And the Big Purple Pill Does This...

Before anyone reads this, goes and takes a bunch of stuff, has some unfortunate reaction, and sues me, let me disclaim: This is MY daily regimen, not a recommendation. I came to this routine through doctors' recommendations and reading too much, and I am in no way advocating it for someone else, nor will I be held responsible if anyone is doopid enough to think that just because I'm doing something means it's a good idea for them. Use your own brain people! Don't be outsourcing to my sleep deprived mass of grey cells.

But I thought it might be entertaining to read the list of pills a very healthy 36-year-old will swallow in a day in a quest to stay healthy, make her kid healthy, and stave off various genetic threats. So, here is my daily regimen of supplements:

Wake up. Pump milk. Take one capsule of macrobiotics (15 billion organisms per pill, half lactobacillus, half bifidus or something to that effect) on empty stomach.

With breakfast: one pre-natal vitamin with Omega-3s. (No, I'm not pregnant. Pediatrician said keep taking 'em as long as I'm breastfeeding. Besides, they're good vitamins.) Two fiber capsules. One iron (37 mg?), one vitamin C, 500 mg (mostly to help absorb the iron). Four fenugreek supplements.

With lunch: Two calcium (250 mg each) with Vitamin D, one magnesium (250 mg). Unless I have a bunch of dairy at lunch, in which case I try to take these later with a snack, because you can only absorb 500 mg of calcium at once, and I don't want to waste it. Four fenugreek. Adding today: Two grapefruit seed extract, 125 mg each.

Get home, take another macrobiotic on empty stomach (supposedly - realistically, I forget and take these after dinner with other pills, hoping that the empty stomach thing is an optimizing step, not a fundamentally necessary condition.) Nurse baby (such a lovely contrast from work and commuting!) Throw some food down my gullet. Take last pair of calcium with another magnesium, and four more fenugreek.

So, if you lost count, that's 27 pills a day. Did I mention that I'm perfectly healthy? Well, okay, except the thrush I keep threatening to write about. But I'm pretty sure my dad was taking fewer pills when he was fighting terminal colon cancer. It just seems a little silly.

The fenugreek is a galactagogue (SUCH a fun word to say! Like a cheap comic book bad guy.... Oh no, it's Galactagogue! DUN dun DUN dun DUN dun... aaaaaaah! but it means something that helps you make more milk) and frankly I noticed more of an improvement after adding the magnesium this week. So I'll probably get to the weekend when I can afford to experiment a little better and start phasing out the fenugreek to see what happens. I don't stink as much anymore so I'm wondering if my body is adjusting to it - one is told that it only works if one is fenugREEKing. Hee hee.

The fiber is a long-standing habit - when you lose your dad to colon cancer, if you so much as get diarrhea after some bad sushi, the GI docs want to turn you inside out looking for polyps and put you on fiber for life. Which is fine, harmless enough. And frankly, I'm pretty anti-colon cancer and pro-preventative medicine and cautionary behavior. So fiber it is. And any of you who are due for a colonoscopy better get one or so help me I will find something worse and subject you to it. Really, the test isn't so bad, it's the prep that's unpleasant, and that's not even as bad as the aforementioned sushi mishap.

But I digress. My point is, what did women do before we could just pop down to the corner hippie freak grocery store (I say this with love and full acknowledgement that I, in many ways, am also a hippie freak) and buy crazy numbers of supplements? And what are women with less money doing? I mean, we're on a tight budget these days, but if the doctor tells me to spend $30 per month on macrobiotics, I can do it. Many of us can't.

Some of these are just a way of restoring ourselves to a more natural diet - the omega-3s are replacing fish, for example. I like fish but it's too expensive and full of mercury to eat as often as I would have to in order to get enough of these fabulous fats, which our ancestors got by just eating fish out of the nearby river or ocean. But really, did, for example, Navaho Indian women have access to mass quantities of fenugreek around 1350? I'm thinking not. I could be wrong. Of course there are a lot of galactagogues, and plenty native to this continent, I'm sure. But I wonder if I am lucky to live in this time of ease and plenty or if what I don't realize is that I wouldn't have needed these things long ago? Eh, doesn't matter, I am when I am.

Robert stirreth, off I go.

Back Home Again, in California...

