It's official. I've gone crazy. I'm going to attempt BEDA (Blog Every Day in April) again. This will be the 3rd time I've done it.
It's 2:08am and I'm sitting here on the old, worn couch, pumping. My trusty pump.. the same one I used when Mara was a baby. I got it for free through my insurance at my first lactation appointment on November 29, 2014. I took it out of the box that very night and proceeded to have a standing date (sometimes more than one) with my pump every day for the next eleven months. It was my mechanical BFF.
When you first turn it on, it sucks quickly. This is to emulate the quick flutter sucks of babies when they first latch on. This goes on for a while until it triggers a letdown (the milk flowing) at which point I push a button and it sucks slower.
When Mara was a baby, I pumped every single night in the middle of the night for about eight months. It was awful. And that was in addition to pumping before bed and sometimes first thing in the morning. Utterly exhausting. However, it allowed me to have a very impressive freezer stash.
The way breastfeeding works, as I understand it, is that it's a feedback loop. This means that, usually, the more you nurse/pump, the more you produce. Feed/nurse less and you produce less, feed/nurse more and you produce more. I apparently have a very persnickety feedback "sensor" because about a month ago I was so tired that I just couldn't get up to pump. I ended up letting my "slacker side" go nine hours without expressing anything.
It damn near dried up.
I'm still trying to get it back to where it was. And that was literally ONE missed pumping session.
Anyway, it's 2:21am now and I'm going to finish up pumping and go back to bed before one or both of my children get me up for some reason. Mara's sick again. She has cold number 3948479300489 of this cold/flu season. Fun stuff. Now it's just a matter of time until Orion and Corky catch it too. But not me. I almost never get sick. Moms don't get sick days so I guess my body just manages to keep it together somehow.
No comments:
Post a Comment