I know people think I’m weird. Or crazy. Or both. Or worse – I know some think I’m gross.
It’s OK. I’m not doing this for validation or attention or recognition for being SuperMom or SuperFreak. I didn’t sign up for a 22-month-plus (-plus-plus-plus?) breastfeeding journey. Hell, I didn’t even sign up for one month.
I’ve said before that I never set a breastfeeding goal beyond, “I’m going to try.”
Successful breastfeeding seemed like an impossible achievement considering my hormonalĀ deficiencies. Breastfeeding triplets sounded humanly impossible. Breastfeeding premature triplets? Whoa. Triplet toddlers? ARE YOU SERIOUS?
I’ve known people who breastfed their toddlers, and while I never thought it was gross, I wondered why a mom/toddler team would still be doing that. I’d see that toddler running around being independent and wild and very much so little-adult-ish and walk away scratching my head but ultimately thinking “whatever floats your boat, lady.”
I couldn’t imagine breastfeeding one toddler let alone three. Where do you find the time and energy? Does it come in a pill you buy from Amazon.com?
Insider secret: You find the time and energy while you’re breastfeeding your toddler. A lot of babies (all three of mine included) reach a point when they need somewhere dark and quiet to nurse. That was the first step in our latest chapter.
It took us more than a month for just one of my children to successfully breastfeed (determined by pre- and post-session weights while in NICU), and they were sent home with instructions to only breastfeed once a day because they hadn’t quite gotten the hang of it at nearly three months old. We practiced daily – I tried to give each baby their own practice session, and by May or June (they were born in November with a February due date), I was finally confident that we all were on the same successful page and walked away from feeding them with bottles of pumped breastmilk, leaving those for Daddy or grandparents when they fed babies.
They’re weaning, slowly but surely. Toby no longer wakes in the middle of the night to nurse, something he did until he was about 19 months old. My triplets all want to be breastfed first thing in the morning, but only Toby and Eleanor nurse in the afternoon after their nap. The only comfort nursing that happens takes place during illnesses (which are rare) and occasional (probably 2-3 times a month) difficult night wakings.
Before I breastfed I wondered why toddler mothers still nursed their children. Now I know. I breastfeed my toddlers because they like it. I’m still going because I can’t quit based on some arbitrary number, like 12 months, when it took 6 months for the four of us to learn what we were doing together. They’ve earned the quiet, comforting time with their mama, and I’ve earned the cuddles. Benefits like immunities and nutrition are handy, but they don’t drive me like they once did.
I’m still breastfeeding my triplet toddlers because it makes us happy.
I’ve heard it a bunch of times: “They each have their own personalities! It’s so amazing – wow!”
Or some variation.
It’s hard for me to bite my tongue, because REALLY? I don’t understand where people’s awe comes from. They’re different people – OBVIOUSLY their personalities are different.
I’m sure a lot of personality traits come from nurture and environment, but just as much – if not more (it has to be more, don’t you think?) – comes from nature. From one’s own brain and guts and DNA map and whatnot. (FYI, even identical multiples don’t have totally identical DNA.)
But in the same respect, I’ve found myself in the pediatrician’s office posing a concern about A/B/C because he/she is doing things different from his/her siblings. It’s happened more than once.
In my defense, I do have to ask because of the evil What If made even more evil by the forecasted possible delays and disabilities when I gave birth 12 weeks early. Thankfully, no one has had any true delays that required attention.
They’re just different.
Eleanor is nimble and agile. She was the first to walk (at 12 months actual age, 10 months corrected age), and she’s been jumping/landing with both feet off the floor since somewhere around 17 months old.
Toby is clumsy but runs superfast, and Callista is careful and just started truly running (rather than walking fast) two weeks ago.
Callista is a mimic. She tries to repeat almost any word we present and succeeds with most. She says, “Good morning!” and “Excuse me,” and while her pronunciation isn’t spot on, she is pretty darn close and is easiest to understand.