Hoosiers will recognize the song reference. Maybe. Or people who have been to the Indy 500. Anyway, I am home on a "personal day" today, essentially because there isn't enough boobjuice in the fridge to get through even half the day of me being away from Robert. He's had a week (probably a growth spurt) of waking up anywhere from 11 p.m. to 4 a.m., hungry. The closer to 5 a.m. he nurses, the less likely I can pump anything meaningful at 5 when I get up. Wednesday or Thursday morning (can't remember now, it's a blur) he started making noises at 2:30 in the morning, so I leapt up to pump before I missed my shot. So of course he fell back asleep and didn't need to nurse until 6, which means I could have waited until 5 to pump and gotten a lot more. But there's no way to know that at 2:30 a.m.

You know, in a way, this is a lot like investing. You don't know what the markets are going to do in any one moment, so you have to go with your best guess, based on careful observation and being as objective as possible. And then, no matter what you did, sometimes you'll guess wrong, and in hindsight, see a dozen reasons why you should have done it the other way. Only in this case, there are no empirical models or research papers on "when is my kid going to wake up hungry, and when is he going to make it through the night." Plus guessing right, while satisfying, is less likely to be lucrative. Well, except that it would enable me to stay at work.

Which brings me to my major point for the day. I'm not sure this is worth it. I'm exhausted, and while I've improved a lot on this point, I spend a lot of time at work being anxious about providing enough breastmilk for Robert. I asked my boss for Wednesdays at home again (no answer back yet but he was clearly not enamored of the idea) but even with that one day, I don't know if it would be so much better - of the six or eight weeks that I have supposedly been full time in the office, most of them have involved some sort of exception, and I think I've only had two weeks where I really spent five days in the office. Then there's what goes on for these office days. Feeding times and commuting mean I can't really stay longer or get there earlier, and with all the pumping setup and cleanup, I'm lucky to get 7 real hours of work in, which includes eating while I work (uncivilized at best, gross and detrimental to my keyboard at worst). We can get rid of the commute in December when our lease is up, but I'm not sure moving to a fairly isolated, expensive (albeit lovely) village is really the best answer. And I think I would still have a hard time with it, if I was trying to be in the office every day. It would just be easier to run home or have Matt run Robert to the office if needed.

So given that we are an all-boobjuice family, I'm wondering - is me working full time really worth it? I mean, yeah, one of us has to. And I don't think I could give up work altogether and stay sane/nice. But I could go part time, in a more sales or consultant focused position, nights and weekends (not all of both obviously but I bet I could sneak in ten hours a week). What we're really talking about here, even if we have three kids, is a 5-6 year hiatus in my work life. I can avoid a hole on the resume (and, to some degree, in my brain) by working part time. And then we can keep the baby near the boobies. Progressive (and stubborn) though I may be, I have to acknowledge a certain, purely biological sense to that.

Well, kiddo is waking up from his (rather short) nap, so off I go.

A Shoe Named After Me?

So, Kiddo and I had a lovely weekend. I let hubby sleep in yesterday to recover from his rough week. Then we had a glamorous family date night at Johnny Rocket's, followed by me going to bed at - yep - 8 p.m. To my credit, I did stay up until 10 Friday, and failed to really nap on Saturday. Then today was productive and companionable, just baby and Mama, including cleaning the kitchen and boiling all Bessie's washable parts (wait for the posting on thrush - it'll be a real page turner) washing my nursing bras and other gentles, and making a pot of soup. We had a walk and a brief visit with Andrew (and his parents) downstairs. The biggie - I got a 1 hour yoga DVD done this morning and a shower immediately following, when Matt was on duty before heading out to the theatre. We're talking a premo weekend people.

And the whole thing made me realize, I really do think I'll do better with an out-of-the-house job than trying to be the stay-at-home parent. I think it dawned on me when I realized I was spending the whole afternoon trying to carve out time to do something intellectually stimulating. Like reading while nursing - doesn't work as well now that I have to defend myself from Kiddo's rapidly developing "pincer grasp" the whole time. And I got sick of the tune stuck in my head to which I was making up words for whatever was going on. You know, there really isn't much that rhymes with Robert.

Just call me Captain Flip Flop. Sigh. We'll see how I feel at 4:45 in the morning when the alarm goes off to send me to Bessie again. I know either way has its advantages and draw backs. And I suspect my recently increased interest in staying at home is significantly (but not wholly) fueled by the return of the very busy time in our quarterly cycle, including doing not fabulously on my writing projects.

Will she go to work tomorrow? Or will she start buying lottery tickets? Find out next week on, "As the Mood Turns!"

Bessie at the Office

Bessie is a Medela Pump-in-Style electric dual breast pump. That's right people - I named my breast pump. After a cow. Not just any cow, mind you, but my colleague's best cow when she was growing up. Okay, fine, I named the breast pump and THEN she told me about the cow. But anyway, I think it is a very fitting name for her. Plus it's just easier at work - "I gotta go see Bessie," or "That Bessie is such a slave driver." Instead of, "I can't, I have to pump now" or "Yes, really, four times during the work day."

