Monthly Archives: February 2022

Multi-tasking while pumping milk

Posted on by
Reply

It’s often been said that mothers are the best multi-taskers on earth. Why is that the case? Well, it’s because they don’t have the choice of multi-tasking; they MUST multitask simply to survive and ensure their children’s survival and comfort. This is also the only way shit gets done in the house.

Here is a list of things I’ve completed while connected to my Spectra S1 breast pump. I’m pretty proud of myself, if I can say that, given that this Spectra pump, even with its built-in battery, is basically like carrying around a mini bowling ball everywhere that’s connected to both my nipples.

Cutting vegetables and fruit

Preparing toast

Mashing up avocado

Preparing morning oatmeal

Eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner

Brushing my teeth (I do not recommend this; this was ominous!)

Flossing my teeth

Entertaining baby in Baby Bjorn bouncer chair

Double boiling and heat aerating Chai

Whisking matcha

Disinfecting kitchen counters and bathroom sink

Scrubbing toilet bowls

Preparing breast milk and formula bottles

Wiping up baby spit up on floor

Washing dishes

Writing blog posts, responding to emails

Listening to and reading the news

Phone calls with friends/family

Answering the door when food delivery comes (yes, I really did this)

Voice to text dictation for this blog

Sitz baths for postpartum healing

Posted on by
Reply

Before I had gotten discharged from the hospital, the nurse packed me a sitz bath to bring home to use in order to heal my rectum and vagina. A sitz bath is essentially a bath for your nether regions: you set it up on top of your toilet after lifting the lid and the seat up. You fill the shallow bath with warm water along with Epsom salts and mix it up. Then, you takeoff your pants and underwear and sit on top of it for about 5 to 15 minutes. The Epson salts as well as the heat of the water are supposed to help heal your rectum and vagina from all of the trauma that you experienced during childbirth. I had read about sitz baths leading up to giving birth, but I wasn’t set on buying a sitz bath for myself, so lucky me, I got one for free at the hospital… Or, you can also say that nothing is free at any U.S. private hospital in reality because the raw cost of giving birth at Lenox Hill, when you combine the costs for both you and your baby (because yes, your baby does get a separate bill as soon as she pops out) is over $80,000. But that’s another story for another day.

Anyway, this was part of the many things that were packed for us to take home after giving birth. I did not get around to actually using it until about one week postpartum. I finally took a little bit of time during  one evening to do a sitz bath for myself. I considered it part of my self care and healing. So I would set myself up in the second bathroom, fill the sitz bath with warm water and lavender Epsom salts that Chris’s brother bought me for Christmas, and then just sit there. I would have my phone away and literally just sit in stillness for 10-15 minutes. It was a short, sweet time every day almost every day for about 3-4 weeks when I would just meditate in silence by myself and have warmth enveloping my nether regions. And I could not believe how good it felt the very first time, and every subsequent time. I felt an immediate “ahhhhhhh.”

I pretty much got hooked on doing this. It especially felt good when the few stitches I had inside my vagina started to heal, which tends to cause itchiness. As soon as my bottom hit that warm water and salt, it was as though all the itchiness just dissipated just like that. And even though the time that I spent on top of that sitz bath was short, it was a really calming time, and I looked forward to it every evening.

One of the fun things about the sitz bath is that it has the slits in it to allow the water to drain. That way, if you overfill it by accident and you put your bottom on it, the water will just drain directly into the toilet bowl. But if you think about it, the sound of the water dripping into the toilet bowl is going to sound just like urine dripping into the toilet. And so, one day, Chris decided to carry the baby into the bathroom to come check up on what I was doing. And he looked at me, then looked at the baby, and kind of smiled. 

“It sounds like you are peeing!”

“You are really loving that thing!” 

“How long are you going to be using that vag bath?”

I thought that I would no longer need it anymore at this point of my postpartum state.  But then, out of nowhere while peeing one day recently, I started getting a burning sensation in my vagina after wiping. So, it looks like I may not be retiring my sitz bath as soon as I thought.

