Work, pump, work, pump, work, pump, work, pump, fall over.

Hello Dear Boobjuicers and Friends!

So I am recently inspired by a new mama, the wife of a colleague (who is such the cute proud papa with their 7-week-old snugglebean in his arms but I will not say that at work because we are all Polite Professionals who do not call each other adorable, or dear, which of course I never do at work. Nope. Doesn't happen.) She is starting to pump in anticipation of going back to her breadwinning gig part time. I meant, when I was pumping four times a day at my breadwinning job, to outline a day's schedule for you, Dear Boobjuicers, to illustrate one of my major themes in this blog:

You are not alone in finding this to be a major pain in the ass. It is still worth it. You will get used to it and better at it, and it's not forever. It is worth it. You will be majorly proud of yourself. You can do it. It is worth it.

So here it is. As I recall from my previous gig, and from the first two months at this gig, it went a little something like this:

Get to work by 8 if at all possible. (On Mondays, dial in to the weekly meeting and mute it so they don't hear me chewing/pumping/swearing at whatever I just dropped on my toe.) Put equipment in place. Do some work.
9:00 or 9:30 - pump round one. I liked to leave this until the later time if I could get away with it, because I found I got more milk if I did, and also it was nice to feel like I'd been working for more than ten minutes. But remember you don't want to have nursings/pumpings be more than three hours apart, and you want 8 or more rounds with kiddo or pump a day if at all feasible. Look at a real authority here, like The Nursing Mother's Companion, or a lactation consultant, not me, but to avoid losing ground on supply there is a minimum number of times per day you want the girls to get drained by the pump (Bessie) or Kiddo. So, pumping routine, which for me included a little bit of work on the computer while Bessie did her thing. If you have to pump away from your work station, is there something you could be reading that relates to work? It made me less anxious to think I was getting some breadwinning work done while the girls were doing their thing.

(Read the one pumping session blog entry here, imagine that has passed.)

The whole pumping routine took about 40 minutes, from getting up to wash my hands to sitting down to work again afterwards, including storing my catch and washing the pump parts. With Mama CC's brilliant tip about having enough pump parts to go through the day without washing in between, you could cut 3-5 minutes off that.

So then I'd pump again at 11:00 or 11:30, 2ish, and 4ish. I almost never ate lunch away from my desk, and I would often work until 6. This is not necessarily the best way to do things, but with my awesome commute (10 minute walk) I could get away with it and that made for something approximating eight hours of actual work in the day.

I have a lot of meetings and calls to do in the course of my job, and I had to be careful to schedule those to allow for pumping. There were definitely some anxious moments of realizing I had booked things poorly, but my new boss was extremely understanding about the whole thing, and basically just treated me like a grown-up who knew better than him where I needed to be. It's awesome to have a boss like that. We do not all have bosses like that. I have some thoughts on that point, but the biggest suggestion, and possibly the hardest but I have done it too (remember this is my *new* boss) is to phrase your conversations about the time and resources you need in terms of, "here is how I am going to continue to do the awesome work to which you have become accustomed." And most bosses are not the person to whom you should vent, unless they are lactivist mamas of kids who have all weaned already. Which, statistically speaking, your boss probably is not. Know that the law is on your side, but avoid referring to law unless you have to, I would say. Of course you know your situation and your boss and I do not. But bosses get nervous when you start quoting labor law, and conversations are harder when people are nervous.

There were days I felt like I got no work done. There were days I could not bring myself to pump a fourth time. There were two days back in California, and I do NOT recommend this, that I pumped on the drive home instead. I don't think this was terribly safe, and I wound up deciding it only got me home 15 minutes sooner, because I still had the same setup and take down, and it was harder to do well in the car. But my point is this: you will have imperfect days. You might get frustrated or feel overwhelmed. Me too! And I made it. And Kiddo only got formula once (and puked it all back up but that is another story). Which is not to say that if your Kiddo ever gets formula you have failed. Nonsense.

My point is this: I did it, therefore you can too. I'm just a mama like you, perhaps a bit more stubborn than some. I'm not a big supply boobjuicer, bottom end of adequate I would say. You can do this. It will be worth it. You can whine to me all you like about how hard it is, and I will acknowledge that yes, it is hard. It is worth it. You can do it.

One last note: there are lactivists who feel that pumping is a sorry thing to which we resort because our maternity leave practices in this country are crap. Well, if I lived in Denmark, which might be nifty, I would still have a breastpump. I'm not someone who would be happy staying home all day with my Kiddo. Not just mildly bored, I mean, out and out depressed. I'm not built for it. I come from a long line of women who need to work to be happy people. And unhappy people are not as good at being mamas as they are when they are happy. And I am not going to apologize to La Leche League or anyone else for wanting a breadwinning job. Kiddo got through it just fine, our boobjuicing partnership has been awesome, and I am among Medela's biggest fans. (Except their bras are small.) So if you get this sort of noise from your lactation consultant or someone else to whom you turned for help, take a deep breath, feel free to hide behind economic necessity (I did!) but do NOT feel guilty for wanting or needing to work. Even stay at home mamas might like to go out for an hour and a half without panicking that their kid is starving and Dad/co-Mama/babysitter is losing their cool. I'm good with that too.

There are more thoughts than perhaps you wanted on this topic. I hope you are all well and have a fabulous Hallowe'en. (Go as a cow, that would be funny. Or a big bottle of milk. Or a huge boob. Or a really tired woman with a kid hanging off her boob.)

