go with the flow
With the return of my menstrual cycle came a slight drop in milk supply. My husband and I are record keepers, so our daughter has a daily journal where we write down the details of the day—hours of sleep, diaper changes, food eaten, and milk consumed/produced—as a way to keep track of her health and keep an eye on “trends.” One trend that we noticed is that, my period = irregular milk production.
During these weeks, we are very fortunate to have a stash of frozen milk to dip into! The decreased supply days are also a good thing because, milk can only stay in a deep freezer for so long. This allows us to use up the oldest bags of milk before they “expire” (the range is 6-12 months in a deep freezer, so to err on the side of caution, we are going by six months post-pump).
ep
As I write this post, we are Exclusively Pumping (EP) at eight months. We were able to drop another pump session, and are currently down to five pump sessions per day after a lot of trial-and-error to determine what “start times” would work best for our schedule. I still pump when I first wake up in the morning (between 5:30 and 6:30 a.m.), again at 9:30 a.m., at 1:30 p.m., at 6 p.m., and before bedtime at 9:30 p.m.
We’ve always said that “it’s the little things,” and it really is when it comes to EP. I never thought I would be so excited to see an email from insurance, but here I am! Every two-to-three months or so, they approve us to receive a “resupply kit” when I confirm that we are still breastfeeding our daughter. For us, this kit includes: another set of pump flanges, valves, tubing, diaphragms, and two bottles. After our most recent resupply at eight months, we now have five sets of everything we need during a pump session, which means—we only need to wash bottle parts once a day now (cue happy dance)! Before we received any resupply kits, we felt like we were constantly washing bottle parts just to keep up with the flow of the day. Washing just once means that we can save water (and sanity) and still keep up.