Eleanor and Toby have their own (individual) dialect with more words than not. (Note that they can each understand each other perfectly, and the Monkey See Monkey Do effect helps people not fluent in ETC understand them because what one says the next repeats, and one of them can usually get pretty close to Actual American English.)
Eleanor likes to add an S/Z-sound or an ie/y to some of her words. Daddy is “dadas.” Color is “cuz.” Pickle is “picky.” Glasses are “gyassy.” Words like outside, book, night-night, puppy, dog, kitty-cat – those all sound like you’d expect. She’s not delayed. She’s just different.
Toby … I’m not sure how to describe Toby’s dialect other than “Toby.” He calls his blanket (or blankie, whatever) a “beet,” and color (crayon?) sounds more like “cong.” Some of Toby’s words probably sound like nonsense to outsiders, but I know they’re specific and are assigned to actual words he can’t or won’t say properly like he says outside, all done, show, car, go and shoe, for example. He isn’t delayed. He’s just different.
And then there are the shared words that they must have come up with during a group meeting, like how they all used to call a button a “bup.”
As for where Toby excels past his sisters – those girls have nothing on his sweet dance moves or his beat boxing. He has rhythm in his soul, and while I have to own up to Toby’s clumsiness, his rhythm obviously doesn’t come from the same place as balance, so I’ll hand that credit to his musical daddy.
They’re all so close in size, development and interests, but they’re also completely and totally different. I hope everyone in their lives, me included, remembers that.
I want to write, but I don’t know what I want to write about. It’s like being hungry but looking into your pantry and refrigerator and seeing nothing but the same old stuff you’ve been eating.
So I stare, and I feel hungry. I eventually give up and walk away hoping the hunger inspires some wild, passionate craving, something that sends me running back to create magic in a flurry of fingers hitting the keyboard.
It hasn’t come. Not yet. I’m beginning to wonder if I just need to write. Something, anything. Good writers write no matter what they have to say. Good writing doesn’t often come from a place of random passion, and I know this. I know good writing comes from practice and stretching and just letting your brain relax and flow and accept that a jumbled mess sometimes needs to be worked out before the magic can show.
So I shall write.
Disclaimer: I’m not an expert; I just play one online. š
Earlier this year, I calculated a rough estimate of how much time I had spent using my breast pump earlier this year. By my guess as of March, I’d logged a whopping 86,000 minutes – that’s 59 days – give or take.
I only quit pumping regularly two weeks ago, and while I had whittled down my time to approximately 60 minutes a day, I still added a hefty amount to my total time with my pumps.
Yes, pumps. As of March, I had only used one – a Medela Symphony I rented from the hospital at which I gave birth. Less than a month after writing my pumping-time entry, I decided to take a plunge and switch pumps. I gave up the Symphony and fell in love with a Hygeia EnDeare (rented directly from Hygeia).
So, what’s the skinny?
If your baby is in the NICU, if you have more than one baby to pump for, if you don’t want to breastfeed but you want to bottle feed your breast milk – whatever the reason, if you intend to produce milk but don’t have the ideal breastfeeding start, you should start your breast pumping start with a hospital grade pump. They’re strong, they have bells and whistles, and they will better help you establish that all-important initial supply in the early months when you essentially train your body to supply what you demand.
Medela is the big name. Ameda seems to be where Medela is not. Hygeia is … where?
Hygeia is a hidden gem, one that follows the WHO international code of marketing breast-milk substitues, meaning word of mouth is how Hygeia intends their customers to find them.
If you take one thing away from this entry, let this be it: I wish I had chosen the Hygeia pump sooner.
Don’t get me wrong. I loved my Symphony while I had it. I had no issues and produced 2 liters a day at my highest volume. Obviously there was nothing wrong with the pump! After passing the one year mark, though, I noticed a marked difference in my production. It was becoming more and more difficult to produce what I had gotten in the past, and no amount of increased water, food or supplements seemed to help.
I honestly don’t know if the supply drop I experienced shortly before I quit the Symphony was something totally unrelated to the pump or if it’s at all possible for one’s body to just get bored with a machine and fail to perform as well, but I do know that the switch from the Medela to the Hygeia was like night and day.
