The Beginning of the End

When I started breastfeeding, I was wary of setting a goal for myself. Too many times I had seen mothers unable to keep going. Too many times I had see the absolute guilt that wracked them over having to wean to formula. I didn't want to set myself up for that kind of disappointment. So my "happy with myself" goal was three months. I wanted to make it until I went back to work. Work--and the pumping that goes along with it--would be a game changer. Going back to work came and went. I nursed baby girl during my lunch break. I am lucky and have my own office, with a door, so I was able to block off pumping times in my daily calendar and not have to worry about how, when, or where. All this time I was still waking up at midnight (even though baby girl had been sleeping through the night since eight weeks old) to get in one more pump. It all went to my freezer stash. I was paranoid about my supply tanking. I wanted to keep the "demand" up.

Six months came and went. I allowed myself to stop getting up at midnight to pump. I worked that pumping session backwards until I was just pumping to empty before heading to bed for the night. And we settled into a routine, a rhythm that has held for the last six months. I nurse her twice a day. I pump twice at work and once before bed. On weekends, it's glorious. I get to nurse her all day long, even if we're out and about. I've never had to worry about bringing milk along with us, keeping it cold, etc.

My supply has gradually slipped a bit here at work in the last month or two. Before I would pump 11 or so ounces at work in two sessions, and then another three or so before bed, to cover the 15 ounces she gets at school (two 6-ounce bottles and 3 ounces of breastmilk with her oatmeal for breakfast). Now I'm lucky if I pump eight ounces at work. It didn't matter though. My hard work in the beginning created a ridiculous freezer stash. So we've been dipping into that for about four ounces a day for a couple of months now.

Which brings us to now. A whole year. I surpassed any kind of goal, any kind of expectation I set for myself. I won't even begin to talk about the nursing relationship we developed, about my thoughts on breastfeeding my daughter. That's a whole other, much more emotional post. What consumes my thoughts now is the transition to other milk. The beginning of the weaning process. And it starts with my before-bed pumping session.

We have a couple of trips coming up in the next couple of months. The last thing I want to have to do is lug my pump with me and excuse myself to go pump somewhere private every evening, and then worry about where to store the milk. I am ready to not have to pump before bed. I've worked in one extra pumping session every day for a year now, and I'm ready to not have to do that anymore. So for the last couple of weeks, I've gradually cut back on the amount of time I pump at night. From 20 minutes down to 10, down to 8, 7, and now 5.

I can't tell you how difficult it is to turn off the pump when the milk is still flowing. I know it's what I have to do to train my body to drop that "feeding," but it goes against everything I've done for the last year. I have to literally not look at the pump, or the bottles filling slowly up, when I turn it off. I have to look the other direction, reach back with my hand, and turn off the pump abruptly, like ripping a bandaid off of a wound. And it makes me sad. Every night. Every time.

And I know it's just the beginning, the beginning of the end.

Eventually I'll drop the two daytime feedings so that I don't have to pump at work anymore, although I'm experiencing a lot of guilt over that, too. It's so easy. I have my own office. Really there's no reason not to continue to pump at work except for my own desire not to have to deal with it anymore. But then I think, that will always be the case. It will always be easy. I have to draw the line somewhere, right? And then I think about not being able to just nurse her on the weekends anymore, having to worry about other sources of milk, and I'm right back to feeling conflicted. BOTH options are convenient. Not having to pump at work? Convenient. Being able to just nurse her all day on weekends? Also convenient. I wish I could have it both ways.

Eventually, I'll only nurse her in the mornings and before she goes to sleep. I plan to hang onto those as long as I can.

I'm so proud and so thankful my boobs have provided so much, so consistently for my daughter. I am so blessed to have had the ability to nurse her as long as I have. Bear with me over the next few weeks/months as we see where the weaning process takes us.

Love and the Backdive

When I was a little girl, my dad used to take my brother and I to the city pool. We were both water kids, comfortable swimming, maniacs with cannon balls and diving deep for sunken rings. My brother's courage extended to the diving boards, where he was doing dives and back dives, flips, gainers and half-gainers from as early as I can remember. My courage stopped at the buoy line that separated the main pool from the deep end.

We gave up on me ever doing a flip. I wasn't interested in even trying. But my dad was unwilling to give up on me doing a back dive. I would climb the three steps to the board, slowly walk down the plank to the edge, the raucous crowds of kids, the jostling in line behind me all fading to oblivion. He would stand on the edge of the deep end, just feet from where I stood at the end of the diving board, and call out encouragement to me. I would slowly turn around and carefully scoot back to the edge, to where I could feel the board dip under my weight and spring gently back up.

