On tandem nursing

A while back, I wrote about finding myself nursing BlueEyes while I was pregnant with Little Brother. I thought that BlueEyes would wean himself when my milk would dry up due to my pregnancy. But that didn't happen. BlueEyes didn't seem to care whether there was milk or not, he would just continue to nurse. And the closer I got to Little Brother being born, the less I felt like weaning a toddler who would probably not stop nursing without a fuss. And I didn't want BlueEyes to get the feeling that he was being replaced by the new baby. So now I find myself tandem nursing a toddler and a newborn.

It's not that we don't have certain rules. I taught BlueEyes pretty early on that if he wanted to nurse he wasn't supposed to pull on my shirt, but he had to sign (before he could talk) or ask to nurse. And a little later, I imposed the rule that I counted back from 5 to 1 and then he had to stop nursing, to stop the endless nursing sessions he would have. And now we have the rule that Little Brother always nurses first (although this is still a hard one for BlueEyes) and that BlueEyes can only nurse in bed, so before and after sleeping.

So yeah, five years ago I didn't even realize this was a thing: tandem nursing. But it is, and now you know it too.

Homecountry nostalgia: Elfstedentocht

With some pillows and a boppy it's totally possible to nurse a baby and type on your computer at the same time. However, sometimes being trapped under a nursing and/or sleeping baby is a perfect excuse to watch some tv. Just now I watched this highly recommendable (but not subtitled) homecountry show about the Elfstedentocht in 1997. It nearly made me cry from all the nostalgic feelings. Since 98% of my readers are not from my homecountry, I should probably explain.

The "Elfstedentocht" (eleven cities tour) is an ice-skating event that last happened in 1997. To me that sounds like yesterday, but in reality that's 17 years ago (crap, that makes me feel kinda old). This event is a 200 km (120 mile) skating tour on natural ice in one of the northern provinces in the homecountry. A province so far away that people even speak their own language. Every year the main question during the winter is whether this epic tour is going to take place or not. Only 16.000 people can skate during this event and the other 16 million inhabitants of the homecountry travel to said province to party and encourage the skaters. But with global warming and such, the last time the ice was thick enough to hold this many people was in 1997. So we nostalgically look back and wonder when the next time will be. In the meantime, there are a bunch of "alternative Elfstedentochten" where people skate 120 miles on ice somewhere else in the world and there's a host of other Elfstedentochten, where people use rowing boats, bicycles, motor cycles and what not to complete the same route. Yours truly cycled the tour once and rowed it twice (but with rowing it's a relay race, I should add).

The entire internet could not provide me with a clip with English subtitles but here's the 1997 finish. Also, this was the winter fashion in 1997. Also quite interesting.

We made a co-sleeper!

Normally, I save all my craftiness for in the lab. When not in the lab, I don't really enjoy making crafty things, and if I ever attempt, I'm horrible at finishing projects. This is illustrated by the fact that I have several unfinished craft projects in my old room in my parents' house. Nowadays, I just don't really try it anymore. But last Friday Dr. BrownEyes and I did a very crafty thing: we made a co-sleeper from our IKEA Somnat crib and our IKEA Malm bed. Ours is not as fancy as this example from a slightly different crib, but I'm still very proud of the result.
We used this equation:

The Malm bed.

 +

The crib that BlueEyes used for maybe 2 months, after which we realized we kept walking back and forth and he kept ending up in our bed anyway.

 =

A huge bed, so prospective baby can co-sleep safely.

In short, we removed the side of the crib (which is a feature this crib already has), we elevated the crib with wooden blocks and since the Malm bed has a wooden edge next to the mattress, when elevated just enough, the crib mattress can lay on that wooden edge and align nicely with the big mattress. We pushed the crib against the wall and the bed against the crib and will fill the hole on the left in the crib with rolled-up towels, so the two mattresses are snug against each other.

When do you stop pumping milk at work?

A while back I wrote about pumping milk at work and the other day I got an email from a reader asking me the following:

Hi Babyattachmode,

I came across your blog while looking for some guides to breastfeeding and pumping at work. I am about to go back to work as a postdoc, and I'm wondering whether it is possible to not pump at work at all and will my milk supply go down if I skip my work pump. Any advice is appreciated!

Best [anonymous]

Even though I’m not a lactation consultant, I do have some experience and heard a lot of advice and experiences from women around me, so I told her this:

It really depends on the age of your baby and on your supply. For most women, their milk supply starts to be stable between 9 months and a year. So if you baby is older than 9 months, I think you should be okay not pumping at work and just nursing him at home. However, if your baby is younger than that, I think not pumping will affect your supply and it's up to you how much you don't want that. If you're okay with your supply dropping and slowly moving over to formula, then you can do it and any breastmilk he gets from you is something of course! However, if you plan to nurse longer and your baby is younger than 9 months, I wouldn't advice not pumping at work.

Another thing to consider is your own comfort. When I stopped pumping when my son was 1 year, I still got pretty engorged at the end of a workday and had my handpump in my office to relieve the pressure on days when it got too bad. I'm sure my breasts could not have handled an 8+ hour workday without pumping in the first year, but I know this is different for different women too.

A last thing to add is that for me, pumping was not that much work. It's another thing to add to your routine, but I was usually done within 15 minutes per session, and I pumped twice a day. I had an extra set of tubing and breastshields so that I didn't have to wash those in between pumping sessions for example.

To which she replied that her baby was 9 months and that she had pumped twice daily since she went back to work when her baby was 2 months.

So I told her:

When your baby is already nine months, you're likely going to be okay not pumping and continuing to nurse. I dropped one pumping session at 9 months and the other at 12, but you might be okay just not pumping during the day. Just see how it goes and if your supply drops dramatically you can always decide to continue pumping for a couple more weeks/months and then try again. For a while I pumped during breakfast to have an extra bottle and leave home with empty breasts for the day (especially when BlueEyes decided not to nurse a lot in the morning).

I thought I'd post this conversation on my blog too, as it might be helpful to others too!

On breastfeeding while pregnant.

Before BlueEyes was born I knew I wanted to give breastfeeding a try, but I didn’t have any particular goals in mind. I first wanted to see how things went and if I could even do it. Shortly after he was born he started nursing and it went surprisingly well. I was very lucky and never really had any problems. No clogged ducts, no mastitis, no nipples that were hurting. It was all smooth sailing. 

Before I had BlueEyes, I thought nursing a toddler, let alone a bigger kid, was a bit weird. I guess it doesn’t help that you rarely see people do it. But your own child becomes a toddler very gradually. So slow that you almost don’t realize that he’s not a little baby anymore. So there is no one day when all of a sudden he is a toddler and you ‘have to’ stop nursing. I’m still breastfeeding BlueEyes, because I really don’t see a good reason not to. What I didn’t realize before is that after about a year you can stop pumping at work, because your breasts slowly turn from milk storage units to milk making units (i.e. you make the most milk during a feeding instead of throughout the day). BlueEyes nurses shortly when we come home from daycare, he nurses (a lot) before he goes to bed, and then when he wakes up at night he nurses to fall back to sleep easily. And he nurses when he’s really upset and angry and when that is really the only way to get him to calm down.

And now I’m pregnant and again, before I had BlueEyes I didn’t even realize that that was a thing: breastfeeding while you’re pregnant. Well, it is. And now you know it too ;-).

Breastfeeding in public

One day a beautiful mural appeared on the side of a building I bike past when cycling home from work:

Only when you look closer, you can see that the woman in the mural is breastfeeding a baby.

And that she has another child leaning into her back.

'Nighttime parenting' by Sears

I already admitted recently that we bought our first baby sleep book. After a year of not sleeping much longer than 3-4 hours (or less) at a time, I felt that maybe we were missing something. Previously I resisted getting a baby sleep book, because I thought (and still think) that worrying about lack of sleep takes even more of your energy than just not sleeping well. I also believe that sleep is not something you can force onto your children, but that the only thing you can do is create an environment in which they feel safe to fall asleep. So we didn’t buy any of the books that say that you have to let your baby cry-it-out, but instead got ‘Nighttime parenting’ from Bill Sears, the father of attachment parenting. Does it make sense to get a book on something that you already do (namely breastfeeding and co-sleeping)? It kind of does, which is why I’m writing about it.

The book starts out explaining what attachment parenting is. Sears doesn’t say that you have to breastfeed, babywear and co-sleep, but he just says that attachment parenting helps you achieve two goals:

• To know your child. 
• To help your child feel right.

And I like the way he talks about ‘nighttime parenting’, suggesting that you shouldn’t put your baby in a separate room from 7PM to 7AM (as some people around us suggest) but that you should also be there for him at night. But what annoyed me a bit was how he made it sound so overly romantic: you lay down with your baby after a nice warm bath, hold him in your arms and nurse him to sleep. Yeah right. In our house, that works only some of the time. Most of the time however, BlueEyes will nurse, almost fall asleep and then turn around and sit up, crawl out of bed and start playing. So then usually Dr. BrownEyes will come in and walk around with BlueEyes until he either sleeps or wants to nurse again (which he will tell by crying). This is far from the romantic picture dat Sears is painting in his book, which is filled with 70s pictures of people cuddling with their sleeping baby in the family bed…

In another chapter Sears talks about the ‘high need baby’, with which he means babies that have a hard time sleeping and/or cry a lot. I’ve been wondering whether BlueEyes would qualify as a high need baby, and to be honest: I have no idea. I don’t really have a lot of firsthand experience with other babies (I had never even changed a diaper before BlueEyes was born!), so I can’t say how he compares to other children (well except for all the stories about children who sleep through the night at 6 weeks old…). But the solution for a high need baby is basically even more co-sleeping, breastfeeding and babywearing than for a regular baby.

