere. Except the way she phrases it puts the burden entirely on me. This next part is what gets me- she admits to me that she probably wouldn't be a good fit anyway to be my midwife because she has a medical disability due to 60% vision loss in BOTH OF HER EYES. Which would require her to find a ride if I was to go into labor in the middle of the night because she cant see in the dark, and since my house is dark she would need us to buy a fucking flood light so she can see my vagina???? None of this was communicated to my husband and I in our consultation with her. Which would of drastically shifted our choice in her.

Obviously we ended care with her. But at this point I was so defeated, I'm 23 weeks pregnant with my first baby, and no medical care in almost three months now and $1000 short because we dont get our deposit back and the other $500 was an HRA money. I badly wanted a homebirth but all the homebirth midwives in our area seemed to be fully booked for my due date. So I switched to looking at a birth centers. Meanwhile My husband still looks for a homebirth midwife and manages to find one with 2 midwives with an opening for our due date. We make a contract with them. It takes my old midwife three weeks to finally transfer my medical records after our new midwives were down her throat bugging her everyday to send it. We tell them this story and they are very taken aback but they don't really give us any concrete opinion on how bad they think the situation was.

I ended having a hard time the last few weeks of pregnancy I had 3 weeks of prodormal labor and was into week 41 of pregnancy and no signs of early labor and I was getting frustrated which our midwives calmed me down and walked me through herbal induction methods they had if I continued to show no progressing signs into active labor. Eventually I did go into labor by myself, it was about 7 hours total with 4 hours of pushing. My midwife had to help guide babies head for quite a lot of it because my left hip was so tight due to an injury it was stalling babies descent. I also had a complicated 2nd tear that required an OB to repair, and both me and my daughter had fevers requiring an 36 hour observation of my daughter in a hospital. All of this happened with 2 very competent midwives who made me feel at ease throughout my pregnancy and labor and have excellent working relationships with the hospitals in the area. I have no doubt in their capabilites and our hospital transfer was due to environmental factor (the air vent in our bedroom was blocked, so our bedroom got very hot with me pushing and 5 other people in the room) I dread to think what could've happened if we stayed with our other midwife.

But now that my daughter is here safe and sound. And every person I tell this story to looks at me with shock that we stayed with the 1st midwife as long as we did and how she is still a midwife. I'm wondering if I should report her to the ACNM? This is my first experience with home birth midwives so I'm not really sure what standard of practice is across the nation?

Thoughts?

My daughter has an upper lip tie and honestly it's not really affecting her feeding. She's gaining around a pound a week, the latch doesn,t hurt. She just has a upper lip blister.

I know surgically releasing a tie is an option but A. We dont really have the money for that and B. I'm not sure I want to go that route if it's not 100% necessary.

So are there other option to help loosing a tie that don't involve the procedure?

it seems like my right breast is not a fan favorite of my daughter (she's 1 month old). She seems to have a hard time latching and it's beginning to be uncomfortable for me despite both her top and bottom lip being flanged out. On top of that she also isn't content by the end of a nursing session on the right. And my right breast frequently feels engorged regardless if I breastfeed her on both sides equally.

Versus my left breast - she latches great, it's not painful, and she is always happy and sleepy at the end of the nursing session.

I know babies usually prefer one breast to the other but it seems odd to me that she would have difficulty with one and not the other ?

I also had to pump the right side last night to relieve some pressure and I got 1oz in just 5ish minutes which seems like a lot for one boob in that time frame??? So it's not like it's not producing milk.

Anybody have this experience, what did you do to help it?

I am a FTM and I'm a pale ginger, my husband is also fairly pale just because where we live doesn't get a lot of sun. I just gave birth a few weeks ago and I'm surprised at how tan our baby is. I thought for sure she would be more pale like us but she's a few shades darker than the both of us. Is this typical? She had jaundice but it's all cleared up now.

Maybe this is silly but this my first baby. She slept great 2 nights in a bassinet since then - nada. Cosleeping is the only thing that guarantees me any sleep and I'm actively aware of HOW I'm sleeping. Whereas the first few nights I tried to keep her out of our bed I ended up falling asleep on a couch with her in my arms and I realized it wasnt that great of an option to keep fighting.

So I started cosleep. I'm keeping her in light clothing, my husband and I only sleep on one pillow each and all other pillows are at our feet, I tuck the bedsheets between my legs so they dont ride up, and I do a c- curl around her. I'm not moving at all in the night from these positions until I wake up.

The only thing I'm worried about is my daughter keeps going from her back to her side doing the newborn curl and basically uses my breasts as pillows after I feed her from the side lying. I'm very paranoid that my breasts might end up suffocating her because I have very large breasts. Is this something I should be worried about?