Much love,
Suzi

Mama Wisdom

Hello Dear Boobjuicers and Friends!

Again I have been the blessed recipient of Mama Wisdom. This is, by my definition anyway, a special category of mom to mom advice. Not just good advice, which we all know is an unfortunately small subset of total advice received. This is that particular bit of advice which finds us at just the right moment and causes a cloud to lift off of our brains or hearts or both, leaving us feeling not only able to face what ever challenge drove us to seek advice (or just to vent) in the first place, but also as though we are truly not alone.

I have received Mama Wisdom from all sorts of interesting and unexpected places, but most recently, at a wedding. The Wise Mama is a friend that was at grad school with Hubby. We were chatting about parenting breastfeeding while I was staring unabashedly at her unreasonably beautiful daughter, who is turning into quite a young lady. She is much more of an earth mama type than me, and I have in the past have been skeptical of herbs and similar advice. But it turns out she was spot on. I tried one cup of the tea she recommended on Sunday and almost immediately felt much better! Of course I also spent almost three hours on my own, having lunch and poking around Sur la Table and Powell's Books (yay kitchen stuff and books!) But I'm sure the tea helped. Now I just have to find the happy balance between the helpful mood lifting effect of the tea and the laxative effect of the fenugreek in the herbs. (Best to ease into these things and not have two cups on day one and three cups on day two, it seems.)

Meanwhile Kiddo is seeming a little less interested in nursing of late, not consistently, but more frequently than before. He had a nasty head cold which turned into an ear infection, so until we got his sinuses opened up a bit it was hard for him to breathe while nursing. But I think maybe he is getting less interested generally. We'll see. I feel sad about it, but less so than I would have even a couple months ago, I think. And I feel a little more confident that he will still want me to pick him up and cuddle him, which he does in the mornings when we don't nurse any more. So maybe we're both approaching that point of being ready to put the boobies away. But for now I will look forward to "boo" again tonight.

Much love,
Suzi

The Inconvenience of Non-Invulnerability Whilst Breastfeeding

Hello Dear Boobjuicers and Friends!

Sorry to report that ranty Suzi is back.

So I've had an interesting week, and yes it's only Tuesday. I got a UTI, and no, I didn't even get to do anything fun to earn it, but thanks. So okay, no biggie, do like a grownup and go to urgent care for a visit. Piece of cake. "Is that antibiotic safe to take while breastfeeding?" Blank stare. Click, click, click. "The computer says probably safe." That's nice. What does your education and vast experience caring for the total human including her nursing offspring say? It says cricket noises, that's what it says.

Okay to be fair this young chap is used to sprained ankles, food poisoning, and UTIs from pre/non-mamas who *did* get to do something fun to earn it and are *not* breastfeeding. But it's just a classic example of what I consider to be shocking ignorance in the medical community about breastfeeding. When I was struggling with yeast in the breasts when Kiddo was more dependent on me for food, I had an ob/gyn tell me I had to stop breastfeeding to use Diflucan. Um, hello, you're an obstetrician. Don't you know stuff about breastfeeding? "He's already been exposed to tons of Diflucan." "oh, hm, let me see (pulls out handy reference guide from pocket, leafs to appropriate page) Yeah maybe it's okay." HELLO!!!! Is breastfeeding so unimportant to you, a freaking obstetrician, that you can't be bothered to pull the booklet out of your pocket to start with? Do OBs only care about uteruses or something? What the hell! Okay to be fair the guy (yes, man) who pulled Kiddo out on his birthday was WAY more sympathetic, not less ignorant about yeast in the breasts but totally supportive of breastfeeding, and completely cooperated with the research I sent him and trying those regimens (again click the link above for the yeast entry to see more). So I'm painting a lot of doctors with one brush, but hey, I'm curled up on the couch with a UTI and an upset tummy (mmmm, Macrobid...) so a little leniency on being polite is fair I think.

So we mamas get told to wean or to pump and dump so that we can take a particular drug for some problem which most of the time can probably be treated with some kiddo safe (and probably generic read cheaper) alternative. There is totally not enough research on drug tolerance and breastfeeding out there. And the manufacturer's website (not to name any names but this drug was really popular when the anthrax letters happened) was hilarious, basically boiled down to "our lawyers told us to disclaim any and all responsibility for decisions, children, and our own products and to send you back to the doctor who gave you this bad advice in the first place."

What is a boobjuicer to do? Well, write your congressperson, sure, but meanwhile, get pushy. Your doctor knows a lot but not everything. You get to insist. You get to say, "no I will not pump and dump or wean, you need to find me a safe drug." There are a bazillion drugs out there, and there is probably an alternative. Usual disclaimers, I am not a doctor, you and your doctor(s) have to make the decisions, I'm just a mom and a lactivist. I know very little about medicine. Don't sue me, I have no money. But that said, I do know this. You can't just be a passive consumer of health care in this world. You have to be your own best advocate, and your kiddo's best advocate until kiddo is old enough to do it for kiddo's self. You *can* push back politely to your doctor. Most of the time when I have done so they have actually been appreciative for the new information.

Ugh, I'm tired and ranting. But you get my drift. Get pushy with your medical providers and let them know how important nursing is to you. Make them take the booklet out of their pocket for your kiddo.

And here is a quick shout out to the angel mamas who helped me this week. True friends and healers are such a blessing and I am grateful for the ones in my life.

Much love,
Suzi