Monthly Archives: March 2022

Pumping at Central Park

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As the weather has been slowly getting warmer, Chris and I have been eager to get out and about more. For the last three months, neither of us has sat down at a restaurant, with the exception of his going out for a regular colleague lunch about once a month. We have pretty much been in hibernation mode given our baby was born in the middle of December, and this time of year, it’s pretty freaking cold here in New York. So even if we didn’t have a baby, we would unlikely to be going out much anyway. But now that she has gotten her vaccinations and the weather is getting warmer, we are looking for ways to get out more little by little. This week, we took her out to Central Park for a second stroll, and we went through the Ramble… All while I was connected to my portable, wearable breast pump. I have been a little bit self-conscious with using the wearable portion of the new breast pump that I bought. The breast pump itself is actually not wearable. It is just supposed to be portable, as it is smaller than an iPhone. But with the Legendairy milk cups, you are able to hack the tubing so that you can connect the milk cups to the pump and add the cups into your bra. I connected the cups and the breast pump and turned it on right before we left. I even made sure to prime my breasts before we left by doing some breast massage and applying heat. 

This was my second time using the wearable cups component, and I will say that it actually worked pretty well. The thing is, the cups just assume that you either have a 24 or 28 mm diameter nipple. I am actually a lot smaller than a 24 mm measure, and so I know I need to buy an insert for the flange in order to maximize my output, but for now, the 24 mm will do. With flanges, you really need to have the exact measurement to fit you as an individual, otherwise, you will either experience pain or you will not have the maximum output. The first time I used the cups, I did not have a great output, and I wasn’t sure if it was just because the flange size was not correct or I just wasn’t using the cups correctly. The other thought that I had was that because my output is not consistent throughout the day, perhaps I would have gotten that similar output if not just five or 10 mL more if I had used my regular Spectra pump. I would never know for sure. 

But when I wore the cups out at Central Park that day, I actually had a pretty high output, all things being equal. And so I was pretty satisfied, particularly since I was not able to “see“ my let down,  nor was I able to do breast compressions. Because that would defeat the “wearable“ component of this breast pump set up, right? Being able to see a let down is really key for me to control the settings of the breast pump to maximize my output. Some women are able to feel their let down reflex, as it will feel prickly or like a tingle, but I am rarely able to feel that and instead, I have to rely on being able to see the milk spraying out of my nipples through my milk ducts while connected to the breast pump flanges. But alas, if you are wearing a wearable pump, you are not able to see any of this, nor would you want to because you would probably be in public. So, I have factored that into my judgment of whether these wearable cups are really doing their job and giving me as much output as I ideally would want out of a wearable pump. Because based on all of the above, you cannot really judge a wearable pump and its output against a regular electric breast pump given you are not using it in exactly the same way and being able to control it the same way with the same pieces of information during use. 

I was letting my friend know about this, who is considering getting this portable and wearable breast pump set up assuming that she gets pregnant a second time. It really does make a huge difference if you are pumping a lot and need to be on the go. A couple of things to factor in, though: you probably should not be bending down when you are wearing this pump because the tops of the cups have holes in them where the tubing is connected. And so, if you were to bend down, you could potentially risk spilling milk. That would not be great. Anyone who ever said, “Don’t cry over spilled milk“ clearly has never pumped milk exclusively for their baby to eat before. 

Another thing to factor in is: if you were going to be away from home for a while, you will need a place to be able to empty and store the milk cleanly and safely. You would not want to walk around with these cups all day long not just because they will make you look like you wear an E cup bra, but also because it just would not be comfortable. Plus, you need the milk to be stored at a lower temperature for safe eating for your baby. So, it would be smart to have a portable cold storage container where you could pack ice to keep the milk cold in bottles. You will also need a place where you are comfortable enough to take the cups out from your bra, set them down, and tip them out into bottles that you can then store in a cold place. These are all the things you have to think about if you are choosing to use a wearable breast pump out in public.