It took a lot longer than I thought it would to figure out the whole pumping at work thing. I've gotten pretty efficient at it, and it still takes me a half hour round trip, just over half of which is the actual pumping time. I use a hands-free pumping band, which I hope to review soon on this blog, so I can be on the computer while I'm waiting for Bessie and the girls to work their magic.

I've gotten a feel for what times of day I'm going to need to pump - there is some wiggle room of course but to get all the sessions done with enough time in between to rest there isn't as much flexibility as one might like. So when someone asks in the hall, "can you talk about that at 2?" I can say, "Unless you only need 15 minutes, better make it 3."

The law provides (I think... should check that) that employers must let you pump every three hours, but I find I need to do more like every 2.5 hours. Otherwise I can't get in four, and I go too long on the way home and/or supply decreases. I'm lucky - I have my own office, with a door, and can just sit at my desk to pump, not hide in the file room or oust someone else from their work space. I read (somewhere on some forum I'm no longer on) about a mom in the Air Force (I think - maybe Navy?) who is a pilot. She was pumping in the bathroom on her plane (a feat in itself) to get supply for her baby while she's flying. So if she can do that, I should woman up and do my job in my cushy office and not complain.

A friend told me about an acquaintance who actually pumps on her commute home. That seems sort of brilliant, except for the part where I'm sitting in the car doing all the set up in the parking lot of my workplace. I have gotten pretty good at pumping in the car but I don't love it and it takes enough extra set-up to remain modest (read: not get arrested or gawked at) that I don't actually think it would save me that much time. Plus then of course I'll get stuck in a traffic jam and not be able to take off the pump and shields, and of course I could safely turn off the pump while I'm driving, but something tells me trying to store breastmilk and put my bra back together while barreling down the 210 at 70 mph is just not a sound decision. Perhaps this other mom's commute is just the right length - anyway, my hat is off to her, but it ain't for me. Although to be fair I've pumped in my car three times now and no one has even walked by at an inconvenient moment.

My co-workers recognize the sound Bessie makes over the phone - I think I freaked one of them out with it - I thought he wouldn't be able to hear her, but he said, "what's that sound?" and I said, "I'm sorry, is that too weird? I could call you back..." He graciously finished the conversation but I suspect I was the subject of much sports bar mocking later that week.

So lately I've really been struggling with the whole working while breastfeeding thing. I'm struggling to feel like I'm doing well at work, I'm struggling to have enough breastmilk at home for my baby, and I'm struggling to remember that we really do need the money and I really shouldn't just quit. It would be much more responsible to let my husband get a job first and then quit, or at least go part time for a while to give him a chance to look. Right?

Totally Mom-Focused Reasons to Breastfeed

1.) So. Cuddly. I get the baby all to myself, can even take him back from extended family with less arguing than other times and get to cuddle him alllll to myself. Hahahahahaha.
2.) Burn off pregnancy fat. Totally helps. Something like 500 calories a day. Even if I had the time I wouldn't spend that long on the elliptical trainer.
3.) Less risk of breast cancer. Although who knows, scientific studies contradict each other all the time.
4.) Gee, honey, I seem to have forgotten something before I started nursing again, would you mind bringing me...
5.) Keep those great pregnancy boobs a little longer.
6.) Healthier baby means less getting puked on, driving to the pediatrician, etc.
7.) (fluff feathers, wiggle tail) Hey, check out that cute, thriving baby. I did that with my boobs! (Strut, strut.)
8.) No marginal cost per bottle (I can't put "free," I'm too big of an Economics dork)
9.) Totally portable, no accessories needed. Okay, maybe a shawl if you're not here in Cali where we can get away with brazen breastfeeding.
10.) Oxytocin is good stuff. Courses through the system like peace on Earth when the baby gets the girls going.
11.) Instant peace for (from?) wailing baby.
11.a) amusing sound when putting wailing baby to breast: WHHHHAAAAAAAOOB. I suspect this is where the word "boob" came from.
12.) Every morning before work, no matter how busy work will be, or how late I might be running, I get to hold my baby quietly by myself for at least a few minutes.

Feel free to help me add to this list...

Coming soon...

I need somewhere to share all the funny, frustrating, amazing, weird, painful, joyful, and messy experiences I am having raising my baby on 100% breastmilk while working 40 hours a week. So here it is!