Judy H.K., you touched a sensitive nerve with your question about milk
drying up at 3 months! How did this mother assess her milk production as
being nil and what did she do about it?

In Australia, too many people are firmly convinced that at a certain point,
milk just dries up or "disappears". I believed this 23 years ago when my
first baby was 3 months old. I assessed the situation on the basis that he
suddenly wanted to feed twice as often as usual and that my breasts didn't
feel as if they had any milk in them . (Very scientific!) After a day of
this I was thoroughly panicked and quite convinced that I'd "lost my milk".
I promptly weaned him, never again putting him to the breast. The great
paradox was that for a woman who'd lost her milk, I certainly was wearing a
great pair of melons on my chest for the next 4 days! I know now that all
I'd lost was my confidence, not my ability to make milk, and that confidence
is as crucial to successful breastfeeding as is information and support.

Now I tell women this story, and add my theory on where all the lost milk
has disappeared to - that someone will discover a lake of it in central
Australia, probably by falling into it! (Well, there's been at least that
much milk go missing in Australia!)

Anyway, when we go through a woman's case history and she tells us about
disappearing milk, the stories are all similar to mine - that at some point,
she decided that she was losing her milk, and started offering other feeds
(bottles and solids) which progressively took the place of the breast and
weaning rapidly followed. The only exceptions to these stories are the rare
cases where the woman has sustained some severe psychological shock, like a
sudden traumatic death in the family - one woman woke one morning to find
her husband dead in bed beside her! Her milk production really did just
STOP. If she had continued to offer the breast regardless, I'd have expected
her to start producing again at some stage in the next few days, but she
decided not to.

Robyn Noble and Anne Bovey, Brisbane, Australia