I take it back

Forget it, I take it all back.
We are not well on our way to weaning. We are breastfeeding (almost) as much as ever. In fact, I have begun to feel fullness and leaking again.
Sometimes he wakes up at 4:30 am and just HAS to have boob. I mean, nothing else will do. I try to send Ilan out to get him anywhere after 3:30 am because otherwise I don't stand a chance. I try to make him wait until at least 5:30 am before I feed him because I can consider that to be closer to actual morning as opposed to middle of the night.

A Little Bit Of Weaning

I'm not sure, but I think there might be a little bit of weaning going on around here. I didn't nurse him at all yesterday, and I didn't nurse him this morning. I nursed him a lot two days ago because he was a sick little guy with an achey ear and I thought it would make him feel better. I'm not at all sure that there was any milk coming out, but he doesn't really always seem to care. I think he just loves to suck. Well, I think there is a little bit of milk in the beginning of each breast but then nothing. I asked him but all I got for a reply was 'ana? nana? ama?'
He's been staying in his crib a little longer in the mornings (pu pu pu) and so I don't feel the need to nurse him just so I can get some extra lying-down time in the mornings. I don't know what we're going to do for the afternoon nap but I guess we'll take it as it comes.
I think I'm finally ready for this step now. I mean, the thought of weaning completely still makes me a little sad, but I think that he's gotten a lot out of it already, health-wise -- I'm not sure how much more there is to gain at this point though I suppose there is literature on that subject if I choose to persue it. And I guess, well, I don't know. I'm just ready and I think he is too. But time will tell.

Weenie

The Mean Wean

My sister walked in on my the other day and said 'I can't believe a child this size is still breastfeeding.'
I was more than surprised to hear this coming from my sister, who is currently anticipating a drug-free home birth and who has rightfully become the butt of trans-fat jokes for her devotion to health food. It never occurred to me that the size of the baby determines the duration of his nursing. And of course, one has nothing to do with the other.
The truth is, I've been trying for a couple of months now to cut down on feedings. I'm aiming for a one-year wean, but Baby has a different idea in mind. He knows what we're up to and he objects passionately, especially at 3am when snuggling doesn't count unless it involves boob.
Last night, exhausted and suffering from a fever, I gave in. I don't mind breastfeeding. In fact, I love it. I love his sweet 'I only look like I'm asleep' suckling face. I love how he reaches for my mouth while he's fressing. I love making him feel warm and secure and happy. I just wish that I could offer him the same feeling without the hormonal commitment. And that's why I'm bothering to start this weaning process at all.
My sister told me that by nine or ten months, her baby didn't really care much for nursing anymore anyway. This is obviously not the case here. In fact, although he eats several square meals a day (ptu ptu ptu), I am under the impression that he wouldn't mind, at the very least, a milky dessert to each one. He would suck suck suckle all night if I let him still. I don't know what to do. If it wasn't for the fight that my body is putting up against this process then I wouldn't worry about it, and I'd just keep nursing him happily into toddlerhood and beyond.

The Sounds

Oh, the sounds that accompany feeding time!

The sniff sniff of searching for the breast.
The sad, low whine of not getting it fast enough.
The excited cooing when he knows it's coming.
The happy smack and slurp as he latches on.
The tsk tsk tsk of sucking and swallowing.
The followup throaty burrrrp.
The yawn.
The deep breathing.
And he's asleep.

Leaky Braucet

The rotten-milk smell that began when I was in the hospital persisted until about month number 2. That is, it was in my sheets and in my clothes as long as there was milk on them, which was often. I was leaking all over the place. I was going through bra pads like crazy. They would get lost every time I took them out to feed them (Ilan would get upset about finding them all over the house-- or other people's houses if we were sleeping over somewhere) and so I would just pop in some new ones.
The smell went away by about a couple of months. I guess the consistency of the milk had changed significantly enough by then. My breasts were still leaking, though. If I went a little too long between feedings, or as soon as he started sucking on one nipple,the other one would start to gush. This led to some embarrassing incidents. I learned to use my scarf or the nursing apron over my shoulder to cover the spreading stain.
Even today, at nine months, the leaking continues. Sometimes it's like a fountain. All he has to do is get in the right angle and open his mouth.
But at least the smell is gone.

Nine Months

Avi Ohr will be nine months old in a couple of days. The weather has been really hot and he sweats a lot. I feed him water sometimes from a bottle but breastfeeding is probably still the better option. Anyway, he still really loves it. We're in a routine now, though it's definitely not an optimal one. I nurse him in the morning when he wakes up and then I feed him breakfast a little while later. After that, he plays for a while and then signals to me that he's tired and he wants to go to sleep. Signaling, by the way, doesn't mean holding up a handmade sign. It means being irratable and sometimes, if I've missed that sign, he just nods off in the middle of the living room floor. Most of the time, however, naps are when we snuggle up and have another feed. That's how he drifts off to sleep. Sometimes he sleeps for twenty minutes, and sometimes for three hours. Mostly it's somewhere in between. The rest of the day is more or less a variation of the same cycle: eat, play, sleep. I try to put himto bed at around 9:30 but sometimes he gets tired a little earlier and sometimes a little later.
Then comes the night-time. For a few months, he was sleeping through the night. But for a couple of months now we've been on this cycle where he sleeps until midnight or one and then wakes up and wants to be held. The easiest thing for sleepy me to do is just feed him until he falls asleep again and then put him back in bed. Then he wakes up agian around 4. Again, I take him out of bed and feed him, only this time I often fall asleep before I get around to putting him back in the crib. So he is used to waking up in bed with us.

