Long lost blogger

Yes, I'm still alive.  Barely.  Ha.  Kidding.  I think.

Really, as I sit here to type out a post for the first time in, what, nearly 6 weeks(?), with babygirl sleeping in the sling on my chest and a glass of white wine on the desk, it's with intensely mixed emotions that I begin to write.

Damn, this is hard.  It's been both the most wonderful experience ever and the most maddening.

Bullet points are probably all I have time for before she wakes and wants to eat.  Here are a few of the ill-formed thoughts that, in my blog utopia would be subjects of whole, well-articulated posts, but alas, this is all I have time for:

> breastfeeding sucks (this is a blog post title I've been wanting to write for 6 weeks now):  Pun intended.  And nobody tells you this.  Oh yes, yes, many of the bloggers I read throughout my infertile period and through my pregnancy complained of the pain of breastfeeding, but did I believe them? No.  I self-smugly figured they were just wimps.  Well, count me among the wimps.  Actually, the pain for me isn't physical so much (yes, I had mashed nipples, but never to the point of bleeding, back in days 1-7 or so when I was still trying to nurse babygirl and there was no milk coming out) as mental anguish and pain.  How could I not produce enough milk to feed my child?!?  A hundred years ago she would have died!  Of course, now we have formula and my blame-it-on-something mind decided that that was my downfall.  She had dropped over 10% from birth-weight on her day 4 pediatrician visit and the doctor wanted me to supplement.  My milk didn't come in until maybe day 6 or 7 and by then we were supplementing (with a bottle, horror of the breastfeeding nazis' horror) and it was all downhill from there.

Since then, I've done every regimen known to man to try to increase my supply.  Nurse->bottle-feed supplement->pump every 2 hours (that means I had only about 10 minutes between ending pumping and beginning the next nursing session); power-pumping for an hour every day; a course of Reglan; and currently pumping 8x per day while bottle-feeding whatever breastmilk I get (less than half her intake) and then supplementing with formula.

Why did I think breastfeeding would be easy?  I wish I had been more prepared for how hard and frustrating it would be.  I took a class.  My sister breastfeed both of her boys for 1 year each.  Why was I so unprepared?

Anyhow, nothing has really worked.  I've very slowly and only incrementally increased my daily pumping output from around 10, 12 ounces to around 14 and occasionally 15/16 ounces per day.  Babygirl is a voracious eater though.  She's taken as much as 34 ounces in one day!!

The Reglan did pretty much nothing for me, except make me crazy.  Seriously, a bad drug, at least for me.  I was drowsy to the point of dizziness.  I had this weird mouth thing:  the official side effect is dry-mouth but it felt like I was constantly trying to put something - food, water in my mouth to get rid of the taste and feel of it.  And I wasn't tasting/enjoying any of that food or drink.  And my mouth physically felt drawn downward (weird, I know.)  So, I'm tapering off.  3 more pills; one tonight and then one every other day til they're gone.

And really?  Given my 'poor responder' history with hormone-stimulating IUI and IVF drugs, did I really think taking a drug to stimulate another homone (prolactin) was really going to work?  As we know, my body completely refuses to obey medication rules.

So, I'm going to get off the Reglan.  I'll see where my milk goes with a few more days of pumping 8x per day (plus two or three what I call "social sucks" a day for babygirl) and then probably reduce to 6x per day pumping because I just can't even get out of the house pumping every 2-3 hours it feels like.  

I *think* I'm at peace with myself about only giving babygirl a portion of her nutrition in breastmilk.  It is what it is.  I suppose I could find some hard-core La Leche League person or another lactation consultant (I've consulted 3 already) that would figure some way to get me back to exclusively breastfeeding, but I'm just tired.  And worn out.  And done.  I'll keep doing some pumping as long as my milk lasts probably, but I expect it to fade away over the next couple of weeks.

> Ok, enough with the breastfeeding.  This post is already too long (thanks to babygirl being fast asleep) and too overly downer when what I really want to say is:  I am so blessed.  She is beautiful (everyone says so ;-) but really, she is.  And she's just started smiling at us the last two days!  I get tears in my eyes thinking about how long we waited to have her with us.  It's really quite unbelievable that we've got a nearly 6 week (tomorrow!) old in our house and she's thriving.  Yes, despite the feeding drama, she's over 9 pounds now and growing like a weed!  Her little heart-shape face has gotten chunky cheeks and her little skinny mini legs are starting to get rolls.  So cute!!

> Name:  cgd asked about her name in a comment on my last (epically long-ago) post.  I'm not going to use it regularly, but I do love her name so I'll tell you in this post.  It's Eleanor May.  Eleanor was my maternal grandmother's name (she was my last living grandparent until about 4 years ago).  And May was my husband's maternal grandmother's middle name, although it's the name she went by her entire life.  We wanted something that wasn't trendy, that was classic and it means so much that it honors our grandmothers.  We hope she'll love it as much as we do.  We will be calling her Eleanor and not Ellie or another nickname.  I had toyed with the idea of Ellie as a nickname but a) my parents used to have a dog (a beautiful liver and white Brittany) named Elle which we called Ellie, and b) Mr.Right wanted to call her by her full name.  So, we'll be calling her Eleanor.  Of course, if, when she's in high school, she wants to have her friends call her Ellie, so be it.  I also wanted a nickname and my name just doesn't nickname so I'm happy with giving her the option.

> Life as a post-infertile:  well, what can I say. I think it never leaves you.  Certainly the losses we endured and the pain of multiple failures to conceive with every known medication and medical procedure leaves scars.  But, they fade.  And I honestly have started believing on a regular basis that nothing could go wrong with my babygirl (a weird feeling not to anticipate the worst all the time).  And I know that's not possibly true.  There will be (medical) bumps in the road I'm sure.  But, she's here.  And, she's healthy.  And, she's beautiful.

> I hope for all of my blog friends who are still waiting and/or still worrying before getting to take their baby home for good that you experience success - whatever that ends up meaning for you.  I have a feeling I'm probably going to fade off into that not-so-frequent-blogger contingent who find it both hard to find the time to post and difficult to figure out what to post when we still feel the pain of our friends left behind in infertility.  But, I will try to update from time to time.  Some of my favorite blogs to read - even as I was still struggling to get pregnant - were those that had gone over to the post-baby side.

For now, I leave you with this from Halloween day: