The saying goes “you can’t cry over spilt milk” but as any breastfeeding mommy who has every spilt expressed milk will tell you, you can and you probably will. I view expressed breast milk like liquid gold. You can’t just go to the grocery store or Target and pick up more and wasting my expressed milk is a truly traumatic experience for me.
When Honeybun was born, I decided I never wanted my children to have formula. Being a first time nursing mom and having heard many stories of a mother’s milk “just drying up” one day (including my own mom), I became a breast milk hoarder. I had collected and frozen so much milk that our first wedding anniversary gift from my parents was a large chest freezer since my breast milk was taking over our fridge/freezer (Honeybun had joined our family 11 weeks before). I was determined that if my milk dried up, I would still have enough stored up to feed Honeybun to a year (at one point I had well over 200 ounces frozen).
Over the course of nursing three new babies, I’ve come up with a few ways for easily collecting and storing breastmilk. The easiest by far starts a few days after birth for me. I found out with Honeybun that I’m a dripper. As baby nurses on one breast, my milk lets down simultaneously on both breasts but obviously baby can only consume one side at a time, so what’s a savvy mommy to do? Put a bottle under the other nipple and collect the drips. Though Doodle is not yet 3 weeks old, I’ve already collected over 20 ounces of drips which hubby can give him if I decide not to take him to work with me over the summer.
While the “drip method” is great for early collecting, the way I collected so much when Honeybun was a baby was through actual pumping. When Honeybun was 7 weeks old I started back to teaching dance 5 days a week but luckily I was only gone from her 1 afternoon/evening a week long enough that she required a bottle. During my break I would pump and would generally get 4-6 ounces total and she usually only took 3-4 which gave me a small surplus.
I also pumped in the morning which is where most of my stock came from. Sweet, considerate Honeybun slept through the night at 9 weeks old which was wonderful from a sleeping standpoint but left this mommy highly engorged and uncomfortable. So, again being a savvy mommy, rather than waiting for my milk to reregulate, I began pumping. First feed of the morning I would nurse her on one side and used a manual hand pump to express the milk from the other side. In the beginning I was getting as much as 9 ounces from just the one breast each morning. I continued this daily practice until Honeybun was about 10 months old and I realized my milk was not going anywhere plus I had more than enough frozen to feed her to a year if needed.
With Sugarplum I wasn’t so obsessed with hoarding. Even though we had twice as much freezer space as everyone else I knew in Dublin, it still wasn’t enough for the massive stock I’d established with Honeybun. Plus I didn’t have a work permit so wasn’t ever really away from Sugarplum anyways and she took much longer to sleep through the night so I never had the engorgement issue. I did pump while feeding a few times a week, just to have enough for me to go to a dance class or have a night out with hubby but never got an extravagant stock built up.
We will have to see what Doodle requires. At this point I don’t have a job which will take me away from him much but hopefully I’ll be doing something in the fall. I also have a feeling he’ll be sleeping through the night early like Honeybun did and I already wake up engorged some mornings since he only feeds 2 or 3 times a night and is very quick before falling back asleep. Guess I need to start making room in the freezer!
