Dry Nipples and Cream

I am very bad at doing all these girly things like putting lotion on after a shower -- or ever. When I'm pregnant I make a bigger effort with my cocoa butter lotion in order to prevent stretch marks. I know, I know, there's no guarantee-- but I didn't get stretch marks last time. Of course, last time I didn't get nearly as big as I am this time. To give you an idea of how little I use ceram, I've had the same bottle of Palmers since we got married and now we're on our second kid. Do the math yourself. I bought another bottle when I was pregnant last time but it's still sitting new in my cupboard. And I don't only use it during pregnancy. I used it on my face in the winter when the heaters and the breastfeeding were making me so dry that I felt like my face was cracking off.
Back to my nipples. The point is, they're dry and cracked. I don't think it's thrush but I don't want to take the chance. But I also don't feel like putting lotion on. Truth is, I just plain forget all about it. Who thinks about dry nipples until they take their shirt off. And if I'm taking my shirt off, I'm probably on my way to bed and I don't have the energy for nipple rubbing, or else it's morning and I have better things to do, like chase after my DS to get him dressed for kindergarten. I guess we'll just have to wait and see if this clears itself up like it did last time. Actually, maybe I was a little more diligent about it last time. I recall using baby oil or something. Or was that on my itchy scalp?

Nursing Bras

When I was nursing (and I plan on doing it again soon) bras were imperative for keeping the nursing pads in. Otherwise I would have huge wet marks across the fronts of my shirts. http://breastfeedingchronicles.blogspot.com . The problem was that I couldn't actually find a nursing bra that was small enough for me. They don't make them for virtually flat-chested women. Fortunately, the nursing pad helped fill it up.

I bring this up because I just read an articles about going bra-free: http://hubpages.com/hub/Why-I-Go-Bra-Free . The truth is, it took me until age 15 to start wearing bras at all and then it was only because my nipples were poking through my shirts. Some people don't mind that, but it didn't go over well at a religious school-- and anyway I don't like it.

Nursing Pads

I just saw an article that recommends getting the cotton nursing/bra pads instead of the disposable kind because they're softer. Well, I have better reasons than that. A couple of times, after a particularly leaky or sweaty night, DS looked up from my breast into my tired face and breathed out a mouthful of cotton. Those things disintegrate! Especially the cheap ones. Not only that, but the reusable ones are, of course, more environmentally friendly than their disposable counterparts.

I also recommend bringing the nursing/bra pads to the hospital with you. You never know how long you're going to be there and your milk might come in, as mine did, with a vengance. I only had a couple of shirts with me (I snubbed hospital gowns after wearing them for the first couple of days) and they both got real stinky real fast. I had a lot of leakage when I was nursing. He'd be eating from one and the second one would leak like a dyke with a hole in it. Or I'd be just one minute too late getting my nursing bra loose and I'd have two geysers sprouting from my chest. Nursing pads were my saving grace in those first few months. I was never without them.

That Bites!

The biting started sometime around month 9 or 10. He doesn't even breastfeed anymore, but he's still biting me. They say that whe baby bites your nipple (yes, it hurts even worse than it sounds-- think tiny little sharp teeth) it's a sign that they're done eating anyway, so you might as well take them off. You're supposed to reprimand firmly and remove. Well, I would do that but it never helped. Maybe because I have no willpower and as soon as he cried I'd stick him back on-- most of the time. But now it's just random bites. My thighs, my belly, my arm... whatever is in reach. He prefers fleshier places, of which I have plenty lately.

He doesn't bite his father, though, which I think is a sign that the biting is related to breastfeeding. I wonder how he'll react when his new sibling is born. I think he still remembers breastfeeding his enjoyment of it.

Pump it Up: Frozen Breastmilk

I have three or four little baggies of frozen breastmilk sitting in my freezer. They've been there for... ho hum... maybe a year. Who knows why they didn't get used. At some point we switched to formula for those rare occasions that I wasn't around to breastfeed him on demand. In fact, I don't know if I ever pumped for the purposes of feeding after about 6 months when he started on solids. I know I pumped a couple of times out of paranoia after I popped a milk blister on my nipple and was afraid that the backlogged milk in the duct may have gotten infected or something (there may be no basis for thinking this, but we all have our neuroses-- I'm just choosing to share mine here).

A milk blister, by the way, is what happens when for some very strange reason, you get skin growing over a milk duct. The milk wants to escape but it cant, thereby forming a blister. Any CYA post you read about it on line will tell you to go to a doctor to get it popped but I just had DH do it for me the first time b/c I hate going to my doctor and I ended up just doing it myself whenever they popped up after that. Then you have to clear the duct of milk, which may or may not have semi-solidified and might come out like toothpaste. Gorgeous.

Later on I developed what may or may not have been thrush. I think not. Thrush is basically a yeast infection that the mother and baby keep passing back and forth to each other when breastfeeding. The mom shows signs of it on her nipple and baby shows signs of it in his mouth. But DS didn't have any signs of it as far as I could tell. I think it was just misdiagnosed dryness that I'm prone to.

Back to the freezer milk. So I don't know what to do with it. Obviously, I'm not going to feed it to my kid at this point. Most people would just tell me to throw it out but that seems so... wrong somehow. Maybe I can donate it to science. The local university might find use for it. They can do a study what happens to breast milk after you keep it in the freezer for a year. Or on something else. Like if my baggie leaches chemicals into the mik. Gosh, I hope not. Though once they start teething, you never know what you'll find them sucking on.

Senti-mental

Sometimes I get sentimental about my breastfeeding days. And this is at eighteen months! About 4 months after weaning! I really should enjoy my time off now, though. In a few months I'm going to be starting all over again.
Other times, I am really glad that breastfeeding isn't going on anymore. I remember how difficult it could be some nights -- many nights at a stretch, really, when he would wake up and accept nothing but the breast as an incentive to calm down. That's when we realized that it would have to be DH who got up every night with him if we were ever going to get past that stage. It took a few days but eventually it worked.
I don't remember my last breastfeed. The truth is, it probably contained more than a few screams from me because towards the end he made a pretty regular practice of biting me-- hard-- when he was finished eating. Have you ever been bitten on your nipple by little razor-sharp teeth? It is a most unpleasant experience. When DH complained about the noise of my cries, I offered to bite his nipples to see what he would do. He doesn't have a very high threshold for pain. He demurely retreated back to his side of the bed.

New Interest

DS has become newly re-interested in my breasts. Even after he was well weaned, he'd still put lay his head there for comfort, but now he wants to touch them and look at them-- and bite them! all the time. I'm not sure what the appeal is. Maybe with the pregnancy they're much bigger now. Or maybe he's just becoming more aware of bodies and differences. He doesn't seem to want to nurse-- he's just paying some extra attention.