So, it’s really not as convenient as you would originally imagine, as there are a lot of other things to factor in when it comes to comfort, breast milk storage, portability, sanitary places to empty out the milk, clean surfaces, etc. But I was happy to be able to be out and about with Chris and our baby while also knowing that I was able to pump. It felt good to know that I was not being hindered from going outside just because I needed to pump milk. And that is not just to pump milk just because the baby needs milk, but because I know that if I go too long without pumping, I will get very uncomfortable and potentially engorged. And I definitely do not want that.

Goodbye, newborn diapers

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Today, my baby turns 3 months old. She is no longer a newborn, which is a bittersweet thing to think about. While it was obviously tiring having a newborn to care for around the clock, it made me a little sad to realize that she was outgrowing her newborn diapers. She was teeny tiny and swimming in the going-home outfit I put her in while at the hospital in mid-December. And now, she just about fills it out. She has already outgrown the two Christmas newborn outfits I got her, the only two newborn onesies she had. Chris unpacked her Size 1 diapers last week and added them to her diaper caddy, and I immediately felt both sad and happy. It’s true what they say: the days are long but the weeks are so short. While I am looking forward to that day soon when she will be eating solids and will rely less on me for pumped breast milk or nursing for comfort, it also makes me a little sad to think she will be less reliant on me for nourishment, as insane as that sounds given how exhausting and mentally challenging that has been for me. Pumping has overtaken my life, but it has given me joy to know that my body is capable of nourishing my baby as much as it is. My baby is getting to be a bigger baby as the days go by, and it’s so gratifying to see.

Milk manager

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Since the beginning, Chris has taken the lead in managing the baby’s feeding, from her schedule to what she eats (breast milk vs. formula) to the amounts she has per bottle. He also has been maintaining a very extensive Google Sheet that documents all details of her inputs (feeds), as well as her outputs (poops and pees). Though endless apps exist to track all of these details, Chris insists that he enjoys updating this and that he wants to own the data. Each evening at around 8:30, when we are preparing the baby’s bottles for her 10pm, 3am, and 8am feeds for our night nurse, I am usually pumping or arising from taking a nap to pump, and he is at the kitchen counter, taking a look at all my pumped milk bottles, emptying them into Avent bottles for the baby’s feeds, and figuring out much more I need to pump before we can reach the ideal amounts for her to eat during each of these feeds with the night nurse (or ourselves when she’s not here). I thought about this while getting ready to pump this evening and started laughing to myself, and I told him that he’s basically the Milk Manager.

“Yeah, well, someone’s got to make sure that this shit gets done,” he responded proudly. “There needs to be data integrity and accuracy!”

He doesn’t seem to trust the night nurses when it comes to their reporting on how much the baby has eaten at a feed. This has happened a few times when we have asked how much the baby has eaten, and they have claimed she ate a certain amount, but the difference remaining in the bottles we see is far greater than what it should be if what they said was true. He also, annoyingly enough, doesn’t trust my judgment and nitpicks at me for 5ml here and there.

It’s okay. I’m happy for him to take the lead as Milk Manager. That’s just one less thing I have to think about.

Quiet moments

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Since Chris has gone back on family leave, the only bottle feeds that I do for the baby now are at 10 PM three days a week, on the nights when our night nurse is not with us. While doing her bottle feeds when Chris was on leave was stressful and exhausting on top of managing my pumping schedule, doing her bottle feeds on these evenings is actually a bit enjoyable now, if I do want to admit it out loud. These are the times when it’s just the two of us in the living room, and I am feeding her, observing her, listening to her little sounds, and enjoying quiet time together. My favorite time while feeding her on these evenings is while I am burping her and figuring out whether she is still hungry or not. I have her positioned so that her head is just over my shoulder, and I am holding her body up while patting and massaging her back. Often times, when she is full, she will start to fall asleep and get into a koala position while on me. And while I hear the sound of her little breath and feel her chest go up and down, I remember how lucky I am to have her, happy and healthy. I stroke her hair and rub her back, and I lean back to relax with my baby in my arms. And I think to myself, even though today was a shitty day in terms of the amount of pain I had in my left elbow and my right wrist, and even though I am still sleep deprived and really dying for a full night’s sleep, while also trying to reconfigure my pumping schedule down to six pumps a day so that I hopefully don’t compromise my milk supply, but also try to regain back some of my life and perhaps some sleep, I am so grateful. This tiny human is slowly becoming a little bit less tiny every single day. She is cooing and babbling, taking in the world around her and observing more and more. Her wake windows are longer, and she wants more interaction and stimulation from us. I can see that she looks for me in rooms now, and she can see farther and farther away. Sometimes, she turns when she hears my voice. And in the mornings when I am pumping and entertaining her at the same time, while she is babbling, she will stop and carefully study my face when I sing to her. These are the moments that make me unbelievably happy.

“Breast milk is not free”

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A few months ago before I gave birth, I was in a session with my therapist discussing my hopes for a feeding plan for my baby. We were listing out the pros and cons of breastfeeding and formula feeding, and as a pro for breastfeeding, I said, “well, one big pro is that breast milk is free, so I don’t have to pay for it!” She gave me this look that said part shock, part horror, and part comic and responded, “Oh, breast milk is NOT free!!”

And while on my pumping journey, I have heard her voice so wisely repeat this in my head, over and over and over. The literal dozens of hours I have spent with my nipples connected to a breast pump, the time I have spent doing hand expression, breast compressions and jiggling (to get the milk ducts active), breast warming and massaging; milk duct clog expelling, breast milk measuring, spilling (yes, there were a couple small yet painful spills.. every drop counts); researching ways to increase my milk supply, trying different and useless supplements, my nipples being sore and pointy to the point I cannot even wear my regular bras or my sports bras; power pumping, all the exacerbation of pain in my fingers, hands, wrists, and elbows as a result of all the above — I have reflected on all of this almost every single time I have connected myself to my breast pump. BREAST MILK IS ABSOLUTELY NOT FREE. I was stupid and naive to have ever made such an ignorant statement. Pumping has tested my mental health in ways that is close to the roller coaster I went through with IVF — In-vitro fertilization!! Who would have ever thought this??

In those moments, I feel deeply resentful of all the women who told me that they “just got lucky” because breastfeeding just worked out for them right away — they had babies who latched right away (well, mine did: that was a very FALSE sense of security), babies who sucked hard enough to get all their milk out so there was no milk transfer problem as in my case, babies who rapidly gained weight during nursing. When they connected their pump, they always pumped enough to get a feeding or more for their baby, or all their pumps had a consistent or predictable output. I wanted to say to all of them, “I hate all of you, but that’s because I’m envious as fuck.”

I also think about the total lack of understanding that men have when it comes to the pain and toil that pumping milk around the clock takes, or the potential harm that a clogged milk duct can take on a woman’s body. Example: the other day when I was dealing with a milk clog, I spent a good three hours shuffling between two pumping sessions and a manic attempt to get the clog out. In that time, Chris went out for a haircut, but before that, he was obsessed with AirPods he lost. When he got back, the first thing he asked me was, “Any luck finding my AirPods?” I told him that I spent that entire time either pumping or trying to get my clog out. “That’s it?” he responded, in terms of what I had accomplished during that time.

Seriously? Was he more concerned about his lost AirPods than the fact that a milk clog could result in 1) less milk for the baby to eat, 2) a total reduction in my overall milk supply if the clog persisted for too long, 3) my potentially getting mastitis, resulting in extreme flu-like symptoms, needing antibiotics, and in the absolute worst cases, potentially even going to the ER? And let’s also not fail to mention that… I was in pain! And when I said this to him, he responded, “Someone’s being a snowflake today.”

I told my friend this, who has two children, breastfed both, and dealt with many painful and stubborn clogged ducts. She got exasperated listening to this and said her husband was the same. “Men just don’t understand the crap women go through to feed their kids!” she said in response. “(Husband’s name) always bugs me about the times I pump and asks why I always have to pump at those times… like it’s a HOBBY!”

This is why I have mom friends and a pumping support group. If I didn’t, I probably would have given up on pumping after the first month. Because while formula may be expensive, breast milk is the most expensive food that exists. Women sacrifice their bodies and their mental health just to nourish their children. And there’s really no greater gift or sacrifice than that.

