How often should I breast feed my baby?
You should breast feed your baby as often as your baby gets hungry. In the beginning, babies have very, very small stomachs. It's going to breast feed very often in the beginning, so you want to make sure that you're providing milk every time that little, tiny stomach gets empty. Most babies have pretty clear signals when they're hungry. They're going to bring their little fists up to their face and start licking them, moving their nose, sniffing, looking around pretty intently for their mother. If your baby's doing that, and you bring it to your chest, and all of a sudden it starts looking for the inside of your shirt, you know your baby's hungry. As your baby grows, its stomach will grow about in line with the size of its fist. After about six weeks, it's about this size, so babies will have longer sessions, and less often, because they have more space to fill, and around six months, your baby's stomach will be up to a bigger size. At that point, you'll have what's considered a normal breast feeding session, which is every three to four hours, and the baby'll stay on for about thirty minutes.
