Since last Tuesday morning, I’ve had the most annoying kink in a back muscle on my right side. I have no idea what caused it. Chris thinks it’s because of the flatter pillows we slept on at the hotel, but who knows? Regardless, it’s been lingering for way longer than any muscle kink I’ve had ever had. Usually, they go away after a few days with some massage and nightly tiger balm application, but this time, nothing seems to help. I used the Theragun on me and had Chris use it on me a few times. He’s helped massage me and rub in tiger balm. While it feels good in the moment, I never seem to get back to normal after or the next day. It just feels the same. These are those odd little joys of getting older: having weird back cramps and kinks that have an unclear origin that just seem too stubborn to fade no matter what you do.

Last night, as Chris helped apply pressure on the spot with tiger balm, I thought of all the great reasons to have a life partner, and this was one of them. When you agree to spend the rest of your life with someone, you also agree to help them with these little life annoyances, like taking out muscle kinks, applying tiger balm to hard-to-reach areas of your body, buttoning up buttons on awkward spots behind your neck, sewing the holes in their shirts, soaking and swishing their blazers in a baking soda, vinegar, and tea tree oil + water solution to get out lingering stench. Because if you don’t have a partner to do this for you, who else will be there day in day out to help you?

Usually, when “ripped” is used as an adjective to describe how a person looks, it’s meant to be a compliment. So if you tell someone that they look “ripped,” you’re most likely telling them that they have very tight abs or chest muscles, or very sculpted and defined arms. Well, I discovered for myself yesterday what it meant to have “ripped” nipples, and I mean that in the literal sense, as in.. yes, I actually (accidentally) ripped the skin off the sides of both of my nipples. Unfortunately, this had nothing to do with muscles or looking sculpted. It had to do with pumping with improperly fitted flanges and my own cheapness/laziness.

My Legendairy Milk cups came with 24mm and 28mm flanges, as did my primary Spectra pump. I have no idea why these are considered standard flanges sizes considering that over 80% of women have nipples smaller than 24mm, but hey, it is what it is, and likely a way for these companies to make more money by up-charging you anywhere from $10-20 for a smaller flange size. I had pumped while on the go just twice before with the 24mm flanges and these cups plus my Baby Buddha portable pump, and the output was never as good due to the flange size, but I accepted it just for the convenience. Legendairy Milk did not create 17mm flanges for someone like me, as their smallest one was 19mm, so I thought I was out of luck until I discovered the Maymom brand, which has flange tunnel inserts to hack and place into these flanges. I felt cheap, though, and wasn’t really sure how much mobile pumping I would be doing, so I neglected to buy these $15 inserts when I discovered them about two weeks ago.

Well, I pumped while in the car ride to Philly, and the entire time, I had no idea that I was damaging my nipples. I think I have just gotten so desensitized to all things nipple related that I didn’t even feel the skinning of my nipples as it was occurring. Plus, with all the bumps in the road, that is likely how the cups got off centered with my nipples, which then caused the damage. I had read so many stories in the pumping mamas Facebook group about women who had gotten bruised, split, cracked, bloody, and ripped nipples from using the incorrect flange size, but luckily for me, this had never happened. How does this happen, you might ask? So with flange sizing, it’s like Goldilocks: you can’t have your flanges be too small or too big; they need to fit just right for the perfect combination of both maximized comfort AND maximized output. If the flange is too small, you will bruise and split your nipples that are getting constricted. If they are too big, you risk your nipple getting pulled too deeply into the tunnel, thus creating friction on one side of your nipple, which then results in what happened to me — skinning, peeling of your nipple skin.

I didn’t even realize this had happened until I removed the cups when we got to the hotel room. I took them off and immediately noticed that the top of my left nipple was a deep purple color. And then upon examining both sides of my nipples, I realized that the skin was peeling off to reveal a raw, exposed under layer. The pain finally started settling in, and everything and anything that rubbed against my nipples hurt. I applied shea butter to help soothe and repair it, but this rawness will likely last for a while until my skin repaired and healed. Luckily for me, my nipples aren’t bleeding. After physically taking care of this, I logged into my Amazon account and purchased the stupid $15 flange inserts for the cups. This pain and injury was not worth saving $15 for.

This is the shit mothers go through just to feed their babies. Pumping mamas truly have it the hardest. You will never quite understand how annoying and taxing it is to be a pumping mom unless you actually do it yourself.

