The Breastfeeding Dilemma

This week I reached a crossroads in breastfeeding Harper: start pumping more times a day, including the middle of the night, or start supplementing with formula. For almost a month now I've had to use some of my frozen supply in order to have enough for her bottles each day at day care. Most days I go to the day care to nurse at noon so I only need to send two six ounce bottles instead of three, but even so I generally can only pump enough for one of those bottles. I knew my use of the frozen supply wasn't sustainable, but on Wednesday this week I counted the remaining frozen packets in my freezer and realized I only have enough for two more weeks.

When I mentioned this dilemma to Harper's doctor at her six month appointment he said, "Well, you really shouldn't go more than six hours, so you'll just have to pump in the night."

"Yeah right," I thought. For five months I've been counting the days until the baby will sleep all the way through the night, and then once she does, you're telling me I have to keep getting up at 3am to pump? Only a man could tell you that with a smile on his face and a tone that says, "See, problem solved!"

When Harper first started skipping that last nighttime feeding at 3am, I did have to get up and pump because my body was used to needing milk at that time, but within a week and a half I could make it until 6am when she woke up for the day. I enjoyed about three weeks of a full night's sleep, but my milk supply definitely took a hit. And so here I am, weighing my options of re-establishing a 3am pumping or just making a gradual switch to formula.

I'm a little surprised at how reluctant I feel about making that switch. It's hard to know that if I wasn't working and relying on pumping, we could continue breastfeeding without any problems. At the same time, I'm really, really, really looking forward to being able to wear my regular bras again. Nursing bras have to be the most irritating things on the planet. They're itchy because they're cheaply made, they either make your boobs look even larger or they have no support, they gap at the sides, they have gigantic unattractive padded straps...that's just a separate post in itself. And of course pumping is no walk in the park either, particularly when I'm traveling to client sites for meetings or otherwise needing to be away from the house for more than two hours. I've pumped many times in my car in the corner of a parking lot somewhere, hunkered down with blankets over the windows hoping no one wanders by. Other than one guy in a Target parking lot who I think took a picture of me with his camera phone, I've succeeded. Most definitely not ideal, but what else can you do?

Anyway, I surprised myself and decided to make an attempt at the midnight pumping and have done it the last three nights...and then spent 45 minutes lying in bed trying to get back to sleep, adding up to about an hour of lost sleep. Harper has been waking up coughing several times between 2 and 5am thanks to a bad cold, which has led to an overall night of a few hours of sleep between hours spent awake. While I know Harper's cold is temporary, the experience hasn't left me feeling very committed to the midnight schedule. I figure I'll give it a try for a week, and if it's not making a significant impact on the amount I get for her bottles, it'll be time for formula. She will have had breastmilk for seven months at that point, and while I know that it would be better if we could make it a year, I'm not ready to turn pumping into my full time, round-the-clock job. Plus it would be great if there were no more incidents with camera phones in parking lots.