Hi ladies. I need help 😩 I have a 3 week old baby who I exclusively breastfeed. Our breastfeeding journey so far has been a bumpy one. My little girl latched on beautifully right after she was born (while doing skin to skin) and fed for a good while. I thought “well, this is easy!”. It’s been far from it 😅 Her first two days of life she was so mucousy and throwing up constantly, she was just not interested in eating at all. She wouldn’t latch. We had to supplement with formula so that she got SOME food in her. When she did eventually latch and start feeding from the breast, I was so happy I didn’t realise she wasn’t latching properly, I just wanted her to eat. A few days later my nipples were so cracked and sore, I was bleeding and crying from pain with every feed. At first I thought I could just push through it and it’ll get better, but it only got worse and I was so close to giving up. Thank god I found out about nipple shields. They literally saved my breastfeeding journey, I would have no doubt given up if it wasn’t for those miracle workers. Fast forward 2 weeks, my nipples have healed completely and I really want to ditch the shields now. It’s proving more difficult than I thought though. I researched it and tried different methods - so far nothing’s working. As soon as the nipple is in her mouth - she’s no clue what to do with it and just won’t suck no matter what I do. I think it’s the difference in size. I don’t think I have small nipples, I always thought them rather average sized, but they’re still half the size of the shield lol so it must be confusing to her. Another thing that’s not working in our favour is that I don’t think we ever had a good latch even before I started using the shields. She never opened her mouth wide enough and was only grabbing the nipple (💄). So now we have to learn TWO things at the same time. It’s so hard on baby, I keep trying but it just gets both of us frustrated and I don’t wanna let her cry and get upset so I usually give up after a couple minutes. I need some advice ladies. Any success stories? What worked for you?? I can’t imagine using those things forever 😩😩