I’ve been working from home for about 2.5 years now, which I never thought I would do. Initially, I was forced into it because of the global pandemic, but then I took a job with a company that wants me to be fully remote given there’s no New York office, and I figured… how bad could it be since I had no idea when the pandemic would end? Well, now I’m 2+ years into that job with no New York office in sight. And while it’s been fine because I’m happier pumping milk and prepping my baby’s meals while at home, this isn’t going to last forever.

The biggest downside, especially for someone like me, is the lack of camaraderie and socializing; setting up Zoom hangouts and 1:1 social chats just is not the same as being in the office or going to happy hours. The second biggest downside, and one that may even tie for the first one I noted, is that I’m nowhere as active. I don’t get as many steps in during the day. Even with daily morning gym workouts, there is not as much walking throughout the entire day without a commute. I’m sitting a lot more and walking around my own apartment, but you never get as many steps in that way. When I used to be in an office, I’d easily get 15K-20K steps in every single day. I highly doubt I even get half of that now, even when I do longer runs or time on the elliptical. I need to be a lot more intentional about getting out of the apartment just for the walk and the fresh air.

I can’t complain, though. I’m lucky to have the privilege and flexibility of working from home. I have a lot to be thankful for. I just need to be more intentional about increasing my activity level.

I originally told myself that when Kaia turned 11 months, which is literally in 4 days, I would officially drop down to 3 pumps per day. But given that I have been doing 3 pumps per day each Saturday we’ve been going out, I figured… what difference is it really going to make, anyway, if I start it just a few days earlier? It means one less set of washing pump parts; one less hour connected to a pump, 10 less minutes connecting and disconnecting, more time to myself to do whatever else I need or want to do. Today was the second day in a row of 3 pumps per day, and it felt so weird. On days when I am not out and am home or just working from home, my pumping schedule will be something like 7:30/2:30/9-9:30, but on days when I am out, I will need to push the second pump probably closer to the last pump of the day. Today, I did my second pump at 2:30, and it just felt a little odd: I can’t remember the last time I felt so liberated, not pumping and not feeling the time pressure to pump or get something done before pumping. Every Saturday and Sunday felt like a time crunch to pump and get something done before or after, and today, for the very first time ever, I did not have that feeling. It felt weird.

It’ll probably take me some time to get used to it, and for now, it feels nice to have such big pump outputs in my three pumps a day. But I know at some point, my body will get the signal that I’m pumping less frequently because I am getting closer to weaning since my baby needs less breast milk, and so that amount will eventually start dropping off. It will likely be a little emotional, especially since I worked so hard to get my output up in the beginning. I’m just mentally trying to prepare myself for that drop off and my eventual weaning off of pumping and providing my baby breast milk. It’s likely the most intense journey I’ve ever been on outside of trying to conceive, getting and staying pregnant, and labor and birth. My body has done Kaia and me a lot of good, and I am blessed and grateful for it.

Yesterday, I caught up with a neighbor friend whose baby is 5.5 months old. I hadn’t seen her or properly spoken with her since her baby was about one month old, so I wasn’t sure how she was doing or how her pumping journey was going. Similar to Kaia, her baby just wasn’t able to suck well and was also a bit on the smaller side at birth, so she had to resort to pumping quite frequently early on. She knew my journey was still in progress, and so she leaned on me for a lot of advice and tips. She told me that while on a trip visiting family in Utah and Colorado at the four month mark, she finally just decided she couldn’t do it anymore, so she weaned herself off pumping quickly to dry up and switched 100 percent to formula. She said she already wasn’t able to provide even half of her baby’s needs with pumping, so she didn’t see a point to continue. And though she has just gotten comfortable with her baby being exclusively formula fed now, she still has pangs of guilt every now and then, especially since she still hasn’t gone back to work and won’t until January.

“I feel so liberated, though, so free!” my friend said. “I felt guilt, but I have so much more free time to just enjoy her and do other things and not be stuck connected to a pump. I can leave the house and feed her anytime, anywhere! I can hold her just for the sake of holding her. I feel like I can have a life again!”

I hear this a lot from moms who make the switch to exclusive formula feeding, that it’s freeing, liberating, gives you agency over your life and your body. It gives you more time to bond with your baby. I get all that, and last January, I momentarily even thought about just stopping. But I’m still happy I kept up pumping. It definitely has been a sacrifice, and my life certainly has not been that free because of this chosen journey, but my baby will only be a baby once, and so I have no regrets that I went this route. But what this also means for me is that whenever I do finally wean off the pump and completely stop breastfeeding, it will definitely warrant a celebration of some sort. It will be the end of an era and the beginning of a new one, plus open the doors to new ways to bond with Kaia.