Hi Mom

Somewhere around three or four months, Avi Ohr started a funny habit. He would be snuggled into me and sucking away when all of a sudden he'd crane his head backwards as if to scope out the room. He'd look back at me, smile, and resume suck suck sucking. It was really cute.

Later on, I thought that maybe it was a sign of refusal, like what they tell you to look for before you start feeding solids to your baby. It started at around the same time that some babies start eating, so who knows?

In The Hospital

For the first few days in the hospital (he was there for five days and I stayed with him, fighting tooth and nail for a bed so that I could be nearby), I wasn't at all sure that something was coming out of my boobs when he sucked on them. I went to the lactation classes they offered and talked to a lady teaching a group of lactating experts-to-be, exposing and manipulating parts of me I would have considered very private only a few days earlier-- and in front of ten people at a time, nonetheless. The very nice expert teaching the soon-to-be-experts showed me how I could express colostrum by hand on to a plastic spoon to feed the baby manually. the problem here was twofold: one-- that I didn't then and still today don't like to mess with my breasts. I don't like to squeeze them. Right now they're less sensitive than they used to be, but I only give them a squeeze if I have to. Like the couple of times my duct got clogged -- but that's another story for another time.
The second problem was that I didn't have a spoon. I had been needing one, actually, to eat the leftover yogurts that I'd saved from the breakfast tray. There were none on the ward and, indeed, none in the whole hospital. Ilana eventually sent one for me with Yaaron. I found it on the chair by my bed when I woke up one morning.
Anyway, on day ... was it three or four? I know it happened in my new room but I moved in to my new room on a Friday... well, it must have been Shabbat morning, which was the fourth morning after the baby was born. I woke up to the smell of something rotting and the feeling of something heavy sitting on my chest. "Where is that smell coming from?" I thought. "And what is sitting on my chest?" Turns out it was my breasts. This is what they call the milk 'coming in.' And come down it did. I had rivers running down the front of my shirt. I had no nursing pads. I had no spare shirts left. I think I ended up walking around the ward like that for a while. Ilana sent me some nursing pads. Ilan brought me some appropriate bras. Ima brought nursing bras for me when she got here from Toronto a few days later. That's also another story for another time. I should remember this one and tell it. My boobs were rock-hard. I felt like a porn star, and offended a couple of people by telling them so. I later re-evaluated this comparison and said that I looked like a department store dummy. Except that a store dummy doesn't have a fountain of milk coming out of each nipple.

Never gonna give it up?

I think that today was the first time that I ever looked forward to him being a year so that I could stop breastfeeding. I am determined to go at least that long and for the most part, it's no trouble. It's just that lately he wants to breastfeed all the time. Especially today when he was tired, he kept grabbing for my boobs. I may start him on a bottle for overnight feedings. He used to sleep through the night but that all changed when we went to Canada. It's not that I mind breastfeeding, but I don't like doing it when I feel like my breasts are empty. He always seems to get milk out of it, though. And my non-sucked-on breast starts leaking in sympathy still so I guess he knows what he's doing.

Seven Months

So Baby is now about seven and a half months old. We started him on solids at six months and he's been happily munching ever since. (We actually found him sucking on the dirty side of my flip-flop the other day, though we didn't consider it a proper meal.) At first, I was having my typical separation anxiety about my milk drying up, but he's been nursing just as furiously as ever, despite the increase in meals and calories in the last few days. I took offense at the suggestion that maybe my milk was not enough for him, but now I realize that there is something to that. I guess that nursing at this point for him is a comforting activity and not so much about the food. He still loves it, though. He especially loves to nurse when he's tired and wants to go to sleep.

White Meat Story

Here's the story about the white meat from http://www.srmason-sj.org/council/journal/oct00/boyer.html

...The Sir Winston Method also brings a bright sense of history and Churchill's own lively sense of humor to the discussion. On the matter of simple word choice, for example, the prime minister was at a reception where cold fried chicken was being served. The grand old man said, "I think I'd like a breast."

His hostess admonished him. "Mr. Churchill, nice people don't use that word for that part of the anatomy. We say 'white meat.'" The next day, he sent her flowers, a very nice corsage. Attached was his official card, to which he had added, "I would be most obliged if you would pin this corsage on your white meat."