Baby’s first skill: sticking out her tongue

Posted on by
Reply

Our new morning routine has been to sit with baby Kaia in her Baby Bjorn bouncy chair and talk, sing, and play with her. Sometimes, I will read to her or show her “high contrast black and white images” courtesy of Lovevery. And of course, I am doing all this while I am pumping. She loves making eye contact, and she has been increasingly more observant not only of my facial expressions, but also her surroundings. Whenever I sing or talk to her, it’s almost like she’s studying what I am saying and trying to make sense of it. She coos and makes all kinds of babble sounds in response.

I read that babies as early as six weeks old can mimic what their parents do, whether that is facial expressions or motions with hands. But today, our baby, for the very first time, mimicked me sticking out her tongue. I had been doing it to her for a few days now to see if she would catch on, and she finally did it today… and I got it on camera! She did it multiple times, and I just got so excited. I felt so, so proud. It seems a bit funny to think about exactly how happy and proud I was, but I really was. It feels so good to see that she is responsive to us and is just taking us all in, little by little. I almost melted into a puddle and just wanted to eat her cute, chubby face then and there. My little, sweet, smart baby. I just love her to no end.

Dreaming of an angioplasty

Posted on by
Reply

I haven’t been able to remember most of my dreams since our baby was born, but the dream I had last night really stood out and definitely highlights all my focus around my milk supply for baby and how I obsess over it.

In my dream, I was at the doctor’s office going over some test results because of some chest pain I told the doctor I was experiencing, and she informed me that I had a blocked artery that she was concerned about. The only way to address and resolve this would be to schedule an angioplasty for me, which is a procedure to restore blood flow to the heart without open heart surgery. It’s considered a minor surgery… but definitely NOT something commonly done on someone of my age.

My immediate reaction was not to be concerned about my own health or the fact that this was a sign of heart disease. Instead, my response was… is there any way we can reschedule this procedure so that I can do this after I’ve weaned my baby off breast milk? If I have this procedure done, I’ll be off my pumping schedule, and I won’t be able to pump on the day of the surgery or during the weeks after that due to recovery, and that will ruin my milk supply and possibly even cause me to dry up, and I NEED to give my baby as much breast milk as possible! Can we wait until she’s at least a year old?

My doctor looked at me like I was absolutely insane… which I was with the response I had. We were talking potentially about life or death for me, and I was only thinking about… my baby getting my breast milk…?!

Almost skipped a MOTN (middle of the night) pump

Posted on by
Reply

It was Valentine’s morning this morning, and oddly enough, I had a full five hours of continuous sleep, which is the longest stretch of sleep I have had since the day before my baby was born.

You would think that I would have been happy about this, but instead when I woke up on my own at around 4:20 AM this morning, I was in a panic because I realized that I had hit “off” on my alarm for 2:20 AM to wake up to pump. I usually will hit snooze, but in my sleep deprived and exhausted state, I hit “off“ instead, resulting in my continuing to sleep for an additional two hours. I had had dreams, or nightmares rather, of missing my middle of the night pump multiple times, so clearly this was a source of potential anxiety for me. In my dreams, I miss my middle of the night pump completely and of course panic about my milk supply dropping. If you follow any exclusive pumping blogs and websites, they all warn you to never skip your middle of the night pump up until the time that your supply regulates, which is around the 12-week postpartum mark, otherwise you could severely torpedo your milk supply for after your supply regulates.

I’d had at least a dozen dreams of missing my MOTN pump. In real life, I would wake up in a panic at around 5 or 5:30 AM, to see the milk I had expressed during my 2:30 AM pump sitting and cooling in the fridge where it usually is. This time, I literally jumped out of bed to go into the kitchen to get my pump ready. And well, it was not the end of the world because I actually expressed almost an ounce of additional milk more than I normally do during my 2:30 AM pump. So at least that made me happy.

I feel like my entire waking and subconscious thoughts surround themselves around my milk supply, my output, and how much breastmilk I am producing for my baby to drink and whether I will have enough for her. Granted, I recognize I do not have enough to 100% cover her needs every single day, but if I am able to get to about 75 to 80% of her needs and cover the rest with formula, I will be comfortable. That is not ideal, as I would love to be able to provide her 100% of her needs with a little to put away for a freezer stash, but I am not sure or confident that that is in the cards for me.

