Goodbye Bottles and Pump Horns

I have waited for this day. First let me start by saying I love breastfeeding just as much as I thought I would. It was/is wonderful. Easy, special, and a magic bullet for a fussy baby. That being said, pumping sucks ass. I think I will delay future children just so I can have a bigger gap of time where something plastic isn’t stuck to my boobs. UGH. I wrote about my trials with pumping early on. I never responded well. I tried it all. I finally just came to the realization that I needed to stop stressing so much about it and just do what I could. That meant for 6 months, I pumped 4 times a day at work. 4 TIMES! Do you realize what this does to your day? It was awful. I hated telling people “uh sorry you can’t come down because I am pumping”. Everyone got used to it but I still hated it. So at the beginning of July, I decided to start dropping pumps. This was really silly in retrospect. I read too much for my own good. I read of all these people talking about the engorgement they would get when they didn’t pump those first few days of transitition so I started “dropping”. I have never been overflowing…so looking back…I probably could have dropped all 4 and never felt at thing. In that last month or so…I was lucky to get 4 oz all day. It was pitiful but I was determined. The week of LT’s birthday, I stopped…and oh how sweet it was. I wasn’t carrying 15 thousand bags to work, cleaning pump parts, wipeing milk off my desk, etc. Life was back to normal!

After that things moved quickly. I was sending Landon to school with mixes of cow’s milk and formula. I also sent just a big container of cow’s milk to practice drinking in cups…and he rocks at it. He was drinking at lot at his meals and one day Brackett called from daycare and was like ” um he drank 5 oz of milk at snack in his cups so do you want me to give him a bottle?” I said no and then he did the same the next day. So we just decided he didn’t need either bottle so I just sent 1 in case he freaked out but I said not to “plan” to give it to him. He never batted an eye and even sat next to Josh when he had his and never made a peep. She said she had never seen a child wean themselves off bottles. Ta da. So you know what that means?! LESS DISHES!

Then I decided since we were on a roll, I needed to drop the bed time one too. He hasn’t “needed” it in a long time and he was getting enough in the day…so I took it out. He had about 3 nights where I stopped nursing and picked him up to go to bed without the bottle and he cried and fussed but went right to sleep once he was in the crib. I just took the last of the bottles upstairs for storage tonight…awesome awesome awesome! This is one happy mama.

P.S. For what it’s worth to anyone wanting to know, he drinks from a variety of sources including sippy cups, little shot glass type cups at school and some at home, smaller child size cups, my boobs(morning and nighttime), anything I am drinking from, and the rinse cup in the bathtub. I think he drinks more bath water than anything. 🙂

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