Before The Begining

One of the reasons I was a little hesitant to start this blog is that it requires talking about my breasts. I am a rather private person, though less so nowadays when it comes to my mammaries. Forgive me if I use slangy words like 'boobs' or 'hooters' or 'honkers' occasionally. It helps to liven things up.

There is a story of Winston Churchill-- I think-- who was hosting eh... someone British... eh... I have to look up the exact circumstances... for dinner. Chicken was on the menu and the guest was offered drumsticks or breast. "Breast!" She exclaimed "How vile to refer to it as such. The proper way to refer to this cut of chicken is 'white meat.'"
Thinking this hilarious, old Winston (again, I'll check the details) later sent her a brooch with an attached note reading "Thank you for the pleasure of your company. I hope that you will pin this brooch upon your white meat."

The quotes, of course, were made up by me, but you get the point of the story.

Anyway, I never had much white meat before the start of my pregnancy. Even during my pregnancy, my bra size went up by one back size, though the cup remained the same. My relative smallness never bothered me. Well, at least it never bothered me from about age 15 onwards when I discovered how blessed I was to be able to participate in athletic activities with only one wimpy bra instead of two sports bras as some of my bigger-chested friends had to do. I never even wore a bra regularly until age 14 or 15, as I remember it. I have always been able to buy cheap, cute, flimsy bras, though admittedly I leaned towards ones with a little bit of padding, not for their filling nature but to avoid the dreaded 'nippleitis'.

During my pregnancy, I would look down at my white meat in much the same way that I did in my early teenagerhood, waiting for something to sprout. Just like in my 'tweens, they never did. The only thing that happened was that my nipples started to dry up and crack. It wasn't painful, or at least not too much, as I remember it. And it might have had to do with the chlorine in the local pool. Still, the change had me worried, having heard horror stories of cracked and bleeding nipples while breastfeeding. I put mineral oil on them and it eventually went away. Looking back, I wonder if my dried nipples had anything to do with the incredibly, embarrassingly itchy scalp I had for a few months of my pregnancy. But that's not in the realm of this blog.

right now i am typing with my left hand only while my son feeds on my

Okay, that's over now. It's hard to type with one hand. Instead of trying to write out what was happening, I made myself a list of topics to make sure to visit in subsequent blog entries. They're at the bottom of this entry.

Now where was I? Oh yes, waiting.

My labour was induced in week 38 due to oligohydremanaise. This is most definitely the wrong spelling of the word. Until that point, there was no sign of milk, as far as I could tell, and my future as a breastfeeding mom seemed mysterious and distant. I had no idea what to expect. I had no idea when to expect it. On top of it wall, I was convinced that the baby was not ready to come out. I still think it was too early, but I'm slowly letting go of the outrage. So after the delivery when they handed me the baby (each sentence here has a whole blog's worth of stories to go with it...) and told me to feed it, I said 'I can't. I have no milk. I was induced and I am early. I'm not ready.' And I wasn't-- at least mentally. I don't remember if it was the midwife or our cousin Malka-- a pediatrician-- who said 'sure you do' and reached over and gave my breast a squeeze. Pffft. Out came milk. There it was. Miracle of miracles. I think this amazed me more than the birth itself. I mean, I figured that a baby was going to come out of the whole process, but milk? Who knew?

Looking back, I think it was the midwife.

I put the baby up to my chest and suck suck suck... he hasn't stopped ever since. There was some talk in the beginning of latching and this and that but pretty much he got it right away and I got it right away and it was good. Then they snatched him away from me and took him to the nursery. Stories stories stories. For another time.

Incidentally, my nipples have never cracked, nor have they ever bled or even been dry since I've begun breastfeeding (pu pu pu). When I mentioned this at a female consortium on the horrors of X (ie anytime two or more moms get together and start exchanging stories), it turned out that the other two moms present had experienced some very painful episodes of said cracking. I guess I'm lucky that way.


List of topics I should come back to:

breASTFEEDING at the computer and other acrobatics thgen learning to relax/sleep
learrning to sleep
pacy anxiety
food anxiety
scratchinf
hickies
bruising
smiles
latching laughs story
tube socks
overnigh breasts
the pump
disintegr. liners
blocked duct
calories
drink or no?
feeding in public
nicknqames muncha
lactation nurse
feelings passed thru breastmilk

Not In The Begining

I am starting this blog when my son is seven months old and already on solids (as a side dish, though. The main course is still mother's milk). I've been thinking about blogging about my adventures in breastfeeding for a really long time. It's really been one of the most eye-opening experiences of my life so far.

I don't think I'll be blogging chronologically. That is, I won't necessarily be trying to remember all that happened to me, breastfeeding wise, in the order that it happened. I'll just record things as I think of them or as they happen. That is, if I am motivated enough to keep the blog up. Also if I have time. I do a pretty good job with my mommy-blog and my moving-to-a-new country blog, so I should be pretty good about this one, though I hope I'm not spreading myself too thin.

Well, we'll see how it goes. Wish me luck.