If you don't want to explain about the pumping, just say you are very regular and that's when you shit.
It's very inflexible or I might leak through my pants.
The nightly transfer-and-wash-and-dry routine got old all by itself (I did most of it), and I wasn't even the one doing the pumping. Ugh, indeed.
[Reprehensibly juvenile Hans and Franz joke.]
The latest research shows there's not much difference between breast-fed and formula-fed kids. (Really no real difference at all.) I loved nursing my kid, and nursed until she was two and a half. But, you know, SCIENCE. If it's making you nuts, you can feel okay about weaning.
I'm too much of a prude to talk about it, except when absolutely necessary.
I would not have guessed this. It doesn't fit well with my impression of you, unless you are more reserved about things in person than you are in online conversations.
My wife decided pumping was right out for #2. We started weaning him at three months so she could go back to work. We were already supplementing because of some weight concerns. I don't know how bad she feels about the imperfection of it all, but it can't be any worse than the fretting about whether her production was adequate.
I wonder if increasing knowledge of the result in 5 will lead to more decisions like those in 9, meaning that, together with the decline in the trendiness of attachment parenting and the (relative) fall of the Doctors Sears, the roughly 1995-2015 period for UMC American women will be viewed in retrospect as the historical moment of peak insane self-sacrificial/conflicted professional woman motherhood in world history. We may already be on the downward slope, to be optimistic for a moment.
I should say, part of her reasoning was that the pumping facilities at her current job are pretty atrocious. At her previous job, she had a private office with another woman and she could just close the door and pump while she worked. And even that was a Major Pain.
Can you read while you do it or do you have to sit there bored?
I can't tell if 12 is asking about a matter of policy or extremely confused about certain biological processes.
No, that's a fair question. If I am pumping on both sides, I have to hold two valves, so I can't read because I can't hold anything else. If I pump on one side at a time, I can hold a book in the other hand.
I worked for a lecturer who was an extended breast feeder (NTTAWTT). She and her husband were splitting up, which meant she was basically single parenting while he cavorted with undergrads. She ended up bringing a sick two-year old to a class, carried on her hip in a sling. Poor kid just kept whining "Milk, mama" and trying to pull her shirt up. I offered to take the kid before class and again ten minutes in; she turned me down. About thirty minutes in, she started crying (the lecturer, kid was already there) and announced to the class that having it all was a goddamn lie and that it was impossible to be a good mum and have any sort of successful career. I ended up finishing her lecture while she comforted her kid in the back. I can't imagine what her evaluations looked like.
She should have taken evening a week to go cavorting with undergraduates.
My adviser occasionally dropped his toddler in my office.
I could never actually manage to pump, even with the machine. Dr. Skull would fetch the kid to campus -- we lived close enough that this was possible, and his scheduled matched with mine -- and I would just nurse her twice a day in my office with the door shut.
Later, like at six or eight months, we got her on a schedule where she was eating solids while I was at school and just nursing when I was home.
This really only works for academics, obvs, and academics who are married to academics.
Basically almost no one, IOW.
So! The formula/breast-feeding study is just excellent news!
Toddlers always land butter side up.
Delagar, can you point me to that research?
17: One of the profs up the hall would drop his six year old off in his labs for his grad students to entertain. One of them complained about safety (trying to get out of babysitting a high energy kid all day), so the prof got the kid his own safety glasses and lab coat.
14: I bet you have tried this, but in case not: did you know you can make a pumping bra on the fly by cutting slits in an old bra you don't need? I cut the slits to be as wide as the flanges and then held the flanges in place using safety pins (later I realized you could just cut littler holes and take the flanges off the... other parts... and not pin anything). Pumping was awful. My single mom sister is formula-only with 1 month old and it's obviously the best thing for her.
did you know you can make a pumping bra on the fly by cutting slits in an old bra you don't need?
Except if it works as a pumping bra, then you need it again.
Is everyone else missing "Latest Comments"? What's up with that?
I remember the article delagar is talking about; it made my lactation consultant friend furious last spring.
Anyway, yeah I read and surf the web while pumping with a nifty hands-free pumping bra.
I can't see myself on the sidebar. In my days we knew how to run a blog. What's wrong with you'uns?
Pumping drove me crazy. The actual pumping itself wasn't too bad as I had a nice double-electric pump, but timing it twice a day was so hard to do with student meetings and afternoon committee work. Plus, I used to try to go to the gym at the end of the day, and I had to pump before the gym, which meant everything had to be timed just so.
My wife tried pumping at first, with the handheld battery-powered kind that looks like a giant inhaler, but never got it working satisfactorily. She was an adjunct when our kids were young, so although she had a full teaching load and office hours and evening classes, she was able to nurse directly almost all the time. A lot of coming and going, but campus wasn't too far away.