So was this book useful? You might be surprised, but yes it was! Because now I know that we’re not just doing something, but that it’s sort of normal to still nurse a 1 year old to sleep and to walk around the room with him when he wakes up at night in order for him to fall asleep again. And that it’s just a matter of waiting until he will sleep better.

Sleeping like a baby

Baby sleep: it’s on every parent’s mind (and a lot on the internet too) So here’s an update on how things are going here:

First I have to admit that when I was pregnant and I couldn’t sleep because my belly was huge, I though to myself ‘when the baby is out I will be able to sleep again’. Yes, this shows how little I knew about babies before I had one myself. I also thought babies were supposed to sleep in their cribs in their own rooms, but his changed pretty fast with a baby who has only slept through the night once in the past year.

Back when BlueEyes was 4 months old, the sleeping started to go better. He didn’t wake up every 2-3 hours anymore, but sometimes slept all the way to 2 am (from about 8pm) in his own crib. This was awesome, but just when this started to happen we went on a trip to a time zone 6 hours away. And then two weeks later we went back to be home for 2 days before heading 6 time zones in the other direction. I don’t know if this had anything to do with it, but after we came home from this month in different time zones his sleeping was not improved to say the least. He woke up every couple hours, and putting him to bed was a lot more difficult. So even though in March I said that I wasn’t that tired anymore I think I was just being delusional back then. At that point we would still put BlueEyes to sleep in his own crib because I thought that that was what you were supposed to do. So first I would nurse him to sleep and then we would very gently place him in his crib. Half the times he would wake up and we would have to start over. This was not the awesomest way to spend the evening.

So now I nurse him to sleep in our bed. This takes anywhere from 10 minutes to 1,5 hours and then he just stays there. I put the baby monitor next to him so that I hear it when he wakes up and we sit downstairs for a little bit (I still go to bed around 9pm to get enough sleep). Also, BlueEyes knows how to climb out of bed safely so I don’t have to worry about him falling out of bed anymore. On a very good night he wakes only once to quickly nurse and then go to sleep again. But who am I kidding? This only happened maybe five times in the past year. Because whenever he is teething, has a cold, or has any other kind of discomfort he will wake up anywhere between 2 and maybe 5 times. 

The way to make this a do-able situation in my opinion is to not look at the alarm what time it is whenever I wake up, because not knowing how late it is also prevents me from thinking that I have only slept so many hours or there are only so many hours left to sleep. What also helps, is that whenever BlueEyes REALLY wakes up, Dr. BrownEyes will step in and walk around with him until he falls back to sleep. This is a way that we found works for us and that allows us to be pretty rested most of the days.

Worse than discussing politics or religion?

Etiquette tells us not to discuss politics or religion during dinner, and I don’t think I always follow that rule, but I have found another topic that is about as sensitive as politics and religion and that is parenting.  

Yesterday the AttachMode family went to another family for dinner. We don’t know them very well but met through a mutual friend and they invited us to their mansion (yes, they have ‘real’ jobs and therefore earn real money) for a barbecue. And as you probably know from reading this blog, BlueEyes sleeps in our bed, is being worn in a sling and drinks my milk. You can call this attachment parenting, although I don’t necessarily want to be associated with people who think their parenting style is superior and who are needlessly spreading diseases by not vaccinating their kids.

Anyway, the dad of the family that we visited proudly announced that they started the “Cry-it-out method”. Since I didn’t want to be judgmental (and since I was at the same time trying to persuade BlueEyes not to throw wooden blocks at a huge flat screen TV) I didn’t say anything but just asked how that was going for them. He said it went well and that the night before it only took 15 minutes of crying before the kid succumbed to sleep. At 5 they decided the baby was sleepy and they put him in bed. He immediately started crying and they set the timer for him. After 5 minutes one of them went upstairs and came back within seconds, only to leave the baby crying for another five minutes. At 6 the baby was brought downstairs again to drink some milk, but after that he was immediately placed back in his crib and continued to cry. When we left at 8 the baby was still crying but the parents didn’t go upstairs every five minutes any more, but only occasionally and they always came back really fast and left the baby there crying. 

The whole thing broke my heart, and I’m not sure if this is what the CIO method is about. I don’t think crying for 3 hours straight is still considered self-soothing… I didn’t dare to say anything about it yesterday, and today I’ve spent the whole day wondering whether I should have. And that’s why this made me realize that talking about parenting is an even more sensitive subject than talking about politics and religion.