I was never going to be sure when my period came back, but based on everything I had previously read and what all my mom friends and colleagues warned me about, once my menstrual cycles resumed, my milk supply would drop. I was mentally bracing myself at around the six month mark, since my doctor had told me that around six months would be a “normal” time for my period to come back, assuming actively breastfeeding. My friends told me theirs came back between 8-9 months with active nursing/pumping. Well, lucky me, mine didn’t come back until the 10.5 month mark, so it was later than I guessed. But the decrease in supply was not welcome, and as it started plummeting days before my period, I’d figured that was the sign it was back. Seeing my output numbers decrease day after day and the sharp drop in milk output on my day over day graph hurt. I’d spent the last 10.5 months exclusively pumping. The first 2 months were the greatest struggle. The next four months, I saw my maximum output and was so proud of what I’d achieved after the slow and miserable start. And to see all of that hard work starting to get chipped away with a decrease in output just felt so sad to me. Academically and logically, I knew pumping would be an emotional journey, but I would’ve never imagined at the beginning how much I could tie my self worth as a mother to my milk output. And to see the numbers decrease the way they have in the last two weeks just felt miserable. Even if Kaia is drinking less milk now, it still made me sad. It’s work I did solely to provide sustenance for her and no one else. I saw it as my duty as her mother to do this, to nourish her for as long as I physically could.

One day, I’ll look back on this journey and be grateful and extremely proud of what I’ve done, despite how grueling and miserable at times it was. Even now when it’s “easy” because I have my routine down pat and know what I am doing, it’s still annoying to be tied up to an electric nipple sucker for 4 hours each day. Each day of this journey, I have been grateful for my body. I hope one day, when Kaia is old enough, I can share this with her, and maybe, just maybe she will appreciate all the time I sacrificed, attempting to give her the very best.

I went back to the orthopedic doctor this morning for a second cortisone shot in my left wrist. I let him know that the pain had pretty much subsided in my right since he gave me a shot there about two weeks ago, but it was clicking a lot more in the last few days, plus I’d had a little pain in it depending on the type of movement. He told me clicking was normal at this stage and was a sign of healing, which was good. But he did take a look at both wrists and noted there was still a lot of stiffness, likely from tendon adhesions as a result of lack of full mobility from the pain I’d had. So he suggested I do hand therapy, at least 1-2 sessions, to learn exercises to get my mobility back. I didn’t want to cause any permanent loss of mobility in my tendons in my hands; my hands are pretty damn important and integral to my health.

Recovery is on the horizon, I thought, as I walked home and made call to set up an OT evaluation for my wrists. I can’t believe there’s finally a potential to be pain free in my wrists soon. It feels like forever since my wrists and thumbs felt completely normal and I didn’t even notice them. I suppose that’s how you know you take your good health for granted; you don’t even appreciate your limbs until something like this happens, and everything just feels like it’s going wrong.

The nanny and I brought Kaia to the doctor’s office today thinking that we were just going in to get her second flu vaccine (baby flu vaccines are two doses), but they ended up taking all her vitals and doing a semi-thorough examination of her. I wasn’t expecting that, but it was nice to see her get measured and weighed again. The doctor is very pleased at her growth and proud of how much solids (and the variety of which!) she’s been getting. She was also not surprised at exactly how much Kaia hated being at the office. My baby cried the entire time she was getting measured. Then, when the doctor came in to examine her, she cried the whole time, not even stopping to allow the doctor to take a quick look at her little pupils. It was absolutely tortuous for her.

The funny thing I always notice every time I go to the pediatrician’s office is all the free samples: baby lotion, baby body/hair wash/shampoo, diaper rash cream, booger wipes. It’s always something different each visit. So me being me, I always scope out the new stuff to see if it would be anything interesting we could take with us during our travels given their size. I also leave a few items like rash cream or lotion in Kaia’s diaper bag. This time, there were booger wipes (yes, that’s what they are actually called), which I still haven’t used, as we had some other samples we were given previously. But there was also something completely not baby related: face wash with exfoliating beads in them. It looked like an item you’d get at the doctor’s office if you were a teenager, trying to figure out how to maintain and care for your skin.

Not sure how targeted those free samples were, but I guess free is still free, even if it’s not relevant to the audience. I suppose parents do need to wash their faces after all, so I grabbed two!