Tag: pumping

Pump bra

When V was young, I used to write a lot more stuff here that was vaguely intended for an audience of intending parents, based largely on all the parenting and somewhat-parenting blogs I was devouring in the 2000s for the same reason. (See our advice tag for a bit of older stuff that’s still public.)

These days I skip that a fair bit, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, most of the intending parents I know of who read this now have children, and have no particular use for my advice. Either they ignored it, it worked, or it didn’t work; I think a mixture of options one and three. Second, I have no advice on parenting four year olds. Don’t look at me. I was (am) OK with babies, but kids are hard.

But once more unto the breach eh? I’d just like to note Sarah’s and L’s advice about getting a pump bra (or making one, I know) so that I wouldn’t have to spend twenty minutes hunching over and clutching my pump to my chest three times a day every work day. (Hunching because I want the milk to flow down, and my nipples point up.) I’m on day one with the Simple Wishes bra (L: your advice was good, but I am so uncrafty and lacking in even basic supplies that by the time I got around to following it, I’d not be pumping any more) and it’s working well. Very flexible sizing too, as far as I can tell. I only regret that when I chose “pink” from the store they meant “pale pink like pale skin”, not “pink like fuchsia” which was what I was hoping for. PINK LIKE FUCHSIA PLEASE.

So there you go. If you’re going to be pumping multiple times a day, at least, if you’re going to be using an electric pump, my advice is to get a pump bra and go hands-free. This advice is brought to you transitively by people who advised me thus a few weeks ago.

I’ve generally been having a harder time pumping for A than I did for V. I think a few things are going on:

  1. It’s boring hunching over a pump for ages every work day, which is what I am hoping this bra will sort out for me. So far so good.
  2. I learned in the last month or so from pumping for V that I didn’t actually need to pump three times a day lest I explode (get mastitis), so I’ve neglected to pump three times a day for A even though she actually needs me to pump at least that much to supply enough bottles while she’s still exclusively breast-milk-fed. Mastitis was so motivating.
  3. I don’t think my supply is what it was when I was last pumping in 2010, probably because I’ve been lactating for a good long while now and I’m very demand driven. I remember with V being able to pump 250mL at a time, three times a day, quite regularly (which was far more than he actually drank, I ended up with about two months of milk frozen for him). My record with A is about 160mL, and 120mL is common, which is less than she drinks each feed (I visit the childcare centre at least once every work day to nurse her directly).
  4. On reflection, he was only exclusively breast-milk-fed at daycare for about six or eight weeks, because he wasn’t as young when he started there. So they were able to use solids to fill his belly much sooner after he started than A’s carers have been able to. (He didn’t really reliably eat solids in my presence for many months, but on his childcare days he ate there.)

In other news, she and I depart for the United States in about eighteen hours. So, expect stories.

What I’d do differently

This was a dinner conversation: if I was having Vincent with foreknowledge (as opposed to having a second child) what would I do differently? (This is all stuff in reach of our current budget, not fantasy stuff like “have a nanny instead of daycare so that we don’t get sick all the time” or “buy a king sized bed” or “move to a bigger place”.)

  1. got a new washing machine and a car before he arrived (although, an older baby is way less trouble on public transport because they don’t constantly eat and poop, he started getting better just as we got the car).
  2. got a new GP before he arrived
  3. put his name down for childcare before he arrived
  4. gone to the breastfeeding class at the hospital (he was only 12 hours old, I was really tired and wired, but there wasn’t another one until I was discharged)
  5. not relied primarily on Kaz Cooke’s Kidwrangling for information: we don’t need two nappy buckets, and the first two weeks did not involve me calling parenting crisis lines while crying constantly (I know that can and does happen, but she portrays it as universal)
  6. gone straight to our current system of nappies (one-size pockets)
  7. got groceries home-delivered for at least the first six weeks of his life
  8. had him this summer (which is probably going to be cooler than average on Australia’s east coast) rather than last summer (heat records tumbling every which way): ok, that’s a bit fantastical
  9. worked out the cost of daycare more clearly in advance and put the baby bonus away for it
  10. not bothered with purchasing a manual breastpump: double electric all the way baby
  11. got the baby fences sooner

The most important one though was not realising how quickly babies become more manageable. I thought this happened when they stopped being babies. It turns out that in fact those first six or eight weeks are actually much harder than the months after that just in terms of the sheer amount of constant work that went into babycare. Feeding needing to happen right now OMG starving, nappy changes even more urgent than that, meltdowns after half an hour in an unfamiliar location, that was all little V stuff.

So I’d much easier on myself for the first few months, because I didn’t have to steel myself up and learn to cope in the long term with that precise situation.

Andrew added that we probably would have introduced expressing and feeding milk earlier than we did. I’m not sure. With foreknowledge that he’d adapt to a sippy cup fine, I might have done it later.