Breast feeding and period question...?!


Question: Breast feeding and period question....?
i have heard that when exclusively breast feeding, a woman's period can take 6 months to return. i am brest feeding my baby but im giving him formula too and im wondering when to expect my menstrual cycle to start back up. im using natural family planning as birth control and im worried about how it will work right now. does anybody have any advice or experience with this kind of thing.?Health Question & Answer


Answers:
Congratulations on your new little baby - how wonderful!

It is difficult to answer your question because every woman is different. Some women can nurse around the clock and their periods will come back at 3 months. Others can cut down and nurse once or twice a day and go for a year or more without a return to fertility.

Have you taken an NFP class.? I would highly recommend taking a class and if you have taken a class, refreshing on the postpartum rules with your teacher. The Couple to Couple League is getting ready in January to release a new transition class for postpartum moms and it would probably help you a lot.

If you are giving formula more than breastfeeding, than I would start checking your signs as soon as your lochia or bleeding stops. Keep in mind than many women have a bleeding episode around 7-8 weeks because that is when the final push of pregnancy hormones is released from the system and it often causes some light-medium spotting or flow for 1-3 days or so.

After that, if you use a mucus only method, you would want to establish your "Basic Infertile Pattern". For two weeks you would abstain and watch your mucus sign very carefully to see how it is. From that point you can establish what is the "background" mucus pattern related to breastfeeding and how to see if your fertility is returning. If you do a sympto-thermal method, you would start taking temperatures again, checking cervical mucus, and possibly checking your cervix position if you do that. CCL has a patch rule for determining your less fertile days during this transition which are very helpful. Basically they would state that if you have fertile mucus, you have to wait for a certain amount of days of drying up before going back to early day rules: not on consecutive days, not in the morning. If you have a couple days of less fertile mucus you would also want to wait until you dry up again to resume intercourse.

The postpartum transition is not easy, which is why I say again to take a class or talk to a teacher who can help you through it. Most women can't miss when their fertility is returning. It is common to have 1-2 weeks of constant, fertile mucus and lots of it when you are getting ready to ovulate or get a warning period.

Don't worry about the NFP naysayers - they are always out on these boards. Yes, your mother-in-law had 13 children. They didn't understand NFP well enough back then. Luckily we have 35+ years of experience now and the science to back it up.

Good luck and enjoy that new little baby!Health Question & Answer

i have a 8 month old baby who was completely upon breast feeding till his 7th month.this month i started to go for work and hence the breast feeding reduces.still i breast feed him 4 times.this month i got my periods back.menstrual cycle will start again once your breast feeding reduces considerably.but as your child is only 6 months,its not a good decision to reduce it.But you cant rely on this natural family planning completely.its better to adopt any other techniques with your doc's advice Health Question & Answer

It varies from person to person. Bottle feeding doesn't help if you are doing it a lot. Natural family planning does not work. My Catholic mother in law who breast fed all her children has 13 most of them less then 2 years apart.Health Question & Answer



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