There's a "mother's room" on our floor at the law firm, but I've never seen any one woman use it for more than a few weeks before stopping.
There's a "mother's room" on our floor at the law firm, but I've never seen any one woman use it for more than a few weeks before stopping.
The one in my office building is horrible. It's a teeny anteroom to a bathroom that they've blocked off. Only one person is supposed to use it at a time. There is one room for an entire 24-story office building.
We had an empty office in my unit that I used for pumping, otherwise there's no way I would have been able to make it work.
This isn't the exact article I read -- that one was in the NYTimes -- but it references the same study:
http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/sibbreast.htm
The Times write-up is here, which I link only because of a really good comment by another researcher, which says, not so fast:
A major limitation of the Colen and Ramey study is that it uses maternal reports of health outcomes, which can be biased by breastfeeding decisions or other unmeasured variables. Another limitation is the focus on middle/late childhood--the study ignores the well-documented benefits of breastfeeding in infancy, and fails to consider the less studied, but equally important, potential for long term health benefits.
For a recent study that addresses both these limitations, using the same sibling comparison design, see:
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/281/1784/20133116.short
or
http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2014/04/lower-birth-weigh...
The study finds that breastfeeding is associated with reduced inflammation in young adulthood, thereby reducing risk for cardiovascular and other costly diseases of aging.
Heebie, if you still want to breastfeed but don't want to pump (or don't want to pump as frequently), could you figure out a way of combining formula- and breast-feeding?
I know it's a supply-and-demand system, and you need a baby or a pump at the breast to make the demand that stimulates the production of the supply, etc., etc. And some lactatation consultants will tell you that you need to make that demand very frequently (constantly!), or your supply will dry up and wither away, like a tumbleweed rolling down the dusty, deserted street of an abandoned frontier town. But: I swear to God, I have known women who have broken the rules and made it work for them, combining bottle and breast, formula- and breast-feeding.
Of course, these women had no supply issues, had more than ample supplies of milk, and in an earlier age, they might have made a living as wet nurses.
But it's not necessarily an all-or-nothing proposition, is what I mean. There may be some middle ground (depending on supply, age of baby, and so on).
Okay, my iphone comment never appeared.
While you're pumping, can you read or do any kind of work or do you just sit there bored? The latter would drive me crazy.
THEYVE GONE WITH THE SIDEBAR SONNY
36: Go Buckeyes. The non-serial killer part of the state.
Was someone messing with the template?
Standpipe was back briefly just before it broke. Just saying.
Was someone messing with the template?
I was messing with it about twenty minutes ago, and then gave up, as nothing seemed to help, but I left it as I found it.
38: I can't go that long without springing a leak. When Rascal is older and supplementing with food, my body will cut back too and I'll be able to go down to once or zero times.
But yes - people's bodies are all over the place. My friend could never get more than an ounce out, pumping, but also didn't have a problem going all day and nursing at night.
Rascal is still very young - not yet two months old. (I've supplemented all of them with formula because I couldn't pump enough to keep up, so I'm used to doing both, but that doesn't address the springing-a-leak thing.)
IIRC, my feisty lactation consultant's criticisms of that study boiled down into two categories:
1. They looked at outcomes in the kids up to age 6 or so, but not beyond
2. They didn't look at any benefits to the mother, of which there are supposedly some.
But it's also worth the point that breast-feeding is on probably an overly-elevated pedestal and that when it really isn't working, the mother shouldn't beat herself up over it.
(That said, I've got it in my head that I must do everything the same for all the Geeblets, which means pumping for one semester per Geeblet.)
I must do everything the same for all the Geeblets
Is this more or less nuts than "four is the magic Geeblet number?" I say more. What do you think, Mama G?
everything the same for all the Geeblets
Obviously. Otherwise your treatment/control conditions are ruined.
But it's also worth the point that breast-feeding is on probably an overly-elevated pedestal and that when it really isn't working, the mother shouldn't beat herself up over it.
Yeah, I get stuck on the natural experiment, where formula was much, much more common in the generations before mine, and then breastfeeding rebounded right around when I was a baby. And yet I've never heard of any major population-wide improvement on any health measure that can be identified in the more breastfed cohort.
Maybe all the removal of leaded gasoline hides the effect.
Is this more or less nuts than "four is the magic Geeblet number?"
Wrong comparison. Is this more or less nuts than "we can't move to Denver because the western half of the United States is fucked on one climate issue, while the rest of the United States is fucked on different climate issues, while the rest of the world is massively fucked but wealth will mitigate things anywhere?"
I find it very hard too believe that you see no effects prior to age six but then you would see them later.
