Good morning everyone,
I’m sitting here with the new baby. As some of you know, my son has a tongue tie, so he can’t breastfeed like I had planned. I don’t want to get stuck buying tons of formula, and breastmilk is super nutritious anyway, so I am now exclusively pumping.
I am supplementing with formula for the time being until I get my supply up, but I am still pumping at least 10 times a day currently.
Yes, that’s a lot, and it’s not easy. Haha.
This is one of those ‘laugh to keep from crying’ situations. The story isn’t even finished yet, but let me update you so far.
I planned to breastfeed, but that didn’t work. I didn’t realize it wasn’t working, and so I got really engorged with milk. Then, I realized my son wasn’t getting much milk, so I began pumping like a fiend. But by then, it had been long enough that nearly all my milk ducts were clogged. It felt like my breasts had the texture of old, hard cottage cheese. Pumping milk helped some, but then I’ve learned that my nipples were extremely small, and I had to special order some super tiny flanges for my breast pump. My initial pump was so inefficient that it didn’t really unclog me much. So I had to wait until my new pump came in. My milk supply is also quite low, but we’re working on getting it up, and I think we’re finally… nearly out the woods.
Pumping so much is difficult with time because I can’t pump and feed the baby at the same time since I can’t breastfeed. For a few days, I felt like I was going crazy. We’re attempting to stay on a schedule, and that’s helping a lot.
This is the schedule we’re on that seems to be working, although any sort of schedule will help:
5:30 a.m. – pump
8:00 a.m. – wake the baby and feed him
8:30 a.m. – pump
10:30 a.m. – feed the baby, nap time
11 a.m. – pump
12:30 pm – feed the baby
1:00 p.m.- pump
4:20 p.m. – feed the baby
4:45 p.m. – pump
6:00 p.m. – pump
615 p.m.- feed the baby, catnap
6:45 p.m.-bath time
8:00 p.m. – feed the baby, bedtime
9:00 p.m. – pump
10:15 p.m. – dream feed
11:30 p.m. – pump
3:30 a.m.- pump
This is a very loose schedule. The times vary by up to an hour sometimes, but I mostly try to keep the baby awake during the day. This helps him sleep at night. He is only a week old, and he is already sleeping 4-hour stretches at a time and sleeping 6 to 8 hours in the night. Even though I’m still getting up to pump, not having to soothe the baby all night really helps with being able to manage everything.
I’ve also learned another couple of tricks to help keep make Parenthood easier, and I will share those in the future, but now I need to wake the baby. Bye
Metta
Frugal Treehugger 