I technically began weaning at 6 months when I introduced solids. Nothing really changed at this point because my baby didn’t change the amount she was nursing during this time. This was intentional since I knew all my baby needed for that first year was breast milk and I was relatively cautious about giving her too much table food because I didn’t want to take any risk of it affecting my milk supply.
When my baby was around 10 months
old though I began to notice that my milk supply while pumping was dramatically
decreasing. This didn’t initially present a problem because I had previously
been pumping twice the amount of milk my baby was taking in her bottles
at daycare. So at this point, I was just pumping the amount she needed daily which
really didn’t seem like a problem at all. I was actually saving time but not
having to freeze so much milk. (And I would certainly call having to take the
time to freeze extra milk a good problem to have.)
Throughout the next month my supply
continued to drop, though. I tried my best to continue with at least her daily
demand. But at that time, I was a nurse working in an intensive care unit. My
pumping times were getting pushed back later and later and my time spent
pumping was getting shorter and shorter. Around the time my baby was 11 months
old I realized that it was taking 2 pumping sessions to pump what I would
typically get in 1. And this was still not enough to feed my baby. I went to my
deep freezer and counted each and every package of milk I had so carefully frozen. I had enough to
feed her one bottle of frozen milk a day for the next month. I decided to take
a risk and I dropped to only one pumping session during my 10 hours away from
my baby. My baby only took 2 bottles at daycare so one would be fresh, one frozen. I knew dropping to one pump was a huge risk. But I simply could not afford to
take the time away from my job duties to pump twice for the same amount of milk
I could yield in one pumping session. And I counted my blessings that I had a
huge stock in my freezer.
I just needed to get through one
more month of pumping once a day. I know this plan could have gone badly. I
could have lost the ability to pump any milk at all during my time at work. I
was worried about it, for sure, but at the same time, I was confident I would
make it to a year. I had made it to 11 months and had such a short time left to
go.
I won’t pretend that I didn’t sigh a
huge sigh of relief when my daughter reached her first birthday. We had made
it. We made it to a year. Despite working full time and having some definite
supply issues, we had made it! And, yes, I was happy to have succeeded. But I
may have been even happier to know that I was done with that pump! I
desperately wanted to treat my pump the way they treat the copy machine in Office
Space. Instead, I spent hours sanitizing and storing each pumping part,
bottle and nipple and then carefully packed them away. I jokingly told my husband
at the time that I told the pump as I was packing it away ‘Good-bye for now, I will see you again in 9 months.’ Little did we
know, this wasn’t too far from the truth as I was, indeed, pregnant one month
later.
But this is not the end of my first
weaning story. It is only the end of my first pumping story. Since my expressed
milk supply had been diminishing over the last two months I had absolutely no
trouble with engorgement after stopping that final pump. When she turned 1 we
were done with the pump, but not with nursing.
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