Way Too Much of a Good Thing

My saga of having too much breastmilk with Doodle and now with Pipsqueak hasn’t really gotten any easier.  I thought I had taken care of Pipsqueak’s troubles with block feeding (feeding twice per side) as it did with Doodle but it only took care of the gas and shortly after, the green poos came.  So I began block feeding by the clock, 4-5 hours on one side then 4-5 hours on the other.  But all it really did was leave me with hugely engorged breasts!  The green poos persisted, Pipsqueak wanted to feed constantly (though he did sleep well at night), he was gaining weight like a mad man, having colicky mornings, choking with secondary letdowns (even turning blue a few times), grunting constantly, biting me when feeding, and having frequent and extremely wet diapers, all symptoms of an oversupply of breastmilk.

I was lucky, though, that when I went to see my midwife for my three week check, the assistant who attended Doodle’s birth and Pipsqueak’s recovery (she missed the birth since he arrived so quickly and she lives so far from us!) who is also an International Board Certified Lactation Consultant happened to be in the office as well.  I shared my problem and she offered a suggestion that I had thought of but wasn’t sure would help: pumping.

She suggested pumping just a few minutes before each feed to clear out some of the waterier milk so Pipsqueak can get to the fattier hindmilk quicker.  So I tried it and even though I’ve modified the suggestion to fit my life, it’s worked!  We’re back to nice yellow, seedy poos rather than the dark green, thick and mucousy poos we had for a while and this is now (roughly) what my breastfeeding life looks like:

Feed 1: nurse right

Feed 2: nurse right, pump left

Feed 3: nurse left

Feed 4: nurse left, pump right

Feed 5: nurse right

and so on and so forth…

I don’t pump at night, though, or when we are out and about but I do pump every night before bed and every morning when we wake up.  I usually pump about 5 minutes each session and get between 2 and 6 ounces depending on the time of day and what we’ve been up to.

This past weekend, we were away and out and about most of the days so I wasn’t able to pump as usual but between Friday evening and Monday morning, this is what I came home with:

About 20 ounces of pumped milk to add to my freezer stash for some day when I leave baby home.  All pumped while I simultaneously nursed baby, extra milk my body made but my baby didn’t need.

The hope is that eventually my supply will regulate and I can go back to straight block feeding or possibly even regular feeding (I think Doodle was over a year, though, before we were able to return to the standard of switching every feed) but for now, this is what we need to do to keep us both healthy and comfortable and a-pumping I will go.