In hindsight, it was really a terrible idea to put leaded gasoline in the formula, back then.
55: Most six year olds can't even comment on Unfogged yet.
Heebie, that's the soft bigotry of low expectations, right there. You can do better.
58: the breast fed ones can. Noser certainly supports me in email.
I will say, just for the sake of argumentativeness, that I remain unconvinced by the "we don't have perfect climate information" crowd. Here's how I see it:
1) The most valuable thing I can hope to leave my kids is a house.
2) Whatever you think the odds of various climate outcomes are, the West running out of water is probably the most likely one on your list.
3) If you have a house somewhere that runs out of water, it's going to be worth far less than you'd hoped.
4) Don't buy a house in the West.
Now, "West" is too broad, and maybe the risk of a major-ish area really running out of water is so low it's not worth thinking about, but "we can't know for sure" is just insufficiently reassuring.
61: I agree essentially but my rule of thumb is simplified: I don't have any desire to live in the areas of the country that are currently experiencing water challenge nor are forecast to have worse.
62 cont'd: because I don't like those places for their climate or crowding anyways.
There's so much space between 1) and 2) in 61. When the danger of depreciation appears on the horizon, people who are paying attention will have a decade-long headstart on deniers, and will sell their house to a healthy market of deniers and people who aren't paying attention.
I'm not convinced that climate-driven depreciation is going to be that big of a factor whether we can predict it well or not. Social and political forces seem to make for huge differences in property values around here. If my house was a mile away in one direction, it would be worth about half or less of what it is now. If it was a mile away in another direction, I wouldn't have been able to afford it.
Or they won't buy the house in the first place...
What's weird is the reasoning 1) a home is the most valuable thing you can leave your children, yet 2) I will make my decision to buy a home based on vague information re subjects I obviously don't have even a minimal level of expertise about, namely the predictability of the effects of climate change on a 30 year horizon, the basic nature of water policy (hint: water is a commodity and how it is owned, transported and purchased matters more than 'do I live near a lake??) and how climate change and water policy combined will affect property values. It's like "saving now is important for my retirement future, so based on some random article I read about how Guyana is doing well I'm putting all my leftover money into the Guyanese stock market. Have fun with your future wealth, kids!"
The important thing is that, by comparison, my decision to pump breastmilk for one semester seems borne of the utmost sensibility.
Dude, 67 is a large, non-potable pile of faux-sophisticated bullshit. Either you buy 61.2 or you don't. I'm sure it'll be a great comfort to the first town that runs out of water that they've only run out of a commodity.
Even the "I read an article in the Economist, now all my money is going to Guyana" analogy doesn't seem quite right, because (apparently) you're sacrificing to not live in the home you want to now for 30 years. So it's more like "sorry I made my life and yours not optimally great for 30 years, kids, but at least we have that Guyana bet! No, I haven't read anything else about Guyana, why do you ask?"
You're totally right. Now that The Economist has seized the levers of power and written the national climate assessment, running out of water is the least of our worries.
If there are water shortages so serious they lead to some cities being depopulated, I doubt we really can predict the effects at this moment. Maybe the best cities to bet on are ones with good water supply and advantageous geography for defense against roving packs of displaced people.
we can't move to Denver
Hey, wait. I'm moving to Colorado (not sure which part yet) in the fall. Do I need to bring my own water?
73: Yes, bong use has really driven up the demand.
I'm always a bit nonplussed by the statement that earlier generations were much less into breastfeeding. My mother and my wife's breastfed all of their children for reasons essentially the same as those we educated people are familiar with.
So is this a class/education divide, with us being born into a then-much-smaller subculture which has since grown larger?
Don't know about your family, but I'm pretty sure the historical trends are real.
It doesn't fit well with my impression of you, unless you are more reserved about things in person than you are in online conversations.
I am, about this kind of thing.
Surely most of the benefits, as minor as they likely are, and all of the immune system related benefits, can be gotten from a less than complete committment to breastfeeding.
People should take my impulse to start sentences with "Surely" as a Dunning-Kruger tell.
True, but there's the springing-a-leak problem. You gotta milk the cows, even on the Sabbath.
Oh yeah, I wasn't about to give any practical advice on breastfeeding. I may be a D-K poster child but I have my limits.
81: I thought you couldn't and that's why people go to Starbucks for a Shabbot Soy.
Surely someone can design a pump that acts completely inconspicuously. The actual mechanism and milk storage is concealed in a handbag or backpack with flat, body-hugging tubing leading to the suction cups embedded in natural-shaped padding.
If 84 reveals me to be hilariously ignorant of anatomy I don't want to hear it.
84: like a milking stillsuit.