Baby laundry: not dryer safe

Posted on by
Reply

Before having a baby, I was warned by many other parents about how much laundry I would end up doing. It wasn’t necessarily that babies need a lot of clothes or that they get that dirty that often. It was more that they will spit up a lot on their own clothes as well as on yours. It is also that they are unpredictable when it comes to how many blowouts they will have. You may also have situations when you are taking off one of their dirty diapers, and then, you accidentally get some of their pee or poop on their clothes. Then, the baby can no longer wear that onesie or shirt anymore, and you have to soak it and get it ready for the wash. Or, another situation that may arise during a diaper change when you are changing them: they suddenly decide, oftentimes reflexively, that they want to take one of their little feet or hands and shove it right into the dirty diaper. Then, while you are trying to block them from getting into that dirty diaper, the smear ends up happening. Voila: there, you have another situation of yet another piece of dirty clothing that you have to wash.

Also, when other parents warned me about how much laundry I was going to be doing as a parent, no one warned me that baby clothes and baby cloth items cannot be washed in the same way that I wash my own clothes. What I mean by that is, these items often times will say, wash in cold water only, wash on delicate cycle, do not tumble dry, do not put in dryer; not dryer safe. Why is this the case? Well, for the clothes, it’s because the baby clothes will shrink. They are already so small. For the other items? I have no freaking clue. These baby companies need to get their crap together and actually make their cloth items washer and dryer safe. Stat. 

So what the hell are you supposed to do? You’re just supposed to air dry everything? When did having a baby and her clothes become so unbelievably high maintenance? I don’t even do this for over 99% of my own clothes! And I am an adult! 

Not everyone has the luxury of having an outdoor space with clean, crisp air where they can just line dry clothes and hang them up in the midst of sun and nature. Some of us actually live in urban areas where we dwell in apartments and cannot line dry our clothes and have them be nice and soft and fluffy once they are dry. We don’t even have a rack to hang clothes to dry. When we have the occasional item that needs to be air dried, I will usually hang it on a clothing hanger and then put it on the shower rod in the bathroom. But I can’t really do that with the baby’s clothes because they are so small and would just fall off. So what we have ended up doing is just putting all of her wet clothes out of the washer all around the dining room table and chairs to dry. And sadly, once they are dry, they are not soft and fluffy. Some of them are actually a little bit rough, as sad as that sounds. It depends on the material of the item, but some of them really are just not soft… At all. And that makes me sad given the original state the clothing item was in. Luckily, most of those items, after a few days in her drawers, get a little bit softer by the time she wears it. So in the end, it’s not so bad. But it is definitely not in its original baby soft condition.

So yes, you can add this to the list of things that I was not anticipating when becoming a new parent. No one warned me how high maintenance baby clothes and baby cloth items would be to wash. And don’t even get me started on the lounger covers and how hard they are to take on and off, not to mention baby chair covers. Those items also need to be air dried. How riveting and fun for new, tired, sleep-deprived parents.

Mutilated breasts and a damaged body 

Posted on by
Reply

Often times when you see postpartum women in images on social media, You see them all made up and wearing jewelry, wearing some nicely fitted outfit that flatters their figure. They are holding their baby, calm and still. If they are old enough, the baby is smiling with them or at them.

