I need some help. I am on a pretty strict budget right now since I have been off work since I was 16 weeks. My son is a week old. I have to pump to store milk as well as feel my little one, since I have to go back to work and he’ll be in daycare. That being said, here is my situation.

I attempted breastfeeding in the hospital (this is my third child and 1st time trying).

He was not latching and the lactation consultant couldn’t figure out what the problem was either. I made the decision to exclusively pump instead as I did with my other children.

Well. My milk came in at around 36 hours after birth of my son, over night. I went from pumping about 30ml on both breast to pumping the next morning and getting about 70ml per breast.

However. Over the last two days my supply has dropped to about 1 ounce per breast, each time I pump. I pump twice at night, so about every 2-3 hours. Then I pump first thing on the morning after my 5 & 7 year old get on the bus, about 730 am or so. Then again at around 10am, 1pm, 4pm and then 7pm. I then pump right before bed to empty out and prep bottles for the night.

He eats 3 ounces about every 2 & a half hours.

Any tips? I’m going through a cycle of power pumping today, currently as I wrote this. Any other tricks I can try? Foods? Cheaper vitamins? The budget sucks, but I need to keep my supply up and want it to stay up when I go back to work as well. My job allows me to pump whenever, and provides us mother rooms that allow privacy as not have to be in a bathroom to pump, and they didn’t have this previously so I went to continue to pump.

To sum up the history, with my other children I pumped 9-12 ounces a session. That amount of supply allowed me to provide breast milk for them until about 9 months old, while only pumping about 3.