Tag Archives: weaning

Shutting off the spigot

This topic is going to make some people uncomfortable. But it’s a pivotal part of writing about motherhood. So if you don’t want to read about breastfeeding, move along, nothing for you here.

Chris, for all intents and purposes, is now a formula-fed toddler, with no problems drinking whole milk and eating regular food (that kid can eat — tonight he had a tub of baby food, most of my chicken noodle soup from Panera, some of the bread that came with my meal, maybe 4 ounces of a 6-ounce formula bottle and some of my chocolate chip muffin). Problem is, he is still waking up most nights at least once, wanting to nurse. Granted, he doesn’t nurse a long time, but he still does it.

Basically, I’ve been preparing for this for a few weeks now. I stopped pumping at work last week. I’ve been drinking regularly caffeinated coffee. And I’m about to switch from the mini pill that allows me to breastfeed, to regular hormone birth control pills that will no longer make breastfeeding possible.

I’m a tad conflicted still. I am mostly on board with my plan to abruptly wean Chris. And he’s at that point where it should be relatively painless — he’s drinking less from his bottles, he has no problem drinking milk from a sippy cup. I’m back to wearing regular bras, and thank God almighty, regular dresses (because when you’re nursing, you need easy access).

It’s the nighttime wakings I dread. I haven’t been able to wean him from dead-of-night nursing sessions because when you’re exhausted, last thing you want to do is try to dance your kid to sleep in the middle of a dark, cluttered room. Plus, when you’re as exhausted as I’ve been, there’s no cognizant thoughts. There’s no thinking to yourself, “OK, we’re night weaning, so just hang in there and let him cry a little bit.” You just lay him down next to you and let him have at it. Truth be told, I blame my husband because he’s been reluctant to move the boys into the same room because he thinks they’ll wake each other up.

Hey, better them than me. What?

But there’s still that thought that, if say tonight, which is supposed to be my last night, goes badly, I may have to call for one more prescription of mini pills and delay full weaning one more month. I really don’t want to do that.

Here’s hoping that all that food tonight will make him sleep through the night and I can go through with weaning. For good.

Made it to 6 months of breastfeeding

I made it.

Its taken a lot of time, sleep-deprived nights, some tears, a few galactagogue experiments and time in a window-less closet of a room at work, but I made it to my goal. Michael hit the six-month mark on July 1, which means I hit the six-month mark for breastfeeding, which was the minimum goal I had. It was not easy going at times, especially after returning to work, but now it feels a little more like smooth sailing. Except for the sleep-deprived nights.

Shall I share my challenges? I shall. That’s what this blog is for, after all.

However, I have to preface my sharing with the fact that I had a bit of an advantage over other moms in the race to breastfeed Michael when he was newly born. Michael was born small, 3 pounds 7 ounces, and had been affected by the medication I was given to keep me from having seizures. For at least the first week, Michael was fed through a tube — first formula, then milk I pumped when I was released from the hospital. The second week, the nurses encouraged me to begin practicing with Michael as he began to gain weight and nipple (the combination of sucking, breathing and swallowing). First, it was non-nutrative nursing (I’d just pumped, so Michael could practice latching on), then a few sessions of actual nursing.

So, on to the challenges.

Lack of sleep: This is the issue I continue to deal with. The lack of sleep is killer the first month, but it gets better as you approach three months. But my husband and I are playing with the idea of giving Michael formula, if just to get him to sleep longer than nine hours a night. Nine hours sounds like a lot, but when the baby’s waking up at 4:30 or 5 a.m. when mom’s alarm goes off at 6:30 a.m. — it sucks. Besides, I know he needs a lot of sleep, so the trick is trying to fill his tummy enough so that he’ll sleep until 6:30 a.m….

Lack of education: My husband and I were scheduled to attend a feeding class at the hospital I delivered at about a week after Michael was born. In fact, I think I canceled our spot in the class as I was discharged. Big mistake. In the early months, Michael would fall asleep as he nursed from one side, and I thought that was OK. What I didn’t know is that I should have offered him the other side, to keep the flow going. Later, it became difficult to maintain a supply in my freezer because I wasn’t pumping enough from both sides.

Stress from going back to work: This was the most frustrating of my challenges. I’m the first among my immediate coworkers to have a baby, so even though I work with mostly women, I got some weird looks and questions like, “So, how many times a day do you have to do this?” one of the first days I was back at work. One coworker — a gay man — got a bit freaked out when I put down my water bottle on his desk, initially thinking it was breastmilk. We all tend to eat our meals at our desks and not take breaks (Internet work, what can you do), so I felt like I was being looked at weirdly for having to disappear for about 20 minutes, three times a day.

The initial stress and frustration, plus my reverting back to pre-pregnancy habits like drinking full-caffeinated coffee in the morning and then drinking a Coke at lunch (which I adopted while I was pregnant), all led to me producing less milk for a few weeks.

So what did I do? Well, as for the weird looks and attitudes, I had to develop a thick skin and just not care about it. I gravitated toward the other moms at my workplace, even though I don’t work as closely with them.

As for the low milk production, I think that ended up stressing me out more, leading to a few tearful conversation with my husband, who exacerbated the situation by saying, “you can supplement with formula, too.” It was frustrating, because I wanted him to support me in reaching my minimum goal of six months. I tried galactagogues — first, Mother’s Milk tea, then More Milk Plus capsules. The Mother’s Milk tea helped, I think, partly because I was ingesting more water. But I’m not a tea drinker, so I had to readjust.

So I did a combination of things. I’d been sending Michael to daycare with three bottles a day, and one full bottle always made its way home, prompting me to use it before bedtime. So I began sending him with two bottles, lessening the pressure on me to produce more milk, and also allowing me to nurse Michael before bedtime and all the time we were home. There were a few weekends I nursed Michael exclusively. And, I had to remember to guzzle water. Maybe the water intake doesn’t necessarily increase milk production, but it does prevent me from drinking caffeine, which is dehydrating. And I switched to decaf coffee, although we recently mixed regular beans with a whole lot of decaf beans.

There was only one day in the first six months where his daycare lady had to give him formula, and it happened to be a day where I’d been unable to nurse him before we went to work/daycare, so his feeding timing was off.

So now what? I’m willing to try to go for the full year, but my husband says he thinks Michael should be weaned as soon as he starts walking — he doesn’t want a real life version of the “Grownups” trailer, where the preschooler walks up to his mom and nurses as she’s talking to friends. LOL.

What I’m wondering is — do some moms wean from the breast, but continue to pump breastmilk to give to their babies in a bottle? That’s something I’d be willing to do, although it would create more bottles for me — ugh. I guess I have time to decide though. On an average day, lately, I’m producing a good 12 ounces from three pumping sessions (which is a good thing, since Michael’s bottles are up to 6 ounces each now) and I’ve got a good supply of breast milk in the freezer.