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.

Six Months!

Harper is six months old! When I think about how much she has learned in order to change from a baby burrito in a blanket into a tiny human with a personality, it seems like it must have been more than just six months. But when I think about the fact that I still don't have any ab muscles, it seems like half a year can't possibly have gone by already.

I think the first three months seemed to go by slowly, because the nights and days were pretty much all the same: feed the baby, hold the baby while she looks around for 45 minutes, baby sleeps (or you try to get her to sleep) for an hour and a half, change baby's diaper, repeat. I still have a hard time staying up past 8pm because I'm operating on a sleep deficit from the first few months. These last three months, though, Harper has been sleeping through the night and we've established a new "normal" routine, which helps eliminate some of the clock-watching. More than that, though, she learns something new every day, and it's amazing to see her find her toes for the first time, recognize you and smile when you walk into the room, or work to get a toy that's out of reach instead of thinking that it just disappeared. Watching her progress has definitely made the time go by faster.


We had her six month appointment this morning, where the doctor confirmed what everyone who meets her says: she's little. She's in the 25th percentile for both weight and height. But 25th percentile is still normal, so there's no concerns. She'll just be wearing some of her 3-6 month clothes a little longer than some other babies.

Part of the reason she's small could be that she's still eating only breastmilk (formula often makes bigger babies). However, she recently started drinking six ounces per bottle at day care, and I'm having a pretty hard time pumping enough to keep up with that demand. When the ladies at day care told me they wanted to increase her bottles to six ounces, they knew they were delivering bad news.

"So, Margo and I were talking..." the afternoon lady told me. "We ah...well, we were just thinking...um, well, we thought that maybe, since Harper will be eating solids soon...ah, we thought that it might be good if, um, if you could increase her bottles to, ah, six ounces." She avoided eye contact when actually saying the number of ounces.

I found the delivery of this news rather amusing, but my honest reaction was about as bad as she was expecting. Outwardly all I said was, "You're killing me!" and I dutifully brought in six ounces the next day. I've had to tap into the store of frozen milk to make that happen, though, so we'll see how long this lasts. My hope is that Harper will be able to go a little longer between bottles once she starts adding solid food to her daily meals next week, and maybe I'll only need to bring two bottles instead of three.

Pumping is definitely the hardest part of being a working mom. Besides being time consuming and difficult to schedule around, it means that all of my dress shirts don't fit. I put on one of my button-down shirts last week hoping to wear it to a meeting, and I couldn't even get the two sides of my shirt to touch over my boobs. A coworker of mine thinks this sounds like a dream and looks forward to the chance to have such "sexy" boobs, but let me just tell you, it gets old pretty darn quick. I actually weigh less now than I did when I got pregnant, but I still can't wear any of my old shirts. By the time I can they'll probably be out of style! Thinking about having to keep up pumping and wearing the same three T-shirts for another six months is definitely one of those times when six months seems like a very long time. Hopefully the milestones we have waiting for us in that time (crawling, babbling, walking!) will make it go by quickly--and hopefully no one will comment if I'm wearing the same shirt in every photo of me between now and then.