Like I said before I had a huge fear of not being able to feed my son. So I searched and searched the Internet, read everything I possibly could about BFing... and I also talked and talked to everyone who I knew that was BFing and/or pumping... One day when I was big and round I was at a friends house ~E~. We were talking about BFing and Pumping and she showed me her amazing stash!!! Seriously the girl was my BFing Idol! Her freezer was full of 8oz bags! I was drooling! lol... I wanted that! I wanted to be able to never worry about having milk for my boy... I begged her for her secret! And hoped it wasn't just genetics, because we weren't related... But at that moment I was hoping she was my long lost milk sister...
Sooo she explained to my how she started pumping as soon she had her son... That she tricked her body to thinking that it need to produce more milk then he needed... That she would pump in the morning and then nurse her son. It's all supply and demand, so the more you take the more you make... Sound easy enough right... but here's the thing... pumping isn't that easy, a babies suck is so much more effective!!! So she also explained that she would do breast compressions and try to get every last drop... So I need more information on what exactly I needed to do to produce the most milk possible!
I found this video it really shows how much effort takes to effectively pump!
http://newborns.stanford.edu/Breastfeeding/MaxProduction.html
After talking to ~E~ and seeing this video I knew how to pump.. Its not just sitting there with your hands free pumping bra while you typing away... you have to actively work to get the milk out... I was prepared to be a milking machine for my baby!
After I delivered my son we spent the four days skin to skin in the hospital! I never let him go more then 1.5 - 2 hours with out attempting to nurse during the day and 4 hours at night... I really wanted to stimulate milk production... This wasn't easy... it was painful, awkward, time consuming, and I just had surgery! My nipples did bleed and get chapped. (That's why IMO every nursing mom should be given a prescription of APNO, All Purpose Nipple Ointment, it's the best stuff on earth!) But I wanted to succeed so bad that none of that mattered! I was a woman on a mission. I also did the usual and refused pacifiers and bottles and made a little card that read "Learning to Breastfeed" similar to to the one above... I also kept him with us the whole time in the hospital, he never went to the nursery.
I asked for a pump and started pumping right away... On day 3/4 my milk came in and I was pumping a couple of ounces in the morning, then again at lunch and before I went to bed. Then I started pumping pretty regularly, morning, noon, night, and sometimes more. I would pump before I nursed my son because I was pretty engorged and it was easier for him to latch on when I did it this way in the beginning. This in-turn caused me to over produce. Which is what I wanted after all. After about 6 or 8 weeks I would pump first thing in the morning and then again before I went to bed I continued this till about 9 months and then my love-hate relationship with my pump became a hate-hate relationship and I decided I was done with pumping.
I was able to store up about 5000+ ounces. We had to buy a deep freezer to store it all. When my son turned nine months old I realized I have all this milk that there was no way we would use all of it... My next dilemma was what to do with it....
Donating Breast-milk
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