I never thought I’d be a pumping mom. Yeah, I had decided to breastfeed both my boys but I never thought far enough ahead to even imagine life would work out like this. With Hayden, I breastfed diligently for the first almost 2 weeks. Unfortunately, my grandfather passed and it threw us into traveling just 2 weeks after he was born. No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t keep my milk supply up because of the traveling and the stress… plus I didn’t know enough about breastfeeding to give myself the motivation to keep it going. I had quit breastfeeding all together before I had even returned home from the funeral. I never even got to the point where I had to attempt pumping at work.
When I got pregnant with Noah, I vowed that things would be different, even though I still didn’t know much about pumping and breastfeeding for that matter. I started following nursing mothers on twitter and reading their blogs and figured that I could do it. I’m a strong mom and I’m doing this for my son.
The day I gave birth to Noah, I breastfed in the hospital and was greeted by a lactation nurse that day. She told me how awesome Noah was latching and asked me if I owned a pump. I said yes but didn’t know where it was (I had loaned it to my sister and never saw it again). She told me that since I was an employee of the hospital, my insurance covered a electric double pump. OMG I tweeted that as soon as she left the room to get it. I didn’t have to worry about going to find one and worrying about how much money it would cost. My insurance paid for it!
The 11 weeks I was off work was crazy, breastfeeding wise I mean. I knew that I should be pumping while breastfeeding to keep up my supply and to start a supply for the babysitter but I never really had my mind on that. The week before I returned, I realized that I had only frozen like 5 bags of milk. I was not prepared. The last week I worked on freezing milk and building up my supply until the day before work started. It was hard but I had frozen 2 weeks worth of milk in that time. Now, I was ready to tackle pumping while working.
Click here to check out part 2!
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