So much so that I happily spend every moment I can learning about how and why we make milk. May I present to you the first five of many, many strange breastfeeding facts that you can use to impress your neighbors and freak out your family members!
In fact, nobody has been able to figure out why this happens! Think less like a bottle nipple and more like a sprinkler head on a garden hose. Or a shower head for that matter. Breastmilk composition changes from feeding to feeding to meet the needs of the baby!
This is why babies who eat formula need to take larger bottles as they grow- the baby needs larger bottles to meet their needs as they get older, but a breastfed baby always will need right around 25 ounces of breastmilk a day. Joey Tribbiani can drink a gallon of milk in 10 seconds!
Thank goodness. When babies nurse properly they lift their tongues to create a vacuum as they massage the milk out of the breast and into the mouth. The muscles in their tongues roll from front to back to help move the milk out of the milk ducts.
You can feel this if you put a clean! Drinking from a bottle mostly requires suction and a chomping motion, which is why babies can have a hard time switching from bottlefeeding to nursing and back. Those little bumps on your areolae- montgomery glands- secrete an oil that smells like amniotic fluid. Montgomery glands, the scratch-n-sniff stickers of breasts. Is it too obvious that I grew up in the 80s? What are your favorite weird breastfeeding facts?
