Go read the Disclaimer again. I am not a doctor. This is not medical advice. Seriously.
Watching breastfeeding is a good way to learn what positions are possible. Unfortunately, you'll probably be watching older babies nurse, and very fresh babies are a little tricky to get positioned in a way that works for them, and lets you get a hand free to drink or eat, read a book or scratch where it itches.
Equally unfortunately, you probably won't get a chance to see anyone nursing lying down. If you can, I highly recommend it. Getting side lying nursing working is a huge chunk of getting enough sleep and maintaining a milk supply.
Having had a C-section, I'd like to draw attention to some unhelpful generalizations books about breastfeeding make about Cesarean mothers and mothers with big breasts. The side-lying position is promoted as easier than the cradle hold for Cesarean mothers. The football hold is promoted as easier than the cradle hold for large breasted mothers. Side-lying is indeed easier while in an adjustable hospital bed. Once home, however, and particularly once my breasts swelled as my milk really came in, side-lying was a disaster. Teddy thrashes about a lot while breastfeeding and he kept kicking my incision. Dead loss. At five weeks, I could get it to work again on one side, now that the kicking doesn't matter as much. We tried a lot of things along the way, including fiddling with positioning a lot, putting a pillow against his back, my back (those helped, but not enough). And we tried swaddling him. But if we have to wrap him up to nurse him, it's easier to sit up, grab the boppy and do cradle hold. If we have him sleep swaddled, he tends to work himself free over the course of the night, no matter how carefully wrapped. As for the football hold, I can make it work, but it's easier to prop Teddy up semi-sitting in my lap and nurse than do that, and cradle is easier still, especially with the boppy.
I think when people say "easier than", they mean less impossible. If cradle hold just isn't working, it's absolutely worth it to try alternate positions before giving up. But if cradle hold is working, don't expect miracles, and don't assume that because the other positions aren't better for you, you are necessarily doing things incorrectly. Possibly the cradle-hold-is-hard-for-Cesarean mothers is because of pressure on the incision. That was not an issue for me, but I used a lot of pillows and a boppy.
I did eventually get side-lying working before Teddy was four months old, which helped us all get a lot more sleep. While pictures and descriptions of how to do various nursing positions are pretty bad in general, it's remarkably hard to find anything useful regarding side-lying nursing. Gordon and Goodavage have the best pictures, which makes sense, as that's a book about co-sleeping and, specifically, bedsharing. I persist in believing that, unless you have a hospital bed, side-lying will work better when the baby is older, and more able to help with positioning. Since you more or less have to switch the baby from one side to the other one or more times during the night, it also helps to have a large bed. A queen or double is fine if it's just you and the baby; if you plan to share with another adult and/or other children, you'd better have a king or something custom. There are some safety concerns with bedsharing, but you can read about those elsewhere.
Having read more about bedsharing, I now see the anti-bedsharing, non-babywearing mindset in a lot of pro-breastfeeding writing. Talking about breastfeeding or nursing holds implies using the hands, and tends to imply sitting up. Positions is a little less tilted.
I was also somewhat startled to discover in my reading that some pro-breastfeeding authors (Baumslag and Michels in particular) are anti-swaddling, viewing it as a barbaric, backward practice that should be stamped out.
More pictures and description of side lying nursing, or nursing laying down.
Teddy has been very active in the last few weeks and when he was six months and a week, he suddenly started crawling (not just army crawl, or a few inches after much effort, but a good ten feet in about ten minutes one night when he crawled off the mattress and then pursued his papa who had a particularly interesting piece of paper he was writing on. The paper became a lot less interesting to us as we continued to back away and cheer Teddy on. Very exciting for new parents.). Around this time, it became extremely hard to nurse him sitting down, because he was too easily distracted. We often nursed laying down during the day, even when I had no expectation that he would nap, just to reduce the number of interesting things happening around us so he could concentrate on eating.
We all caught a bad cold late in February, when Teddy was about six and a half months old. Mine turned into my signature can't-stop-coughing-once-I-start, after the usual exhaustion-headache-low fever. Teddy nursed vigorously, started crawling and starting standing on his own, so while he was sick, it did not slow him down very much. Unfortunately, however, the can't-stop-coughing threw a wrench into sleeping with my baby; lying down tended to make me start coughing, and that tended to wake him up. I propped myself up for a few hours every night, but I had to hand him off to his father for an hour or so in the morning, to make sure everyone got enough sleep. Once again, musical beds.
Stacking the Deck for Successful Breastfeeding
Copyright 2006 by Rebecca Allen.
Created January 31, 2006 Updated March 7, 2006