No pressure (to pump)

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Last month, we started noticing that the baby would have a bit of mucus in her nose, and it would accumulate as the night went on. We could actually hear her breathing loudly while sleeping, and at times, it actually sounded like she was struggling to breathe. This was when I started clearing out her boogers and mucus before bed every night as well as each morning before her mid morning feed. It was actually crazy to think how much mucus this tiny little human had in both of her little nostrils. It made me so sad, and my heart hurt to think about how she could be struggling to breathe.  

We talked about it with our Night Nurse, and she suggested that her nighttime feeds only be breast milk if I could produce enough. Luckily, I had gotten my supply up to a level where I could provide all of her nighttime feeds with breast milk. So during the day, even if I was producing and pacing well with my breast milk output, I would try to save breastmilk for all of her feeds overnight. Even if I did have enough to give her 100% breast milk for an entire 24 hour period, we would still give her one bottle of formula just to make sure that we had enough and then some. It’s almost like my own way of “saving” for the next day, which may be a “rainy day“ in terms of my breastmilk production… Because I had no idea when I might get a clogged milk duct or if my supply would just randomly tank because I still had not regulated my milk supply at that point in time.

On top of this, when Chris would do her bottle feeds, he noticed that she always seemed more satisfied when she had breastmilk. She could have less breastmilk than formula and still be more satiated. This makes sense when you think about breastmilk consumption versus formula consumption in babies: every time you read guidelines on how much babies should eat a different ages by week as well as by month, you can see that many babies from month 2 onward can gain a healthy amount of weight but still consume the exact same amount of breastmilk in a day, Which is approximately 90 to 150 mL per feed. That is a big range, but that depends on the number of feeds in a day. Formula fed babies are not like this, though. As formula fed babies get older and bigger, the amount of formula they need steadily increases. They will eventually need massive bottles of formula to drink. In the one feed a day when she would have Bobbie formula, she would kind of grimace after taking a sip from the nipple of a bottle and look at Chris, like, “what the heck is this? You’re making me drink this?”

Chris told me this, and he told me that she very clearly prefers drinking breastmilk. And I looked at him and said, “great! No pressure to produce more!“ He gave me this exasperated look and retorted back, “why do you have to be so negative? I’m telling you that she prefers your milk over formula! That’s supposed to be a compliment! All of the hard work you are doing to pump milk is paying off! She clearly enjoys it!”

He’s right. I am being negative. I see this as additional pressure to find ways to increase my output to get to as close as 100% as possible even when I originally set a goal of getting to 75 to 80%. But doesn’t it make sense that once you have set a goal in terms of quantity that once you hit it, you keep on reaching higher and higher? So not only does my baby have a clear preference for breastmilk, but she also gets more mucus when she has formula, which is not good. If you knew that your baby was more susceptible to mucus because of an increase in formula consumption, wouldn’t that be pressure for yourself to try to produce more breast milk?

Horrifying stories in Labor and Delivery at Lenox Hill

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I was at my neighbor friend’s baby shower this afternoon. To be honest, it felt really good to actually dress up, wear makeup and jewelry, and get out of the house, even if it was just in our building’s lounge for a few hours. It felt good to wear something other than sweats, my nursing top, and a pumping bra for once. I met her friend, who is a labor and delivery nurse at Lenox Hill, and she shared this horrifying story that nearly left me in tears when I heard it.

At some point in the last two years, a woman gave birth to a healthy baby.. and within hours of being born, the baby was on the dad’s chest doing skin to skin while he was on his phone busily texting family/friends… and he had no idea that the baby’s nose was pressed up against his chest too much and it blocked off his oxygen, and he died. He was dead for over an hour without the dad being aware. Since then, Lenox Hill has a policy that no partner/support person can do skin to skin with baby until after 6-8 hours post birth.

I was so disturbed and upset when she shared this story with me that I nearly started crying. Since going through the insanity of IVF and the emotional intensity of pregnancy and childbirth, and now having Kaia, I physically feel pain when I hear stories like this. I cannot even imagine what that couple’s conversations were like after the death of their child, or if their partnership even survived that.

12 weeks old

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“Why do you always kiss her every time you pick her up?” Chris asked me the other day. “You are smothering her!”