Although I got the Legendairy Milk cups to go along with my portable Baby Buddha pump in early March, the problem with this setup is that it’s not really 100 percent wearable: the Baby Buddha pump is portable in that it’s the size of a smart phone and you wear it on a lanyard around your neck, but it actually comes with bottle attachments. That’s what necessitated buying the Legendairy Milk cups for me to hack and wear with the pump. The cups are way, way too big to be discreet (they hold 8 ounces of milk EACH; who the heck pumps 16 ounces of milk in one pump sitting?! Whoever you are, I am super jealous of you!), plus there are still wires attaching the cups to the pump. Well, shortly after I purchased this combination to create a wearable pump for myself, lo and behold, Willow, a high end brand of wearable pumps, releases their next generation of wearable pump that is completely wireless, where you can operate the pump fully from an app on your phone. Each cup is essentially its own breast pump. The programming for stimulation vs. expression mode can be adjusted for each breast, so in case one breast performs better than the other, you can adjust (this is not the norm for the average breast pump, including the Spectra that I own; these assume you want the same settings for both breasts). In addition, this Willow Go pump allows you to customize what size of a cup you want, so the cup you could choose could be smaller (five ounces per cup sounds more discreet and reasonable than eight!). It’s a bit too late for me to get this pump, especially since I already bought the Baby Buddha and have only used it about five times, but if I had to do this all over again, I’d sell my Baby Buddha and buy the Willow Go pump.

One gripe I had with wearable pumps is that you can’t really do breast compressions with them. I also can’t see the milk spraying out, so I wasn’t sure if I’d know when my let down reflex started. Some women can actually feel their let down, and up until the last week, I was not able to feel it. But amazingly, as I’m currently in my 24th week postpartum, I actually started feeling my letdown, which would alert me to change the setting from stimulation mode to letdown /expression mode to maximize my milk output. Now, without even looking, I know when to switch the mode. This has helped me when I’ve needed to pump during work calls. I make sure to position my web cam so that it just reached under my neck, so no one has any idea I am pumping. In addition, I have my Zoom sound setting on so that background noises are blocked out, so no one can hear the subtle “burrrr” sound that my pump makes while on. I’ve never appreciated working from home more than while pumping milk. Pumping in a sad, windowless pumping mom room at work would have been miserable, not to mention I’d be time constrained.

Endless women in my Facebook pumping mamas group have raved about the Willow Go, how it’s really changed their pumping lives because they can literally pump anywhere and no one will know, as these cups are small and flat enough to fit into their bras, so they don’t make pumping women look like they got breast implants. And more impressively, women have also said their output is comparable if not more than using their Spectra pumps, and no need for breast compressions! It’s a $330 investment, so definitely not cheap or a potential impulse buy. If I ever do this again, I would get it, but for now, I’ll stick with my Spectra and my occasional Baby Buddha use.

Our nanny grows callaloo, a West African cousin of spinach in her backyard, among other vegetables. She said she will bring us some since it’s just sprouting now. She said she knows I will like it… because my baby farts a lot, so she knows I eat a lot of vegetables.

“Mommy eats lots of vegetables and fiber!” the nanny exclaimed while feeding the baby last week. “That’s why Kaia farts so much! So much fiber in the breast milk! In the booby milk! So much good stuff in this booby milk for baby Kaia pookie!”

It’s debatable how much of what a breastfeeding mother eats will end up in her breast milk. It’s already been widely established that alcohol, certain medicines and drugs, among other things, can get into breast milk in traces, but the concentrations of which are still debated. Either way, I try to eat a wide variety of things not just for myself, but also in hopes that our baby will develop an affinity for all these different foods. I’ve intentionally eaten nuts daily, hoping she won’t have any nut allergies. I especially hope she will love all leafy green vegetables and mangoes.

“You produce a lot of milk,” our nanny said one morning, as she watched me measure out freshly pumped breast milk for the baby’s second morning bottle.

She was trying to compliment me and be kind. But when she said that, it made me think about how long it took me to get to this level of output. “It’s definitely a lot more than it was before, but it’s still not enough,” I responded. “That’s why she has at least one formula bottle per day. She’s a hungry little hippo!”

I told her that I did not always produce this much milk; in fact, if you asked our first night nurse a few months ago what my milk output was, she would not have had a positive response like this. She told me that the ratio of breast milk to formula our baby was getting was in reverse to what her son’s wife was able to produce for her grandson when he was a baby. He’s now just over 2 years old. She said she barely produced a few ounces of breast milk per day. Well, I can relate to that; once upon a time, I was in her painful shoes.

She exclusively breast fed her first child, a son. But with her second child, a daughter, she refused to eat from her breast; and when she pumped milk, she just wouldn’t take it, so she ended up having to be fully formula fed. “Breastfeeding is so, so much work,” she lamented. “Nursing directly or pumping; it’s just so hard. People just don’t understand unless they’ve done it themselves.”

It was funny we were talking about this as there is a nationwide formula shortage. Lots of people on social media are blaming moms who choose not to breastfeed, saying that “breast milk is free” but we choose not to use it. It’s sad because those accusations are rooted in ignorance. Hell, I’ve even made that ignorant statement myself once upon a time. Not all of us can breastfeed, and those of us who do, like myself, just don’t produce enough for our babies to eat, so that’s why we use formula. Then, there are situations like our nanny’s daughter who just refused breast milk. What do you do in those cases – let your baby starve and die?

