09.15.06
Posted in Pumping at 12:23 pm by Christina
I had thought that I’d keep pumping past Jamie’s first birthday, as long as there was milk to be pumped, just dropping it down a notch to three pumps a day. What I wasn’t willing to do was continue the domperidone, because it’s already been five months straight of the maximum dosage of that. (I tried cutting the dosage back in July but saw an immediate decrease in my supply after cutting from 90mg to 70mg.) Anyway, in just the first week my supply has gone down to less than 8oz. When considering longer-term pumping, I was targeting 10oz as the threshold where the costs of the pumping on myself and the family stopped being worth it; I guess I just didn’t expect it to happen right away.
So that’s that. I have yesterday’s pump apparatus to clean up, and then tomorrow we’ll pass the pumps back to their owners – the Pump in Style back to my sister-in-law who is in town for her high school reunion this weekend, and the Symphony back to the lactation consultant. I am alternately weepy and stoic. This is SO not where I envisioned being at Jamie’s first birthday. As many of you know, I nursed both of the girls past their fourth birthdays. That close physical nurturance was a vital part of our relationships, and while I know that I can work to maintain the same closeness with Jamie, really, it just isn’t the same as both of us having an investment in that time.
Breastfeeding makes that time unconscious – most of the benefits just happen on the side, because the child comes for a nurse without knowing how much attachment they’re getting from it. Since Jamie doesn’t have that automated so to speak connected time, he thinks what he needs is playing time, etc. You can only convince a toddler to sit on your lap while you sing or read a book or play pattycake for a short period of time. And he can travel with the bottle, even though I try to “enforce” as it were that bottles happen when he’s in someone’s arms – he’s not always willing to be still for his milk. No matter the attention I put into it, he’s spending a LOT less time physically connected. And yes, plenty of children turn out just fine without their mothers breastfeeding them at all, but frankly, I wasn’t aiming for “just fine”!
On top of that, the entire family has to endure the side effects of having a traumatized mother. The psychoemotional toll of this situation has been harsh. I don’t feel like I was overinvested in being a mother. Once I got out of the initial new mother stage with my first, I have always taken care of myself and had things for myself. I was never a mother who spent hours each day playing with my child(ren); I knew they could be self-sufficient given a safe space to be in. I have always read tons of books and taken time for myself in other ways, too – baths, moms’ nights, etc. This past week, I read my first novel in perhaps two months, which for those who know me seems to me a serious sign of the traumatic disconnectedness of my life these days. I am doing my music and greatly enjoy it, yet every Saturday when I leave I am acutely aware of the fact that I would never have disconnected from my baby for four hours at a stretch because of the breastfeeding. That the only reason I’m doing it is because I cannot breastfeed.
The most visibly dramatic effect of this entire situation is how out of control my eating became. All of the emotional upheaval and lack of control over my daily life went right into bags of Milano cookies and other sorts of comfort foods. I am now 120+ pounds over my target weight; before I got pregnant with Jamie I was within 20 pounds of my goal. Some of that weight went on during emotional times during that pregnancy of which there were a few, but at least 2/3 of it went on in the last seven months. There’s a lot of healing and learning to do and it exhausts me just to think about the magnitude of it all. Still, if I was spending about three hours a day at the end working with the pump, I guess that’s three hours a day given back to me that I can use productively. I just have to find the motivation and the willpower to use it wisely.
Permalink
09.11.06
Posted in Life in general at 10:53 am by Christina
The painting, that is. Our painter is quite good and very amiable, but a series of unfortunate events means that we’ve been living in the living room for almost two weeks! Of course, this gives me good insight into what our space needs actually are; we don’t need a massive space, just something organized for our needs, primarily with the right number of bedrooms. We’d like 4 or 5: one for us and Jamie, one each for the girls, and one for Jeff’s office at a minimum. We’d like a fifth for a guest room if possible, because my parents visit regularly and stay for extended periods; it’s not great to have them in one of our spaces, but the girls’ bedroom arrangement could be altered during their visits, with Katie joining Emma on the bunkbeds and my parents taking Katie’s double bed.
