{"id":904,"date":"2013-05-29T09:30:33","date_gmt":"2013-05-29T13:30:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/?p=904"},"modified":"2015-09-12T09:08:42","modified_gmt":"2015-09-12T13:08:42","slug":"milk-hoarder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/2013\/05\/29\/milk-hoarder\/","title":{"rendered":"Breastmilk Hoarder"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"milk<\/a><\/p>\n

The saying goes \u201cyou can\u2019t cry over spilt milk\u201d but as any breastfeeding mommy who has every spilt expressed milk will tell you, you can and you probably will.\u00a0 I view expressed breast milk like liquid gold.\u00a0 You can\u2019t just go to the grocery store or Target and pick up more and wasting my expressed milk is a truly traumatic experience for me.<\/p>\n

When Honeybun\u00a0was born, I decided I never wanted my children to have formula.\u00a0 Being a first time nursing mom and having heard many stories of a mother\u2019s milk \u201cjust drying up\u201d one day (including my own mom), I became a breast milk hoarder.\u00a0 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\u00a0had joined our family 11 weeks before).\u00a0 I was determined that if my milk dried up, I would still have enough stored up to feed Honeybun\u00a0to a year (at one point I had well over 200 ounces frozen).<\/p>\n

Over the course of nursing three new babies, I\u2019ve come up with a few ways for easily collecting and storing breastmilk.\u00a0 The easiest by far starts\u00a0 a few days after birth for me.\u00a0 I found out with Honeybun\u00a0that I\u2019m a dripper.\u00a0 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\u2019s a savvy mommy to do?\u00a0 Put a bottle under the other nipple and collect the drips.\u00a0 Though Doodle is not yet 3 weeks old, I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

While the \u201cdrip method\u201d is great for early collecting, the way I collected so much when Honeybun\u00a0was a baby was through actual pumping.\u00a0 When Honeybun\u00a0was 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

I also pumped in the morning which is where most of my stock came from.\u00a0 Sweet, considerate Honeybun\u00a0slept through the night at 9 weeks old which was wonderful from a sleeping standpoint but left this mommy highly engorged and uncomfortable.\u00a0 So, again being a savvy mommy, rather than waiting for my milk to reregulate, I began pumping.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In the beginning I was getting as much as 9 ounces from just the one breast each morning.\u00a0 I continued this daily practice until Honeybun\u00a0was 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.<\/p>\n

With Sugarplum I wasn\u2019t so obsessed with hoarding.\u00a0 Even though we had twice as much freezer space as everyone else I knew in Dublin, it still wasn\u2019t enough for the massive stock I\u2019d established with Honeybun.\u00a0 Plus I didn\u2019t have a work permit so wasn\u2019t ever really away from Sugarplum anyways and she took much longer to sleep through the night so I never had the engorgement issue.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

We will have to see what Doodle requires.\u00a0 At this point I don\u2019t have a job which will take me away from him much but hopefully I\u2019ll be doing something in the fall.\u00a0 I also have a feeling he\u2019ll be sleeping through the night early like Honeybun\u00a0did 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.\u00a0 Guess I need to start making room in\u00a0 the freezer!
\n<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The saying goes \u201cyou can\u2019t cry over spilt milk\u201d but as any breastfeeding mommy who has every spilt expressed milk will tell you, you can and you probably will.\u00a0 I view expressed breast milk like liquid gold.\u00a0 You can\u2019t just go to the grocery store or Target and pick up more and wasting my expressed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9067,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,8,16,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-a-mommys-life","category-baby-business","category-breastfeeding","category-family-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=904"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/904\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9068,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/904\/revisions\/9068"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9067"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}