That’s not what postpartum actually looks like, though. When I look at myself in the mirror now, I do not totally recognize what I see, at least when I look at my breasts anyway. I have bruises on the tops of my breasts from where I do my breast compressions while pumping milk. I have a scar on the right side of my right breast from the milk clog that I had to take out and thankfully was able to remove relatively easily. My nipples are pointier than they have ever been, and not only that, my areolas are absolutely huge, far larger than I ever thought they would become. I’ve barely had any energy to do my usual skincare routine, and I have only masked my face maybe three or four times since the baby has arrived. That is a huge decrease from masking or using some type of enzyme peel 2 to 3 times a week as I previously did (I am a skincare junkie). The one daily indulgence I do now for myself and my body is to slather warmed shea butter all over myself after my daily morning shower. Shea butter is supposed to help with reducing the appearance of stretch marks, which is why I originally bought it. It’s also good for applying to your breasts and nipples given nursing and pumping. But then, I realized that it’s actually quite luxurious, and the added bonus is that it is 100% natural. I also use it to moisturize the baby, and she seems to enjoy it. And on the mornings when Chris was working, I was barely even able to do that given the baby’s feeding schedule. I looked mutilated. In addition, you can’t see it, but my hands and arms are damaged, with nerve issues that hopefully will not be permanent.

When people ask me if life with a baby is what I thought it would be, I say that in many ways, it is actually easier, as I imagined the absolute worse with a colicky baby, no sleep, etc. We are very lucky that our baby eats well and sleeps well. When she cries, we almost always know what she wants or needs. However, the part that I was not anticipating that has definitely been very hard for me personally has been pumping… and around the clock, surprise surprise. That is like a whole separate job from childcare. Because if you are changing your baby’s diaper or feeding your baby, it’s very challenging to be pumping milk at the same time unless you have a wearable or mobile pump. I also never imagined that my body, particularly my breasts, would look like they were mutilated. Chris says that it looks like someone beat me up, and that is pretty accurate. When my friend came over the other day to help with bottle feeding the baby, she saw my breasts on display pretty much the whole time, and the first time she saw them, she raised her eyebrows, had her eyes wide open, and asked how the hell my breasts looked the way they did. And I explained this to her, and she said, “Shit, I didn’t realize it got this complicated.”

Well, neither did I until I became a mother to my child. Neither did I.

Exclusive Pumping Mamas Facebook group

Posted on by
Reply

When I had told my friend who is also a mom that the baby had a weak suck, and thus nursing could not be the primary form of eating for her, she empathized with me and told me that she had a couple of friends who were exclusive pumpers and had done this for over a year with their babies. So she would reach out to them to ask for their advice to share with me. They had a couple of pieces of advice for me: dark beer, brewer’s yeast, oatmeal, and joining the exclusive pumping mama‘s Facebook group for support. Most people do not understand the life of an exclusive pumper, including those moms who exclusively nurse, and so the support that we needed was a bit unique. A lot of people do not believe that exclusive pumping moms are breast-feeding their children, as stupid as that sounds, because their babies are eating from a bottle as opposed to directly from the breast. And so, in the exclusive pumping mamas Facebook group, one of the rules is that you cannot discuss nursing or latching; one tiny violation of this, and you will be banned for life. This group is solely to support women who pump and particularly those who exclusively pump to feed and nourish their babies.

I had not even thought about joining a Facebook support group, and so when my friend suggested this, I immediately applied to become a member. Hours later, I was excepted, and there I entered into a world of support and resources that I had not had in the last couple of months that I really would’ve benefited from in retrospect. During my middle of the night pump overnight, my pump time came and went so quickly because I was so engrossed in reading all of the posts that people wrote. I related so much to the mental stress and anxiety that people expressed over their milk supply, particularly those who are under suppliers like me. I thought I had it bad when I was only pumping around 200-300 mL per day for my baby in the beginning when there were women who were only able to pump 10-20 mL per day. I actually felt seen and heard in this group of women who I had never met. I even responded to a few posts and questions, and I also posted one or two of my own questions. And people were so willing to respond and so willing to cheer everyone on. Everyone understood each other’s journey here and why we all pumped. We all understood and did not need to explain to each other the importance of breastmilk and why we wanted our babies to have as much breastmilk as possible. It felt really good to read through all of these posts because it was like these were my peers I was conversing with.

I am always making references to the pumping mamas Facebook group when I talk to Chris. It’s like some thing that I mention at least a couple of times every single day, and I’m sure he thinks it is a little annoying. I told him that with this Facebook support group, I finally feel seen. He had a quizzical look on his face and responded, “What do you mean? I see you every day!”