And there I froze. Time and again. When it was time for me to tilt backward and trust that the world behind me would be just as it was when it was in front of me. Trust that physics would hold true and I'd enter the water head first. Trust that the water would embrace me as gently as it did when I did a forward-facing dive. It wasn't the motion that scared me. It wasn't an inability to perform the move, or a fear of what would happen when I hit the water. It was that period of blind trust. That moment when I had to tip my body backwards past the point of no return, before I could see anything behind me. It was confidence in myself, that I would know what to do when I felt my body falling, when the entrance and the lifeguard stand and the water behind me all suddenly appeared upside down. And all the while my dad just kept telling me to just do it. To not think about it and just look for the lifeguard stand behind me.

Sometimes my fear of that moment, that falling, that blind trust, won out and I would turn around at the last second and dive forward, into the familiar, into the comfortable, into the known. But sometimes I would bend, heart racing, looking first to the sky, then farther back, back, back, until the roof of the building, the bricks, and then finally the lifeguard stand came into view, falling, my heart racing, until I entered the water, my hands above my head slicing the water into a warm, open embrace.

Sometimes I was able to find the courage in myself to know that I just had to leap. Bend. Trust. Trust that I would be able to do what I needed to do after I had passed the point of no return, after I was already falling. I had to learn that fear would always be present. Fear that lives in the mind, that multiplies when you think too much, when you give it free reign. I had to learn that fear will always overwhelm you, suffocate you if you let it.

I had to learn to defy fear.

And I did. I learned. I grew into a spunky, strong, independent, bit-of-a-smartass, don't-tell-me-what-I-can't-do kind of woman. I've become really good at not letting fear dictate my decisions. At leaning back back back and trusting that I can handle what comes when I'm falling.

And now I'm leaning again.

I saw a post once, on a message board dedicated to women who were trying to get pregnant, a post polling everyone about how they knew, how they knew they wanted kids, how they knew when the right time was. I saw a lot of responses about a feeling of lacking, a feeling of incompleteness in the family. I saw a lot of answers about simply always knowing that you wanted to be a mother, about motherhood being an integral aspect of these women's identities.

But that wasn't my answer.

My answer to that question is more simple. Or maybe more complex, depending on how you look at it. My answer was love. To me, the point of living, the be all and end all of our existence here on the planet, is love. To know love. To be loved. To experience love. I always knew I wanted to be a mother so that I could give another soul the gift that was given to me: the chance to experience love. That was my answer back then, and now, today, that is my answer again.

I want to give another soul the gift of love. Love of existence. Love of siblings. And all the millions of other kinds of love that come with every breath we take.

We are choosing love. We are defying fear. We are trusting that we will be able to handle what comes when we're falling, blindly, not knowing what to expect.

The looking up, the looking back, back, back 'til we pass that point of no return, that point of falling, is as terrifying and thrilling to me now as it was to that little girl so many years ago.

Here's to trust. Here's to courage. Here's to love.

When Sports Euphemisms are the Only Way I Can Say It

We pulled the goalie.

Well, actually, there hasn't been a goalie present for the last two years. So, I guess, more accurately, we are resuming taking shots at the goal rather than taking the ball all the way downfield only to turn at the last second and boot it out of bounds.

Capiche?

Holy shit.

Turning Around

I always heard that one day I would turn around and my baby would be all grown up. Changes in her are difficult to see. I see her every day. I study her face. I know expression. Her sounds. Her size. The weight of her body in my arms. The texture of her hair as I run my fingers through it. Every day I study her. I can easily identify the exact moment I hear a new sound. Or see a new skill. Or witness a new expression.

Under such close familiarity, it's true that changes are difficult to miss. But sometimes it's also hard to see certain things. I'm so close to her, I'm not really able to step back and think about how far she's come, how grown up she is getting to be.

Until a photo I snap stops me in my tracks.

Here I see a hint of the precious girl she is growing to be, and less and less of the sweet baby I've known. There's something about her smile, the light in her eyes, the gloriously disheveled hair, that I somehow miss when I'm so close to her, day after day, night after night, laughing and sharing tickles and kisses.

That single photo made me turn around, made me remember that every day, every hour, every breath she takes, brings with it growth and change. The baby she is today is not the baby she'll be tomorrow. And one day, soon, she won't be a baby anymore at all. She'll be a toddler. Then a young girl. Then a teenager. Then an adult. One day I'll turn around and it will be her as a bride staring back at me from the picture. The same smile. The same light in the eyes. But so very different at the same time.