But her comments just go to show how relative the amount of breastmilk we produce is, whether it’s a lot or a little. I really should stop focusing on the negative, as in, “I do not produce enough,” and rather focus on the fact that my baby is growing and thriving with a majority diet of the milk my body is producing. I have come a long way and should give credit where it is due. I feel very thankful for this.

I had my first dentist appointment since the baby was born last Sunday. Initially, the dentist said all my x-rays looked good, but upon further review a day later, he said that one of my teeth may have a cavity, but it was unclear based on the angle of the x-ray. So he asked me to come back in for another x-ray that would take a closer look today. I complied, especially since I had noticed that on the tooth he was referring to, I had experienced some strange tingling sensation when I would floss each night for the last month or so. I didn’t think much of coming in other than that I would be able to score some homemade sour cherry wine, plum jam, and herbal cherry leaf tea that they made (they are huge gardeners and love talking about their fruits and vegetables with me). He and his wife, also a dentist, clearly love me. They love telling me pretty much everything on their mind. So as the wife babbled away, I waited for the result of my x-ray.

Well, it looks like the result was worse than a cavity: he showed me a huge hole that was in one of my molars: it looked like the cavity had lingered and affected the root canal, thus causing an infection, which would mean that I’d need a root canal treatment… today.

Wait, WHAT? I was having a root canal.. TODAY? How the hell did this happen?

I had always heard of root canals, but I never knew much about them until today. The dentist explained that it’s really a “root canal treatment” because all teeth have root canals. An infection occurs in the tooth, likely from a cavity that went on too long, and thus the hollowed tooth needs to be cleaned out, given medicine, and then filled up to prevent further decay or worse… death. No one wants their teeth to die. He told me he was shocked when he saw this for me, as I’ve always had good teeth and take very good care of my dental hygiene. He suspects I likely got tooth decay from pregnancy, as during pregnancy, all the hormones that support the baby’s growth actually weaken the bones and ligaments in the mother’s body; These hormonal changes also increase the acid level in the mother’s mouth, which can make her more prone to tooth decay.

I couldn’t believe it. I was 36 years old and having my first root canal treatment. I was hoping I would at least make it to my 40s before having such a procedure done on me, but I guess this is another downside of the effects of pregnancy on a mother’s body.

“In Russia, we have this saying when women get pregnant: ‘one baby, one tooth!'” the dentist wife exclaimed. “Pregnancy can cause tooth decay even for people like you who take great care of their teeth!”

Well, that just made me feel worse. Actually, what did make me feel physically worse was that the local anesthesia took forever to work, and my body just didn’t respond well to it. It took the highest dosage for the numbness to be adequate to perform the procedure without hurting. So half of my mouth, tongue, and even throat were numb until I went to bed.

Since the formula recall that happened by a major American brand earlier this year, it seems like families of babies everywhere are panicking in an attempt to get formula. And as of late, there is actually a real palpable formula shortage: depending on the state where you reside, there is up to a 40 percent out-of-stock rate for formula brands. In the mom groups I am in, many moms are asking about the availability of specific brands across all of New York City and which stores/locations may carry them. Others are asking to buy cans off of other families. In a friend’s local mom group, someone asked if someone would be willing to *donate* their can of Bobbie formula, which is the formula we supplement with that is modeled after EU formula for purity and quality of ingredients. For some babies, they have sensitive tummies or specific allergies, so they can only take certain formulas. This is a really scary and tragic situation across the board. The thought of babies starving or dying really tears me up.

We have several cans of Bobbie that we purchased in advance, not to mention a few cans of Australian formula that Chris’s parents are planning to bring when they come in a few weeks. I am grateful that we have a decent formula supply to keep us going to supplement my breast milk, which is the majority of my baby’s diet, thankfully. But the shortage does worry me. My period hasn’t yet returned, and many sources and moms I know have warned me that once my period returns, I can see very noticeable drops in my milk supply. I have no idea what my drop could be, if it happens at all, and so I have no idea how much formula we may need to supplement in that event.

But I suppose one thing this shortage has made me think about is how grateful once again that my body has been able to get my supply up to where it is now. I wasn’t sure I’d ever get my milk supply up to be the majority of my baby’s diet, but here we are. I am beyond thankful for my milk supply status now. All of those months power pumping really did pay off in the end. The nationwide formula shortages have also sparked many conversations in the pumping mamas Facebook group I am in; it’s even encouraged moms to keep pumping and even power pump to increase supply when they were originally planning to wean or just stop pumping altogether because it was too arduous and exhausting. I can only hope that I will continue to produce and at minimum, stay at the level of milk supply I am at now to keep my baby going until she is at least 1 year old. It would be amazing if I could go longer than that, but that’s my goal right now to keep giving her pumped breast milk.