I don't miss my breast pump

Reading Baby Food in the New Yorker brought back memories of my days in the Mothers' Room.
How I don't miss the days before I hung up my horns for good. The article's got some interesting history on the rise and fall of breastfeeding rates from the mid-1800s to today, and it raises some interesting questions about how family-friendly all those breast pumps and lactation rooms really are:

"No one seems especially worried about women whose risk assessment looks like this: 'Should I take three twenty-minute pumping ‘breaks’ during my workday, or use formula and get home to my baby an hour earlier?'"

I'm hanging up the horns

Today I didn't pump.

I. Just. Didn't. Pump.

I'd planned to, I just let the hours slip by, thinking about the breast pump in my desk drawer, peeking at it, and closing it away. Part-weaning on a whim, you could call it.

Why? Well, I really don't care for the grimy, distant, sink-less mothers' rooms at my new place of employment, but I know women have pumped in much more undesirable locations (supply closets, airplane bathrooms, conference rooms).

But with a lousy place to pump and dwindling commitment (Baby A is almost 7 months old), I just said to hell with it. I want to stop shlepping. Stop cleaning parts. Stop planning for the break in the middle of the day. I want to start working out over lunch, and I'll feel less guilty about that if I'm not also breaking to pump.

So, no, I don't feel too guilty. After all, I nursed exclusively for six months. And now that I've found a brand of formula that Baby A will drink, I'm going to put away the pump for good and have the nursing relationship I enjoy (baby vs machine) in the morning, evening and at night.

Cross-posted to the Chicago Moms Blog

Now everyone knows what's in my pump bag

Two of my all-time favorite blogs have linked to my post about creating a terry bag for my breastpump parts. Thank you Rookie Moms and Parenthacks. I'm so tickled.

A little connoisseur of milk

My daughter is nearly 6 months old and frankly I'm tired of pumping twice a day at work. I've resolved to drop a pumping session and provide just two 4oz bottles of breastmilk for her to enjoy while I'm away. I figured Daddy or her daycare provider can give her a bottle of formula once a day as a supplement. Sounds like a plan, right?

Not when your daughter can smell the Enfamil a room away. We've tried giving her bottles made up of half expressed milk and half formula, but she gags, bawls and pushes it away. Today my husband called me to report she'd refused a bottle made up of 3/4 breastmilk to 1/4 formula. I could hear her wailing in the background. We're dipping into my frozen stockpile of milk to get through this transition, but my hopes of part-weaning her at 9 months so that I can give up pumping altogether are fading fast.

Have any other mothers dealt with this? Do infant formula brands taste substantially different? Is it true soy formula is sweeter than the regular cow's milk stuff? I want to continue the nursing relationship, but on my terms. I don't want to be a slave to flanges, valves and cold packs--particularly as I'm finding it harder and harder to duck out of meetings to pump.

Cross-posted to Chicago Moms Blog

Tales from the pump: I'm an inventor!

My breast pump came with an ugly black tote bag (which I don't use), but it didn't come with a good solution for toting all of the pump's parts and accessories, the horns and valves that come into contact with milk and have to be cleaned between pumping sessions.

Since I pump twice a day, I was washing those parts with dish detergent and hot water and giving them a cursory drying with paper towels. But they never seem to get really dry.

I'd been keeping them in a gallon Ziploc bag in my backpack, but I didn't like how fogged up the bag would become and I hated using damp parts. Also, I found that cleaning the Ziploc bag even once a week was a pain in the butt. And I was never positive that it was really clean.

Enter the Pump Parts Terry Bag!

This velcro-close bag, designed by me and sewed from an old towel by my sweet mother-in-law, holds all of my pump parts and doubles as a lap pad for me, protecting my work pants from inadvertent milk drips.

No more damp horns and I can throw it into the wash every couple of days!

The world's smallest pumping mama

Hey Fisher-Price, how about a My Little Breastpump? Z demanded I craft her one so that she could pump milk and feed her doll, just like mommy. It's amazing what you can do with construction paper, tape and a cigar box.

The pumping puzzle: how much is my milk really worth?

Breastfeeding isn't just "best for baby," it gets me the most bang for my buck. Right? Well, yeah. But the cost savings aren't as dramatic as I'd hoped.

I'm returning to work in two weeks and planning to pump for at least a couple of months. I'm dedicated to nursing, but my breastpump doesn't engender the same warm fuzzy feelings as my baby, so I decided to calculate how much I'm saving by pumping versus supplementing while my child is in my husband's or daycare provider's care. I figured that putting a dollar amount to my efforts would solidify my commitment to pump. I could add up the savings and treat myself to a little shopping spree with the cash I'd saved by not buying formula. (And in case you're wondering, I'm not figuring in the cost of the pump since it already paid for itself with baby #1.)

So here goes. The first real math I'd done since high school calculus.

First, let's assume Baby A will drink three 4-ounce bottles while I am at work, for a total of 12 ounces of milk while I'm away. A 25.7oz (large) can of Enfamil or Similac formula costs $22.99 on sale at Walgreens. You can prepare 160 fluid ounces per can, and assuming none gets wasted, that works out to 13 days worth of daycare/daddy care supplementation. Which means I'm saving a grand total of $2.00 per workday by pumping. Yikes, I don't even earn a latte for my efforts!

Depressing, huh? It gets better. In my efforts to make sure Baby A accepts a bottle when I return to work, I've been pumping at home and saving the excess. I've got a freezer full of expressed milk in zipper bags--probably 250-300 ounces worth. I, like many moms in my position, like to refer to it as liquid gold, but it's probably only the nutritional equivalent of $40 worth of powdered formula.

Now I have saved a significant pile of money by breastfeeding Baby A exclusively for the first three months of her life: $400 by even the most conservative estimates. And that doesn't account for all of the breastmilk she's drunk, spit-up and demanded more of. That'll buy me a new winter coat and some cute cashmere cold weather accessories, but no luxury vacation.

Yet, while I'm only earning about $4 an hour for sitting in a windowless, featureless room with a mechanical milking machine hooked up to my boobs, I still feel a compulsion to keep it up, at least for a little while. Maybe I feel like I can't supplement my second kid more than I did my first. Maybe I'm doing it for the feeling of accomplishment I get from nourishing my children, even when I am away. Surely a big part of it is my desire to keep my supply up enough that I won't have to mix up and and warm up a bottle of formula in the middle of the night. (I'm lazy like that.)

But can I say I'm doing it to save money? Not so much, unfortunately.

Cross-posted to Chicago Moms Blog