So what now? Now that I was turned around to my big girl who is growing up literally before my very eyes?

Now nothing. There's nothing you can do in the face of the flow of days. There's no sense in weeping at the passage of time. No sense in lamenting its relentless march onward. You can no more stop a river by standing in the middle of it, arms outstretched, trying desperately to catch the water as it flows by, than you can hold onto your baby as a baby. And what's worse, if you do fight it, if you spend your time mourning the loss of youth, you miss what time you do have now. It's a vicious circle--you spend your time pining over how fast your child is growing, and you end up missing those five minutes, or that hour, or however much time you spend thinking of the future or the past or any moment but the here and now.

So what did I do?

I did nothing. I returned to playing with my silly girl, with my funny baby, with my energetic and goofy child who cracks me up and delights me and thrills me. I loved her in the moment we had together, these days where she sits on the brink of babyhood. I loved her and soaked up every second of her that I could and didn't pay any mind to the passage of time, didn't waste any of our time together thinking about any moment other than right then.

Time will pass. She will grow. Rather than trying to hold onto each day, each moment, I stood in the stream with my arms outstretched and focused on the delight of the feeling of the water as it flowed by my fingers. Far from trying to stop it, I instead celebrated the sensation of it passing.

And what an incredible sensation it is.

11 Months

Today, sweet girl, you are 11 months old.

You have had the most amazing month! You learned so many new things this month, gained so many new skills, it's hard to even know where to start. You are growing up so fast, in so many ways. You no longer eat pureed baby food. You are on "real" food now, all the time. Mostly you just eat bits and pieces of whatever I'm eating. Your favorite is whole blueberries, followed closely by strawberries. You don't even like us to cut them up into little chunks anymore; you want to be able to take bites off the whole strawberry as if you were eating an apple. You love anything with a lot of flavor--mild spiciness? Yum. Pepper cream sauce? Yes, please. Regular steamed broccoli is fine, but if it's broccoli sauteed in Chinese stir fry, even better! You definitely take after your Mom in that regard!

You have seven teeth now (four on bottom and three on top) and your eighth tooth is about to break through. I think the top-teeth teething is harder on you than the bottom teeth. When you're getting in new top teeth, you tend to grind your teeth together. I imagine it feels good, but the noise! Ack!

You are now pulling up to stand on anything that will support you, even if it's a flat surface with no handholds, like the front of the refrigerator. You never went through a stage where you could get up but not down . . . smart baby to wait until you can master both directions before really delving into the skill! You are starting to cruise up and down our furniture in pursuit of items you want. Half the time you still drop back to the floor, crawl over to the item, and then stand back up, but you are starting to gain the strength and confidence to just stay standing and work your way slowly over to the item.

You know how to turn your toys on now, and you are so much fun to interact with. Rather than just banging buttons or turning pages, you can chase down balls and put them back in the funnel and you can make the little animals pop UP instead of just knowing how to close them. You love to roll a ball back and forth between us and to throw a toy across the room (you already have quite an arm on you, which makes this softball momma proud) only to gleefully chase it down. You are learning to play with your toys, using your imagination to entertain yourself and it is so much fun to watch!

You are also very helpful with your toys! You take all your toys out of their box, but then when it's time to clean them up, you help me put each one back in the box, too. You like putting things into other things, putting things up on shelves and stacking things, and in general building things and putting them together instead of just tearing them all down like you used to!

Your communication has grown this month in leaps and bounds! Not only are you mimicking more and more sounds, like the meow our cats make (your version sounds like, "eeeaaaahhhhhh"), the "ba-da-bum!" sounds on one of your toys, an exaggerated laugh that your dad or I make, or even a "ooooh!" when you turn on a cool toy, but you are also starting to vocalize things on your own, things that tell us what you want! Last month your dad taught you so say "Ah!" after taking a drink of water. Then you figured out that if you say "Ah!" when you're thirsty, we'll give you water! It is AMAZING to be able to communicate with you, to find out your needs and to be able to give you what you want. Not only can you tell us what you want through pointing or saying "Ah!" but you can tell us what you don't want, too. You have learned how to shake your head no, and even to say "nonono!" when you don't want something. So now when you point at something and we guess wrong, you shake your head and say "nono!" until we figure out what it is that you want. You are also starting to sign more and more. You sign "all done" when you don't want any more food and when we finish a book, and when you want more of something, you clap and point to it. It's not exactly the right sign for "more," but it gets your meaning across, and that's what's really important, right?

