The End of Nursing

This post is eligible for the February Birthday Comment Contest.

Well people, it is official, the bewbs have been put away and Elliott is officially 'on his own'. The mantra in the U.S. these days is that nursing should continue until at least one year of age. Well that's fine and dandy, but we don't always get to choose when to end it. In this case, Elliott and I were on a natural weening process from about 9 months. From about that time, my milk supply was on a fairly stair-stepped decrease until just before his birthday when he was only nursing once a day right before bed. At that point he was getting probably no more than an ounce or two each setting and after awhile, I started to feel it was just time. And apparently it was. The first day we skipped that last session, Elliott didn't seem to notice anything different. (I do think it was helpful to have such a strong nighttime routine in which everything else played out as usual that night.) So for the last 2-3 weeks, my body has been mine again.

Pumping at the office gave me some insight on what my body was doing on its own. I didn't start making any personal changes until after my milk supply started changing on its own. I would have been happy to nurse until a year (heck, except for washing out my pumping parts every night - hated it - I found nursing so convenient and easy), so I feel reasonably confident it was just Nature's timing. Besides Elliott has always been a food-baby, not a milk-baby. He showed interest in our food way before they start mentioning the behavior in the baby books. As soon as he was able to start eating well, he never looked back.

Anyway, another family blog I follow posted an interesting recap to her lactation experience and I thought I would do one of my own:

1. A very conservative estimate has me producing approximately 7,530 ounces of milk...or more dramatically, I think, 58.83 GALLONS!

2. Ms. Rightie was the clear winner in production, responsible for 2/3rds of all milk produced.

3. Approximately 352 at-work pumping sessions totaling 88 hours of pumping time. (This doesn't include any at-home pumping sessions, which happened periodically.)

4. Approximately 96 at-work lunches missed...which might account for the fact that no one invites me to lunch anymore.

5. Biggest loss: 15 ounces (it still hurts), and most of my frozen reserve when I first went back to work. I didn't realize you had to use frozen milk so quickly, so I thought I would help my mother-in-law out and thaw the days worth for her. Well, he didn't drink more than I think 4 ounces my first day back...so by the next day we had to throw the rest away...at least that's what I thought at the time. I would have worked it out differently with what I know now, but there was a lot of uncertainty in the pumping/bottle feeding department at the time.

6. Second biggest loss: 4 ounces...but this one also hurt because by that time, I was only pumping 4 ounces a day...which was also all the b-milk he was getting each day, so we lost a whole day's effort. (Although I do think Brad was more crushed than I was since he's the one who spilled the bottle.)

So there you go! A year of lactating wrapped up in a nut shell. And in case you are wondering: Yes, I am intentionally avoiding the b-word. Turns out, a lot of the parental control settings will pick up that word, even if its used in 'b-feeding', and block our blog. So a couple of our friends couldn't view the blog until I removed all occurrences of the word.