I told my night nurse and my friend this the other night when Chris was away at a hotel in his Covid bubble. My night nurse laughed and rolled her eyes. She responded, “She is your baby. You can kiss her however much you would like. There is no such thing as kissing your baby too much!!“

It’s true. I kiss Kaia every single time I pick her up. I tell her she’s my sweet baby as I give her multiple kisses, rock her, and hold her close to me. She’s my life’s greatest gift. Every time I look at her and hold her, I thank God for my sweet baby after all the trials and tribulations I went through to conceive of and give birth to her. I also remember that so many other families have spent longer periods of time trying to conceive and still have not succeeded, and I really feel for them. Not everyone is as lucky and blessed as I am. And with that, I always kiss my baby to remind myself and her of our good fortune.

Today, my baby turned 12 weeks old. It’s cliché, but I really cannot believe how quickly time flies. It feels like it was just yesterday when I had the most excruciating pain of my life being in labor with her, pushing her out of my body, and taking her tiny little self home in a huge car seat from the hospital. This time last year, I was mentally and physically getting ready for my embryo transfer with the one embryo that made it, the little embryo that could, as I liked to call her. While I had hoped and dreamed that this time this year, I would be able to have her in my arms, it has been surreal to think that this actually became my reality.

Motherhood has been full of ups and downs, but mostly ups. I have been blessed with a tiny little human who is a great eater and sleeper, who has easy-to-read signs and is slowly but surely showing bits of her personality. The biggest down, of course, has been pumping milk around the clock for her, as it has definitely tested my mental toughness as well as my physical ability in terms of keeping my nipples comfortable, but I see it as a temporary mother’s sacrifice for my sweet baby. I look forward to her every smile and hearing her laugh, as well as seeing all her other upcoming developmental milestones. But I love even just the little things: smelling her, rubbing my nose against hers, listening to her little grunts and squeals as she stirs before waking up, watching her sleep (she has the cutest little smiles while sleeping… not to mention her tiny night terrors). I love her more than words can express.

A continued weak suck and a second clogged duct 

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Two nights ago, it was just me and Chris with the baby at home. Usually when it’s just Chris and me, I will do the baby’s last feed of the night at around 10 PM. Afterwards, I will do my last pump for the night and go to sleep for approximately three hours. Then, I’ll wake up around 3 AM to do my middle of the night pump. However, I have noticed that the baby tends to be a little bit more feisty on the nights when I have her. That night, she had about 3/4 of her bottle when she started falling asleep. I figured that this was a sign that she was full, so I burped her, held her upright for an additional 10 minutes, and then started to swaddle her to bring her to her bassinet. She was totally fine throughout this entire process… Until I started swaddling her, and she started crying for more food. So I said OK, I can give you more food. I fed her about 20 mL more breastmilk, and then, she started falling asleep yet again. This time, I went through the exact same process as I did above, and then at the exact point when I started swaddling her, she started crying…  again. I was like, seriously?! You need to go to bed and make up your mind and stop grazing! This is your last meal of the night, and it is not a buffet spread that you can just graze at and pick at little bit of foods with on tiny toothpicks!

I gave her about 10 mL more breastmilk until she started falling asleep again. Then, for the third time, I started swaddling her, and she started crying. This is when my patience really wore thin. I continued swaddling her and then picked her up, rocked her, and sang her a song. I told her that this time, she was not getting any more food, and I did not care how much she was going to cry. I needed to pump, and then I needed to go to sleep. She needed to sleep right then and there.

She eventually complied and started falling asleep. I put her in her bassinet and immediately went to set up my pump. I did my last evening pump, and then I went to sleep. I looked at the clock, and it was just a couple minutes past midnight. That was so frustrating. I needed to wake up in three hours to do my middle of the night pump, and the thought made me miserable. I told myself OK, maybe I’ll give myself an extra hour of sleep and get up to pump at 4am. One additional hour of sleep felt very nice and luxurious, and I was going to give it to myself.

