When you are breastfeeding a newborn baby, you are the mother, and you are in charge.

It may sound radical when you hear it like that, but what we mean is that it is you, the mother, who decides which breast to give your baby each time. Just by feeling both your breasts a little, you can simply decide which side’s turn it is. Your baby needs to follow your decision and take whatever side they are offered. If you put your baby on the right side, they feed on the right breast, and if you put your little one on the left side, they stay there, too. And if it’s only 5 minutes, then they do so for only 5 minutes. At this stage of their lives, babies have no say in deciding which side of the breast they want to feed from, and sometimes, they can’t even decide how long they want to nurse for. In fact, this is why breastfeeding often does not work because the babies are not the ones who decide, and their feeds get limited or scheduled. Unfortunately, there are still people who insist on maintaining the outdated notion that breastfeeding time should be limited. This leads to a chain of disasters: too little milk supply → too little weight gain → introduction of supplementing milk → failure of the breastfeeding process.

When you are the one who wants your baby to empty the breast, some babies who have more character get a little angry and sometimes a lot, and this can be confused with a breast rejection. So when a baby protests, the mother will change her baby to the other side of the breast, and then the baby is fine. But after a few months, babies can decide which side of the breast they want to nurse from, and things change again when they move to the other side on their own. And this is where the trouble begins, especially at night! And then you might feel like a giant bouncy toy, back and forth, back and forth, from one side to the other and back again.

It was time to sleep, the baby was exhausted, worn out, and evidently knackered… and you as a mother as well – who can deny it – and then you lay down into your bed hoping that your baby would sleep quickly. It was obvious that your little one was tired, and there were all the signs that the baby was going to fall asleep soon.

At this stage, they certainly don’t care about sleep. Life is short, and people have a lot to do before they fall asleep. “I don’t want to sleep,” they think while you pray for your baby to fall asleep fast so you can have dinner in the hope that your baby stays asleep for a few hours in a row, but you know that this will be only a few (2 or 3), let’s not get too excited.

You have tried to prepare the room like a deluxe relaxing spa: dimmed light, no noises, and live music in the background (which are you singing all nursing rhymes, you know). The most relaxing room, which you don’t even find in the best spas. Then you place your little one on the breast and even breathe deeply and in a slow rhythm to pass on the calm and good vibes, and you think, “If I pretend to fall asleep, my baby will fall asleep for sure!” And there you are, lying there, pretending to sleep; we all have been there!

And when it seems that your baby is falling asleep with this breast-relax… suddenly they get active again and, even worse, there seems to be no end to it. Your little one starts nursing eagerly again, sometimes even helping with holding it with their hands, and it even looks like they want to milk it, and then they would jump over me and plant themselves on the other side and start all over again. And then from one side to the other and back again, which is a common behavior for them. But this position was not in any breastfeeding manual! It was like playing Twister, and each time, the positions got more complicated, and the switches were faster and faster. And you might feel like you get more exhausted and flatter and flatter, in fact you might even feel the colorful circles of the Twister board appearing onto your body and then you wait patiently like in any good board for the game to finally end and the back and forth to finally have a happy ending.