Without getting into the science of how breast milk is expressed for those unexperienced with using a breast pump, I left the Medela getting only getting two let down periods in each session, and I really had to work for that second release. At my best before my supply dropped, I got three (with the third being hard work).
The Hygeia regularly allowed four let downs per session. My volume nearly doubled once I switched.
Both are hospital grade pumps, and at the point I switched, I really shouldn’t have seen much change – for the better or worse – in supply. I did, though, and I really think it had more to do with the different controls on the Hygeia.
The Medela Symphony has a control for suction strength and an automatic button that is supposed to stimulate a let down.
Hygeia’s EnDeare has a control for suction strength and a control for pump speed. There is no “let down button,” but you can find your own stimulation speed/strength combination using the two separate controls. I suspect this is where the difference came into play. Medela’s automatic button just didn’t, ahem, push my button anymore. Being in control of things myself made my time much more productive.
Hygeia Baby generously sent me a complete accessory pack to use with my pump after I gushed and gushed about the pump I rent (I still have it just in case) to Twitter friends and followers looking for breast pump recommendations.
You can use Medela’s accessories (tubes, flanges, etc.) with Hygeia’s pumps, so I honestly didn’t care to spend the money if they were virtually the same thing.
It turns out that some are the same and some aren’t.
The tubes are totally different, and I prefer the Hygeia pump tubes far more than Medela’s. They softer and are more flexible. I didn’t ever have to adjust the direction at which I grabbed the pump parts. It was like the difference between coiling the wire on your curling iron and coiling your garden hose. It sounds like a nitpicky thing, but I had no idea how frustrating Medela’s pump tubes were till I experienced how easy Hygeia’s were.
The flanges are also different. Medela wins this category, as the interior of their flanges are totally rounded, whereas the Hygeia flanges’ interior have a sharpish angle. It doesn’t seem like it’d be noticeable, but once I tried pumping, it was. It totally was. I had to quit mid-session and switch to the Medela flanges because my skin was getting raw. (Expert tip – always rub olive oil on the inside of your flanges where it touches your skin. Friction is no bueno, and olive oil is safe for most babies (allergies are possible but rare).)
The Hygeia accessory I was super excited to try was the valve that connects to each flange. Medela’s flange valves have a thin, removable flap that is easy to lose or drop into the garbage disposal. The hard plastic part of the valve is difficult to clean. Hygeia’s valves are a rubber-like (not sure what the actual material is) duckbill shape, all in one piece. I didn’t notice any difference in how they work at the pump, but the ease in cleaning Ā made the Medela valves dead to me.
Since I was pumping 5 oz. to 6 oz. per side at the time of my switch (and up to 10 oz. at my highest), I’ve never used Medela’s or Hygeia’s storage bottles, so I can’t say who’s the winner there. (My vote goes to the 9 oz. Avent bottles we used for bottle feedings.)
All that said, the reason I rounded out this entry’s title with “M plus H” is because the pumping setup that worked best for me was the Hygeia EnDeare using Hygeia pump tubes, Medela flanges and Hygeia valves (plus Avent bottle connectors and Avent bottles).
The players:
I feel like a doofus for asking this, but if you spend most of your time at home, and you’re on your feet a lot, do you wear shoes?
We’re a mostly no-shoes household, and I’ve always spent most in-home time barefoot – with socks if it’s wicked cold, but I prefer naked feet when possible.
I’ve never been a candidate for a top foot model, and I pretty much loathe pedicures, but I never had feet that could safely wander The Shire (minus the Hobbit hair, thank God) till I started spending a full work week standing in bare feet at home. Short of (gag) getting bi-weekly pedicures (I’m painfully ticklish and therefore sweat through pedicures aka torture sessions), I’m just not sure how to solve my current ugly-feet solution without wearing shoes inside, and that just feels weird.
Is it, though? Or is this supposed to be part of my SAHM uniform?
