Her Story.

Chrissie Wywrot is a content and social media strategist who works with passionate entrepreneurs focused on helping others and making a difference with their businesses.

Background history: Grew up South of Detroit in a small town. She has 1 sister who is 6 years younger then her. She loved being in the spotlight. There are lots of videos of her sticking herself in front of cameras. She liked being the center of attention. She was big into sports and ended up going to college and then worked in sports for a long time.

Career: She always knew she wanted to work in athletics and she loved writing. She describes herself as a creative analytic. She is a strategist and at the same time she is a writer and an artist. Her grandfather was a newspaperman and she always wanted to be a writer. She developed a passion for sports, but she didn’t want to be a journalist because she didn’t want to antagonize anyone. She ended up taking a tour of the old Tiger stadium and wound up working in Guest Services, but realized she wanted to do public relations and so that’s how she drew the connection between writing and being part of the team.

After college, she wound up working for The Detroit Lions managing their website which included a lot of writing and graphics and photography. It brought together all the skills in the area and space she wanted to work in. Chrissie left sports in 2014 and now does writing and online strategy for passionate business owners. She enjoys helping people connect with their audiences.

Was she breastfed: She was not. Her mom always said that she just was not comfortable with that. She assumed that she would not breastfeed her baby, because she already felt that she was not comfortable with that. Probably because that is what she heard her mother say. However, she was “talked into it” by someone that she never would have pegged as someone who would have breastfed. She is the wife of one of the players of the Detroit Lions and they were talking about it and she said that had her third baby and said she breastfed all her kids and even if you breastfeed for weeks there are benefits. This changed her perspective of breastfeeding. and she decided at this time she was going to try it. She was not outgoing individual and seemed to be someone who would be uncomfortable in this kind of situation. The fact that she articulated that to Chrissie definitely had an impact on her.

Chrissie made up her mind to try breastfeed and she wound up taking a breastfeeding class. Her husband was not planning on staying for the class, however, the educator encouraged him to stay and Chrissie was very glad that he did stay. He really needed to understand how much work goes into breastfeeding. We laughed about how the guys never want to be the only guy.

Preparing for breastfeeding: She did not attend any groups She has 3 kids and her oldest is in first grade and her baby just turned 2.
Her first child was the only problem she had with breastfeeding. This matches her personality. Chrissie tells us about hearing about how babies placed on the breast just crawl up and find their way onto the breast. This definitely did not happen with her daughter. She remembers thinking about this information: This is a bunch of crap.

Thank goodness for the opportunity to have other experiences as this was not the case with her next two babies. Her son, who was born via cesarean section and he went right to breastfeeding and so did her third baby.

First experience: She was an emotional wreck because her daughter could not have cared less. She also knows that her postpartum hormones kicked in and this was partly to blame. Her husband is 6.3 with a large build. He had back surgery within a year of their baby being born. He was trying to sleep on the couch in the hospital room and every time they tried to go to sleep, the door opened, the lights went on and there was no way he could get any sleep. She sent her husband home to go to sleep and now she was really emotional.

Chrissie is funny as she tells us about a snarky amazing older women she had as her nurse. This nurse went on a rant and said: “ya know everyone says breastfeeding is suppose to be easy and that’s a load of crap. its not easy, noone knows what what they are doing. You don’t know what you are doing, the baby doesn’t know what they are doing. Don’t worry about it , you are going to get it.”
This was all Chrissie needed to hear – that she was not alone in her thoughts and that she was not crazy and that she just had to work at it.

Ultimately, she realized her problem was that her baby just had not interest in latching on. She was angry and just didn’t want to.
She was so hungry that they were not going to make any progress. She finally gave her 2 oz of formula to calm her down. Chrissie was stubborn also and just kept trying. She had a large milk supply and once her milk came in, things got a bit easier.

By discharge, she had nursed once or twice successfully. She successfully breastfed her until 5 months until her baby decided to go on a nursing strike. This was the first of multiple nursing strikes. This was the point where she connected with La Leche League. Since she had planned on breastfeeding for one year, she was not about to give up. Once breastfeeding was established it was so easy and so convenient.

Nursing Strike – Your baby just decides that he or she does not want to nurse. There is often no rhyme or reason for this behavior, they ust don’t want to nurse.

After having breastfed 3 children, Chrissie now knows that her supply takes a huge dip after 6 months of breastfeeding. Her going on a nursing strike made life difficult, because babies still need to eat and they still want the milk. She wound up giving more bottles during the day. This made things worse because she just wanted more bottles.

She suspects that her nursing strike may be correlated with her lowered supply. She received help via online and is grateful for the help she received. It was suggested that they switch to a slower flow bottle. Her baby was guzzling down 8 oz of milk from a fast flow bottle. She was getting full from large volume bottles at work, not as hungry when she was home and getting it fast. This causes her to nurse less when they were together and this in turn caused her supply to drop. This is a fairly common problem, even putting aside a drop in moms supply. Babies quickly figure out they can get large volumes of milk, very quickly from a bottle and start to lose interest with breastfeeding. It was suggested that she switch to the slow flow and feed babies less milk from her The nursing strikes continued on and off until at 11 months when she switched her to regular milk.

Help from her husband: Chrissie tells us that her husband has what she calls “cleaning nervous energy. When he gets nervous, he cleans. When she sent him home from the hospital that first night so he could get some sleep, he was late in coming back the next day because he was busy cleaning the house.

He was the equipment and bottle cleaner. He would clean the pacifiers and bottles and the pumping accessories. He was the dish guy doing all the dishes. Her husband would always bring her food and coffee and breakfast in the morning. He was appreciative that she handled a lot of the night duty because she was the breastfeeder. He recognized that he was able to get a good nights sleep because she was breastfeeding.

She told her General Practitioner: When she was pregnant with her second child, Chrissie did not want to scare her, but she did tell her that her daughter made her maternity leave pure hell. Their kids were about the same age difference and she wanted her to know that it can be rough. Her daughter just wanted her attention all the time. Her daughter would wake up her newborn son and then she would demand her attention. The daytime was so insane that what happened is that her son would sleep much of the day and breastfeed throughout the night. Her GP did tell her that she was appreciated knowing what the reality is like as a mom of two kids.

Her maternity leave was pretty difficult because she had a cesarean section. The incision opened up after a week. She needed to have a nurse come to her home and pack the wound. Thank goodness her son was breastfeeding really well as the other parts of her early postpartum were pretty trying with her kids being so close.

Words of wisdom: She was never nervous about having children, however, she realized that she was so nervous about having her second child. She had a fear that she was doing something horrible to her first baby. Would she have enough time to give her first baby the attention that she needs. Chrissie remembers telling one of the nurses that she was nervous about not being able to give adequate attention to both and had a fear of not being “enough.” This nurse said to her: ” A sibling is the best thing you could ever give a child. You gave her a great gift.” Chrissie would like other parents to know that each child you have is an individual. Highlight their differences and don’t try and treat them all the same because they are so not.

As a perfectionist, Chrissie hates hearing that you are never going to be able to do everything perfect. You can only do your best.

Current work: She has been focused on her current business working with service based entrepreneurs. I am in the digital space and I help them connect with their audiences. She decided to go into business for herself because she never liked to work for someone else. As a mother, you have greater flexibility with your time as it enables you to make your own schedule. This can sometimes be a blessing and a curse. Overall, it is still better than working for someone else.

Contact info: chrissie@chrissiewywrot.com
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