81 proves heebie is descended from her Jewish/farm boy grandfather!
86: OMG yes. Recirculation optional.
there was a ?MIT? hackathon on nursing machines that had lactation consultants & seamstresses as well as programmers & mech es. They came up with several novel designs.
Hey, wait. I'm moving to Colorado (not sure which part yet) in the fall. Do I need to bring my own water?
I really don't know where Ogged gets this stuff. Reports like this one while predicting decrease (a whopping 9 percent btw) in runoff for the Colorado River actually predicts an increase in precipitation for the Upper Colorado River Basin. A lot of the models predict precip increases in the Upper Colorado, Missouri, and Columbia River basins. And this is consistent with what we actually see every winter. The severe drought conditions in CA and the southwest the last couple years have have not happened up in the Rockies. Parts of CA, AZ, NV, and TX might be fucked. But there's just no modeling or observations that indicate the northern part of the west is in for anything like a water crisis.
Denver is the future capital of the US in almost every post-apocalyptic dystopian YA novel, so it sounds like a great investment to me.
Is that why the blog uses Mountain Time?
I don't make this stuff up. Here's what turns up after ten seconds of googling. http://www.denverpost.com/environment/ci_26899759/colorado-girds-proliferating-people-and-increasingly-scarce-water
CO isn't going to run out of water in the sense of going dry, it's just going to hit a wall at some point given the growth rate. So what? Utah has the same "problem". So they'll just stop issuing building permits or whatever. The existing population will be fine. If anything it means you should buy now before the limit gets reached and prices spike.
"Run out of water" doesn't mean anything functional in California. The only way I can understand "run out of water" is if you have a single reservoir on a single river supplying a city. In California, we are cross-plumbed so that for a lot of money and energy, you could deliver water from a number of different sources, should one of them fail.
Further, the idea is strange. Does it mean: drop below a health and safety allotment of 40 gallons/person-day? Or: little enough that outdoor landscaping goes dry, ruining the aesthetic of the neighborhood you purchased into? Or: cost so much that people would have to spend more than 3% of their income on it (the current standard for affordability)?
The absolute amount of water that will fall on California will absolutely be enough for health and safety stuff. Maybe not for landscaping at a price people are willing to pay. But water is allocated by institutions here. Long before the people of L.A. have to pack up their cars and abandon the house their parents left them, the 20 million of them will vote themselves someone else's water. It'll come from ag, or from somewhere smaller and poorer. Maybe it'll come from a river currently designated Wild and Scenic. There are still a few on the North Coast to tap. The key is that we have the plumbing to move it.
Your house investment in California is fine if you are either close to a robust source or in a rich big city. I wouldn't put trees or a dairy in ag lands these days, but you haven't mentioned either of those as your dream.
the 20 million of them will vote themselves someone else's water
They're going to vote themselves more of Colorado's water? How will that work?
They have more practice getting water from the Sierras. L.A. doesn't have to cross state borders to have the legislature decide that the Kern, Tule and San Joaquin Rivers could be put to higher and better purposes than growing tomatoes, alfalfa and grapes. There will be plenty for cities with money and power. There will not be enough water to keep meat and dairy cheap.
84 reads like product placement for the Freemie.
The most valuable thing I can hope to leave my kids is a house.
Well somebody didn't read enough books about attachment parenting, did they?
I know I'm late to commenting, but I have had a really great experience pumping at this law firm. I'm so lucky to have an office with a solid door. My last firm had glass panels so even if your door was closed people could see inside.
I think it's also a lot easier to pump here because it's pretty common. There's another associate that pumps and one of the admins pumps and either uses a conference room or an office of one of the partners that is rarely here. Since most people have at least three kids (and many have five), I'm mostly comfortable using the kitchen to wash the equipment, storing the milk in a bag in the fridge, etc.
One thing that has surprised me is how few pregnancies (of faculty and staff) there have been at Heebie U over the past eight years. I think it probably just comes and goes in waves, but I can only think of one female faculty member who has been pregnant, and she moved away shortly thereafter. I can think of two staff members, but that's all.
Plenty of men whose spouses have had kids in the past eight years, though.
And I can think of a couple people who've adopted, so the pumping part isn't relevant. Also, like with men, it's not visible, so it has to come up in conversation or else I wouldn't know.
I am part of a cohort of five women all hired at the same time, and three of us had babies within two months of each other. Maternity leave policy -- tested!
Why would someone named LizSpigot need a pump?
Sorry. That was a stupid and crude joke from an internet stranger.
Weak sauce, beamish. If you're going to die, die with your boots on.
Well, I am going to die. And I am wearing boots.
Because it sounds awkward to talk about hosing at work.