Bath time photos 

Posted on by
Reply

Last year, my parents decided to enter the 21st-century by finally getting smart phones. Of course, they were never going to buy brand new phones or be on a regular phone plan, so they got some limited phone plan and bought refurbished used phones. They are Android users, and I am not familiar with using Android phones, so my mom asked me to help her with her android device last summer, I was only able to help her with basic things and then leave her to my dad to help… Which basically means he is never going to help because he has no patience to teach anyone anything.

Well, Chris said that since we had a family chat with his own family, he should build a group text chat with my parents and the two of us as well. I knew this was not going to be a great idea because 1) my parents are not comfortable with text. The most they will ever text is one or two word responses. It will likely feel like a one-way conversation, and who wants a one-way conversation in text? 2) the whole point of a group chat is so that a group of people can, well, chat. That is not what was going to happen with this group chat. What would likely happen, and what has happened, is that we will share things like photos of the baby, and if my mom has a response, she will just call me and tell me her response, which will likely be a complaint. Chris partly also wanted to do this for his own amusement because he wanted to see how predictable my parents would be. He proceeded to send a number of photos, including one of the baby getting bathed by our night nurse. Chris did this specifically to instigate my parents because he knew that I did not tell them we hired a night nurse, nor did I tell them that she is Trinidadian and black. Well, it is very obvious that our night nurse is a black woman. She is a Trinidadian woman with dark skin, and this is apparent in the photo of the baby being bathed because you can see our night nurse’s arms. 

This did not sit well with my parents. They would not be happy with this for two reasons: first, they are terrified of “outside“ help, because they generally do not trust people who are not family. My mother had had some bad experiences with childcare with me when I was a baby, and so since then, she truly does not trust anyone. Secondly, they would not be happy with hired help who is black. Because to be frank, my parents are racist, and they do not like Black people. When I have accused my mom of being racist before, she says that it is not racism. She says that there are just certain races that are just not as good as others. Some work harder than others. Some smell more than others. You go figure.

I had never told my parents that we had hired a Night Nurse. I knew they would not approve. So this photo was the first hint that we had hired someone for childcare. My dad immediately responded and said, who is your night nurse? I knew this response would not mean anything, but I responded that her name is Cheryl. The next time I spoke with my mom on the phone, she tiptoed around the fact that she was not happy with the fact that we hired someone to come into our home and stay overnight. She also asked in her usual annoying and coy way, “I don’t mean anything by this, but is your night nurse black?” I told her that yes, she is Trinidadian black, and she is amazing. She does a great job with the baby and we totally trust her. She then said, when you hire a nanny in the future when you go back to work, you better not hire a black or a Filipino woman. You can’t trust them. Just believe me, I know, she said.

Chris insisted he sent this photo to my parents to “show them who’s in charge,” but I thought it was just to instigate them and piss me off. I was NOT happy he did this, as I explicitly told him not to. My parents are never going to understand that I am in control of my own life no matter what he tries to share or convey to them.

When the hand and elbow pain gets worse

Posted on by
Reply

A good friend of mine had not only offered to come for a day and stay the night and help out with bottle feeding the baby, but she also offered to do a grocery run for me at Trader Joe’s. So I gave her a list of things that I wanted, and she graciously brought them all over. While she was over, we caught up on a lot of things that we hadn’t talked about since we had last seen her on the day after we came home from the hospital. She wanted to stay away given the rise in Omicron cases  and the fact that she works at a grocery store and is thus exposed a bit more than the average person.

When she was over, I realized that even when she was helping me with all the bottle feeds and keeping the baby upright after eating, I still had pretty much no free time to myself. I took one one-hour long nap while she was there, and the rest of the time, I was pumping, cleaning bottles, prepping bottles, measuring out breast milk, cleaning the kitchen, preparing food for me and for my friend…. and I was just exhausted. I wasn’t even sure if I felt like I had less to do even though I did have less to do because I wasn’t doing the bottle feeds anymore. What the hell was going on?  I could not believe it. She came specifically to help and relieve me, yet I did not feel relieved. Yes, I did prepare food for her. I did clean all the bottles that she used to feed my baby. And maybe that took up extra time. But I couldn’t believe that I still felt overwhelmed. 

