Breastfeeding a toddler: adjusting the flow.
Because of the fires in San Diego, our day care center was evacuated for proximity to the fire zone and for resulting air quality. I had my daughter with me for the entirety of last week.
I’m the only person in my department, so ultimately I had to bring her to work with me to at least complete the bare minimum of keeping-my-department-above-water tasks for the week. (Which, with a mobile one-year-old around, was about all I was able to accomplish with maximum effort.)
Normally Sami and I nurse only at night and in the morning. I nurse her when I pick her up from day care, after dinner, before bedtime, once in the night, and in the morning before we get ready to go. During the day she eats and drinks solid foods at day care, and from the reports I get, she is quite the little eating machine.
But on the weekends, when we are together practically nonstop, she is not as interested in solid foods. I still offer her regular meals and snacks, but she is more likely to chuck food on the floor and ask for nursies when I am around.
So my boobs are thinking something like this:
Monday! We’ve been making milk all weekend to keep up! Make lots and lots of milk! (Where did the demand go?)
Tuesday! Aaaahhhh… demand dropping off. OK, we’ll slow down production during the day. No problemo.
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, blah blah blah.
Saturday! Arrrgggh! WTFBBQPhDMSBSQ! Where is all this demand coming from! Produce produce produce!
Sunday: Keep on chuggin.
Monday! We’ve been making milk all weekend to keep up! Make lots and lots of milk! (Where did the demand go?)
And so the cycle normally goes.
But with a week of constant togetherness, my milk production is pretty royally out of whack. So today is Wednesday. And it appears that my body is confused, because LAST wednesday we nursed all day. In fact, we nursed for pretty much nine days straight, through a cold, no day care, and a reduced solid food consumption. Getting back on our normal weekly roller coaster of nursing is proving to be difficult.
I know that it’s just time before my body catches on that things are back on more of an even keel. However, at 10 AM today I found myself hand expressing into a coffee mug, trying to find a balance between relieving the painful pressure and encouraging more milk production. I actually momentarily considered pumping milk to send to day care with Sami, but she really gets enough milk with the nursing we do all night and every morning. I fear she’ll be nursing until college if I don’t encourage her to eat big-girl foods when she is open to doing so, like at day care. Furthermore, pumping doesn’t ease my weekday oversupply problem, only exacerbates it.
So I will have to wait this one out.
I still maintain that there is nothing more disappointing to the mom of an exclusively breastfed baby than dumping liquid gold down the drain. It’s so hard to get up to production speed when the kidlet is first born; I’m still conditioned to feel as though every drop is sacred. With a toddler on the eventually-one-day-weaning track, I just have to get over that.
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