Seven ounce morning is a good morning indeed!

If there was one thing I could tell all new moms about pumping when they're first starting out, it would be to be kind and patient with yourself if you can't pump a "milk waterfall" right out of the gate. It took me a LONG time and LOTS of practice to get good at pumping - just like any new skill!  Some women will respond well to the pump right away, but many others (like me!) have to train themselves to pump well, including lots of trial and error.  But lo and behold, I got much, much better at it over time!

Here's today's 10 minute pumping session while I did online shopping:

I didn't have to try very hard for this, and I could have pumped more
if I'd wanted to (but Annika won't drink even this much at daycare, so I don't bother)

I've posted this photo before, but here's my very first pumping session when Maya was about 6 days old, which took like 25 minutes and I cried the entire (painful!) time:

Christmas Day, 2013: I worked very, VERY hard for this 0.5 ounce of milk

So see, new moms, progress can happen if you give it some time and keep trying!

Also, here are the twinsie babies this morning before school - I am so *in love* with both of them:

Maya wanted to have an "all orange twins" day


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Two Week Wait

First, before anyone gets excited - NO, I'M NOT GETTING PREGNANT.  The "two week wait" is a common phrase for people trying to conceive to describe the stressful, intense waiting time in between ovulation and the earliest pee-on-a-stick test that you can take to figure out if you're pregnant or not.  As I have only experienced this once, and mostly I didn't expect to actually get pregnant, I had a pretty mild experience with it. However, I've also never felt anything quite like it - great excitement, mixed with great fear, mixed with a very sincere sense of impatience.  And yet!  I've found another experience that feels *exactly* the same! So my paper got editorially rejected from Science - although it was quite a kind and positive rejection - and so now we are waiting at Nature.  I wake up every single morning fervently both hoping for and dreading the decision, and feeling distinctly impatient that I can't just know now  (and praying that someone...
Read more

Attempting the impossible

In response to my good friend Lesley’s very valid comment question about how on earth I get any work done with the baby in tow, I’ve decided to do the post that I’ve wanted to write for a while.  I am, in fact, attempting the impossible for the next four months: working as close to full-time as possible while not putting the baby in day care. (Edit: I wrote this really long, flowery, idealistic post below, but the short answer is that I work - poorly - while the baby sleeps.  So I also do everything in my power to help her sleep in long chunks, which is perhaps instilling bad sleep habits, which I will also probably pay for later.  And that's about it :)) Over the course of my world travels, I have always been inspired by the women in less industrialized societies than ours.  They truly bring their babies everywhere with them as they go about their daily business.  They simply strap the babies to their bodies in some kind of carrier and go, nursing whenever...
Read more

41 Weeks

Image
A place where no woman should ever have to go!  No, there is no baby yet. We're off to see the midwife again now for more membrane stripping/non-stress test - I'll try to update afterwards. Here are some photos from this weekend: One of the many (fat) squirrels that inspired the cookies Friday's "Ugly Sweater Party" - husband won, actually! We got some snow this weekend, offering the opportunity to try to induce labor with.... ....snow shoveling!  I did our house (front and back) and all of our neighbors' houses too.  Clearly didn't work, but was fun anyway. Best part of the weekend - husband's parents came to visit, YAY!!  It was so great to see them :)  
Read more