Well, I woke up after my alarm went off, and Chris asked if I was going to get up to pump. He was up waiting for the baby to stir so that she could have her middle of the night feed. I immediately felt a weird lumpy sensation in my right breast, in addition to the same tingly sensation on both my boobs, telling me I needed to pump ASAP or risk engorgement. I started massaging both of my breasts as I normally do before a pump, but I noticed that there were two lumps on the top of my right breast… and I was not happy. Seriously? I gave myself one extra hour of sleep, just four consecutive hours, and my punishment is milk duct clogs?? 

I went to do my pump and got a good amount of milk, more than I normally do around this time of night. I actively massaged out both lumps to see if I could loosen them. One of them seemed to have gone away, but one of them still remained. It was strange that my milk output was higher than usual despite having these lumps, because most of the time when you have clogs, they actually block the milk from flowing. That ends up reducing your output from what you normally get. When I finished my pump, I went back to sleep and woke up again in about three hours to do my first morning pump. And this was when I realized that the clog was not going away unless I manually got rid of it: my right breast produced just half of what my left breast produced this time. The unevenness in both of the bottles that I was pumping really unnerved to me. I knew I had to get this clog out, and get it out ASAP.

I went up to the hot tub on the roof and actively massaged the clog. I used the Haakaa and Epsom salt hack with warm water, and soaked my nipple in it about four times throughout the day. I also applied my Theragun on the clog and pushed it down towards towards my nipple. I made sure to be prepared, as I put a bottle under my nipple, and thankfully I did: milk sprayed everywhere when I did this, and I even got it all over my shirt. I am stingy with breastmilk as an under supplier, and there was no way that I was just going to let the milk spray everywhere and lose it if I could control it. I tried massaging the clog out in the shower, and I also noticed milk spraying. I took sunflower lecithin pills throughout the day, which are supposed to loosen fatty milk and prevent clogged ducts.

Finally that evening, I did more Theragun massage, as painful as that was, and did a last Haakaa and Epsom salt nipple soak for the night. this resulted in the clog finally loosening in a way that looked promising: in the Epsom salt soak, which was colored purple because of the lavender in the Epsom salt mixture, I saw a big, slow gush of white fluid in the Haakaa breast pump that eventually spilled out. While it made me sad to lose this milk, it made me really happy to actually see this Haakaa hack in action and actually working. I continued to massage the clog and gradually felt that it was getting smaller and flatter. Then, I thought that it would be a good measure to get into another hot shower, use a hot wet hand towel, and continue to apply pressure to ensure that the clog was gone while bending over to let gravity help me. I used the heel of my hand as my friend suggested and more milk sprayed out. Did I finally get it all?

I did my 8:30 PM pump, and my right breast produced just over 10 mL… That was miserable to see. And unfortunately, I did not see milk spraying out of the milk ducts that I know this clog is associated with on the top of my breast. I didn’t think the clog was fully out. When I massaged the top part of my breast, I still felt a lump, though it was much flatter and smaller than it was before. However, it looked like my left breast wanted to over compensate for my right breast, and it actually produced the difference of what I normally produce for both breasts during this evening pump, which made me a little happy.

This morning, I took another hot shower after the gym and used the hot towel, the power of the heel of my hand, and bent over to get the clog out further. And this time, there was no doubt about it: The milk just gushed out of my right nipple. It started as long, fast sprays, and then it progressed into huge gushes of milk. I felt one part relief and one part sadness… I felt relief knowing that I was actually making progress to get rid of the clog, but I felt really sad because I was literally seeing my precious breast milk going down the drain and ultimately getting wasted.

 The day before, I had finally, in the last 12 weeks, reached over 20 ounces of breast milk output in a single day. I was proud of myself and my progress, as I had worked so hard to get my milk supply up. But then, as though to punish me and laugh at me, my body gave me a clog the day after. What the actual fuck?! It was like mother nature playing some cruel trick on me.

My mom friend told me that my baby would be able to help me get my clog out, as her baby had always helped her get her clogs out. They always say that a breast pump is never as efficient as a baby at the breast. Well, that is having the assumption that your baby is actually an efficient eater. Well, I knew that that was not going to be the case for me because my baby was not an efficient eater at the boob. And my suspicions were correct: when I placed her on the right side at my breast, she lasted about seven minutes tops before she started wailing loudly. And then this morning, she lasted just four minutes and kept on unlatching and cried yet again. This baby was not going to help me unclog myself at all… I can only hope that this laziness and weakness is not indicative of the person she will grow up to be.

