drop it like it’s hot
Armed with sunflower lecithin, lactation massagers, and cautious optimism, one day I decided to try and drop my least favorite pump session: two a.m. We are very fortunate that our baby girl is, for the most part, such a good sleeper. More often than not she will get a solid six hours before she wakes up hungry, meaning that mama would go six hours without relief (ouch!) if not for the sleepy two a.m. pump session.
This was great for a while, until I slept through the alarm one night and realized that I felt happier and well-rested when I woke up from my baby’s cues instead of the alarm. I decided to nix the alarm the next night and learn to cope with the engorgement I experienced after going a full night without nursing or pumping.
Some mornings are better than others—the ones where I wake up with “rocks” for boobs but no discomfort—but there are mornings where I wake up with a soaked shirt because my nursing pads are absolutely saturated! On those mornings, mama feels uncomfortable and ready for relief, stat.
Once I had successfully dropped the two a.m. pump session, I found myself averaging six sessions per day. When baby girl wakes up for the day between 4 - 6 a.m. (depending on when we got her to bed), around 9 a.m., around 12:30 p.m., around 4 p.m., around 7 p.m., and between 10 - 11 p.m. before bed. Disclaimer that it took a long time to get here: the days of waking up every two hours to feed our baby girl during her growth spurts are not lost on us. As I write this post, we have just entered “Leap Five” (IYKYK, The Wonder Weeks users!) and in a sleep regression, waking up a couple times throughout the night to eat. But we are also celebrating nine-and-a-half solid hours of sleep with no wakings that our baby girl had the other night! Now that was a “rock” morning.
comfortably numb
One morning, out of the blue, the first minute of breastfeeding was no longer uncomfortable. I waited for the sting as my baby girl latched, and—nothing. I had to do a double take: she was latched and getting gulps of milk from one breast and I had my breast pump ready to go on the other. I pinched myself as I turned the pump on, and—still nothing.
I was ready to dismiss that session as a one-time occurrence. Later in the morning I held my breath as we started our session, and let out a sigh of relief when I once again felt no pain. Was this the coveted “breastfeeding shouldn’t hurt” that I was finally experiencing?
After a full week of virtually no pain/discomfort, I felt the breastfeeding dread slip away entirely. Oftentimes I found myself really looking forward to our next session (if I had told myself during that first difficult week of breastfeeding that I would one day feel this way, I wouldn’t have believed myself)!