Pumping had really taken over my life, and I really resented it. I resented the fact that I was able to lactate and Chris was not. It started to infuriate me that my body was the only body that was able to produce food for my baby to eat. Even though I was the one who wanted to exclusively nurse her up until the point that I went back to work, I still got angry about this anyway.  This is a huge responsibility for one person, to be a sole food provider for a tiny little human. Yes, there is formula as everyone would remind me, but my breastmilk is the best milk for my baby. How do I know this? My baby spits up less when she has my breastmilk. The baby’s face appears happier when she has my breastmilk. When she has a bottle of formula, she gives Chris a funny look and tentatively takes the nipple of the bottle into her mouth. She has even refused bottles of formula before when we’ve given her breast milk after. These are all signs that she wants mommy‘s milk and not “fake” milk. 

When the night nurse comes, Chris is able to sleep a full night’s sleep and I am not. I have to still wake up in the middle of the night to pump to maintain my milk supply. My supply has still not regulated yet, and so I was too scared to remove my middle of the night pump in fear that my output would take a dive, and I really didn’t want to do that because I already was not producing 100% of the baby’s needs. If the baby is having about seven feeds a day, depending on the day, she gets between 5 to 6 bottles of breastmilk / 1 to 2 bottles of formula. This has been huge shift for me because I have finally increased my supply to a point where I can provide approximately 75 to 80% of the baby’s needs, and this was my goal all along. We started initially with giving her only about 30 percent breast milk to 70 percent formula supplementation. I doubt that I could get to 100% at this point, but hey, you never know. I had heard stories of women whose supplies had increased at around the 14 or 15-week mark, so I did not completely eliminate that possibility from my mind. I probably got, at most, one extra hour of sleep when the night nurse is here because when she is not here, I do the baby’s last bottle feed of the night at 10 PM, and then I have to pump before I go to sleep. Then, I wake up somewhere between 2:30 and 3am to do my middle of the night pump. I go to sleep again, and then I wake up around 7:15 to 7:30 to do my first morning pump. 

I think all of this frustration and anger were really stemming from the fact that the pain in my fingers, hands, wrists, and elbows had really been at an all-time high this week. It was almost like my body knew that Chris was not going to be around, and so, why not piss Yvonne off more by ramping up the pain? The littlest things made my hands hurt. I could barely rub soap on my hands without feeling a little bit of pain in my fingers and in the base of my thumbs, and I was really sick of it. The pain in the base of my thumbs felt like a permanent bruising. Some of the pain is due to actions that I chose to take repeatedly, such as hand expression and breast compressions while pumping. But all of these things were to benefit the baby because they would increase my milk output, so can you really blame me? The rest, I was just predisposed to carpal and cubital tunnel before ever even getting pregnant. But it’s not like I could just stop pumping or stop taking care of my baby. I still had to cook because I was hell-bent on having home cooked food. That was ultimately why I prepared our freezer with all kinds of ready to eat homemade foods before baby came… Because I did not want to just eat takeout and delivery in my weeks after giving birth. I wanted wholesome, nourishing food that was not laden with excess fat and salt, which is typically what food is when you get takeout. That’s how restaurants hook you: having extra fat and extra salt to make you want more.

I just felt tired and frustrated and annoyed that pumping was taking over my life and the pain was just getting worse. I felt alone in my pumping journey. I was resenting pumping in general and wished it could be easier. My friend gave me a hand and arm massage while she was here, and I am regularly using the new Thera-gun that Chris bought, but it just wasn’t enough. I just wanted a break, a full night’s sleep, some sort of acknowledgment from the world that what I was doing was really fucking hard. IVF required a certain level of mental toughness, but exclusive pumping required a whole ‘nother level of mental toughness that I never thought I’d get myself into after giving birth. I did not want to end my breast-feeding and pumping journey with paralysis in my hands or limited mobility in my arms and then be a cripple. Because what could possibly be worse than a crippled mom?