The most frustrating part of the delay is that we’re losing our momentum on sale prep. There’s almost nothing for us to do while we can’t start staging things. We finished the PODS yesterday, protecting the bed frame from damage, and puttered in the garage a bit. But mostly we wait!
Permalink
09.05.06
Posted in Homeschooling, Life in general at 10:13 pm by Christina
Well, it’s been seven months since I abandoned all normal homeschooling activities with J’s breastfeeding diagnosis and hooked myself up to the pump instead. The girls were able to continue doing their regular Wednesday activities – homeschool choir and homeschool orchestra – thanks to the incredible generosity of my friend Anna, who lives close enough that she could take them along with her to choir, and then she’d stay on for orchestra which her kids didn’t do. We’ve seen a lot of progress in my ability to integrate pumping into more active days, but I stayed home through the spring and never attended those rehearsals before summer break.
Tomorrow both activities start up again, and I’m excited to see everyone more regularly – you know, the parents hang and have great conversations while the kids are learning – although I will be chasing a very active and curious toddler around now. And then next week the girls and I start taking regular swimming, them on T/Th afternoons, and me on M/W evenings. Mine is a deep water aerobics (no impact) that I’m really excited about. All I’ll need is my chorus to begin again on the 23rd and we’ll be deep into the rhythm of things again!
The girls are trying to choose other classes to take this fall; Emma never got the ballet and drawing classes I promised her we’d start in Feb after our baby months and holiday travels were over. Katie doesn’t have a strong pull to anything; I’ve found a local youth chorus that she would certainly enjoy, and she is considering private violin and piano lessons as well. We’ll see where we go!
Permalink
09.02.06
Posted in Life in general at 9:52 am by Christina
This week saw the completion of the landscaping! The front now has a small lawn; we had taken it out for water conservation, and we had bark there for a long time, but last year we moved the bark to the back and the weeds moved in. There’s a large rectangle of bark under the front window; I wanted to keep the sod in one rectangle for watering convenience, as we went cheap and didn’t put in irrigation. The front of the house will be getting some stucco repair (mainly where we took the awnings down) and get repainted. And I’m going to get a couple of large barrel planters for in front of the window, on the bark, to put some colorful annuals in to brighten things up.
The backyard is now a huge expanse of dirt. Since the house qualifies as a fixer-upper – the windows are the original single pane steel frames (1950s), the kitchen has newer appliances but the cabinets are homemade 1970s, the bathrooms are also unrenovated – our realtor agreed that an unfinished backyard shouldn’t be a detriment, especially if we include some escrow funding for the job.
The painter is hard at work inside. We have the playroom, the PODS and the garage full of our stuff, and we are all living in the living room – a floor full of beds at night, and a fun stack of beds during the day! J has learned how to turn around to get down safely, which is nice because now we can start putting him down for his nap in on our bed (which is his bed) without worrying about him falling out. In the kitchen, the painter uncovered plywood paneling behind the wallpaper; plywood was once quite a futuristic new material and it was used everywhere! So that will take some extra attention, namely a smelly oil primer. He did a good job chiseling out the homemade joint between a new and old wall in the front room, uncovering the old corner bead (I think that’s the right term for the metal corner joint on the sheetrock) which was mudded over in a huge lump. He hammered that bead deeper into the wall and remudded it; all it needs now is some matching texture.
There is still some repair to do on the bathroom walls; he’ll be coming back tomorrow (Sunday) to finish the repairs and then get most things masked off. We asked him to leave the front room unmasked; it gives the girls more space to roam, although I mopped in there to little effect, so I may take it back and have him do the masking in there. He’s coming on Sunday because he cannot work on Tuesday (plus the Monday holiday), because he’s being sworn in as a U.S. citizen in San Francisco. (He’s Greek.) Hopefully there won’t be any delays and we’ll be able to start cleaning and moving back into the rest of the house by next weekend.
I’m going to take some pictures today and try to remember how to upload them into the blog…
Permalink