The morale of the story is: take sunflower lecithin pills to prevent clogs. Don’t sleep too long between pumps otherwise your body will punish you. Don’t get too excited about your increased milk supply because your body may come back and bite you in the ass… or in my case, in the boob. MILK CLOGS HURT.

A weak and lazy suck

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When you are a new parent, of course, you’ll think that your baby is cute. You may even think that your baby is the cutest baby on earth, and who could blame you? Every day of my baby‘s life, she gets a little bit older, bigger, and is constantly changing. Every day, I marvel over how cute and sweet she is, and all I want to do is eat her little face. Her face is taking shape, her skin tone is morphing, and she is slowly developing little rolls in her neck. Her cheeks have filled out so that they are super pinch-able. But one thing that doesn’t seem to be changing that the pediatrician and my mom friends around me have encouraged me about is her suck. Most of them were optimistic, and they said that as the baby got older, she would also get stronger. This would mean that her sucking would likely also become stronger. And while she does have some good days on my breast, other days, it’s just as though she is just as weak and lazy on the boob as she was in the first couple of weeks of her life. Sometimes, it honestly just feels like she is licking my nipple, and I am not sure that achieves anything. Who even knows if that counts as “nipple stimulation“ to help my milk supply? I told Chris this, and he said that this was simply foreplay on my breast, and this was not a good use of time for anyone!

A friend suggested that I look into a nipple shield, as nipple shields are supposed to help babies with a weak suck, as it is evidence-based from babies in the NICU, most of whom are premature. The idea is that the babies do not have as much bucal fat in their mouths to be able to properly suck because they are so small, so they need something firmer like a nipple shield to grip their mouths on. My Cleo LC also suggested that I look into this, as well. I was even further encouraged by this when I read a promising story by someone who posted in the breastfeeding group on Reddit, who said that she had a baby who also had poor milk transfer and a weak suck. By using a nipple shield on and off while nursing up until week 13, she was able to get her baby to transfer enough milk so that baby started rejecting all of her bottles that were offered after nursing because she was full. Throughout this period, she maintained her milk supply by pumping milk around the clock, similar to what I have been doing. The crappy thing about the story though, is that she had to go back to work at that point, so she just had to continue pumping milk (this stupid fucking country). But she was still able to nurse her baby successfully in the evenings until her baby was full. 

Well, I spent the five dollars it cost to get a fitted nipple shield for my nipples, and I tried using the nipple shield on and off on one breast while nursing my baby for about two weeks. In the beginning, it actually seems like it was working. She was sucking harder, and when she switched to the other breast, she actually seemed like she was working harder to suck the milk out. But then, there were other sessions when it seemed like it just stressed her out too much, and she would start fighting with the nipple shield. It upset me to see her so stressed, and I didn’t want to make every nursing session this stressful, even if I only used a nipple shield on one breast. And on and off, to make things worse, she was just as lazy as she was before I introduced the nipple shield. So in the end, after about 2 1/2 weeks, I gave up on the nipple shield. Granted, I only spent about five dollars on the nipple shield, so I didn’t feel that bad about it.  I still just really wanted nursing to work, and after using the nipple shield as a last ditch effort, I finally accepted the fact that this is not going to be part of our path forward in nourishing my baby. Pumping was going to be how I would continue to primarily feed her. At least, as long as my sanity was intact, I would continue doing this. My goal is to get to a minimum six months of her diet mostly being breastmilk. Ideally, I would still be providing some breastmilk until she is one year old.  And honestly, I also rationalize this because of the co-pay I paid for my Spectra S1 pump, as well as the new portable pump I just bought, the Baby Buddha, along with the Legendairy milk cups that make it a wearable pump. Well, can you blame me? I’m trying to get the biggest ROI possible out of my investments. And these are all investments in my baby’s health, so I don’t think that there is anything bad about this decision or goal.