You have learned to blow kisses when someone is leaving. There are no words for how unbelievably sweet this is.

You have even started saying words! REAL words! Book was your official first word. You had just finished nursing and sat up, pointing to your stack of books, and said, "Buh!" I know it wasn't exactly enunciated correctly, but it was clear as day what you meant and what you wanted. Awesome! After book, you have said no, duck, bear, baby, and kitty. It is so COOL to hear you saying real words! My sweet little talker.

My very favorite new thing that you do is the questioning gesture that you use when you have a question about something. Whether it's "Where did my toy go?" after your drop something to the floor, or "Where did Dad go?" when he's hiding behind a wall, your hold your little hands up, palms to the sky, raise your eyebrows, and utter a sweet, lilting "eh?" sound. Melts.My.Heart. Seriously. You are the most adorable kid the universe has ever seen.

Eleven months old. In one short month, you'll turn one. That milestone will bring with it changes, not the least of which is the start of the weaning process. Rather than focusing on how sad I'll be to see our nursing relationship come to an end, I'm going to focus instead on the wonderful month ahead. Know that I am savoring every moment of having you cuddled up against me.

You are an incredible child. Your energy, enthusiasm, sense of humor, intelligence, and sweet, loving nature amaze me every second of every day. You make my life better than I knew it could be, and there is nothing that puts a smile on my face the way you do.

Happy 11 months, sweet baby girl.

Love, love, love,
Mom

#20

#20 on the previous post.

No.

I'm not pregnant.

If I were pregnant right now, you'd find me with a paper bag permanently attached to my mouth to prevent the hyperventilation and fainting spells that would surely accompany such a reality.

All #20 meant is that we'll be trying for #2 soon.

At least, I think we will be. Some days.

Other days I think that a 3-year gap between kids sounds MIGHTY nice.

This has turned out to be the hardest decision we've ever made in our lives. The decision to get married? Easy. The decision to do a half-ironman? Piece of cake. The decision to give up everything we've ever known and bring another life into the world, a tiny, helpless little creature we'd be entirely responsible for not only keeping alive but raising to be a normal, functioning, contributing member of society with relatively few mental health issues? Done and done.

But #2. Oh, #2. How terrifying. Our life right now are not only the most amazing, wonderful, blissful, heaven-on-earth, but (dare I say it?) . . . our life is easy. We have the whole "1-child" thing DOWN. She is our light. She is the reason we get up in the morning, the reason we smile all day. We get to devote all our free time to her, and still manage to work in time to spend on each other, be it on an actual date where we get all fancied up and pretend to have manners out in public, or on our couch, in our pjs, laughing at each other until we cry. The decision to try for a second child would change all that. It would rock our little boat and nothing would ever be the same.

On the other hand, isn't that what happened with #1? We were happy just the two of us. We didn't feel like anything was lacking. We were blissful. And well rested. And yet still we knew we wanted kids (plural, if you'll note), and so we had #1 and though she rocked our boat completely and our life has never been the same since, I can honestly say it is better, richer, funnier, happier, and in every way superior to the life we used to lead. So isn't it fair to say that the same will happen with #2? That the fear of the unknown will turn out to be so comically unfounded, because the "unknown" is simply something better than we can possibly comprehend right now?

So that's where we are. Wavering between knowing that we want more kids, knowing that we want our kids to be relatively close in age, knowing that the time could be right to grow our family again . . . and the fear of the unknown, the fear of losing the brilliant, happy, easy, comfortable, easy, wonderful, easy existence we have right now.

We take it day by day. Some days it seems like a good time to take a deep breath and jump, trusting that history will hold true and our same good fortune with #1, the same treasure we discovered, will happen again with #2. Other days the fear wins out and we hunker down in our life of a blissful little trio and never want to jeopardize it at all.

But the good days are coming more frequently . . . even if the fear days are still the prevalent wind.

So we'll see. But the conversations are being had. The edge of the cliff is being looked over.

And in the meantime, we're enjoying the hell our of our easy little life right now.

Catching Up

1. The sonogram went great. Great as in she totally charmed both nurses and was a general ham the entire time. She even tried to work the sonogram machine herself. What a character this girl is!

2. The results. Everything is fine.

3. The other results. She has some extra kidney (whathuh??). Not an extra kidney. Some extra kidney. On her left side. It's called a bifid renal pelvis, and our doc says that it's a "totally normal variance that should have no affect on anything whatsoever." When we got the news, I tried to focus on the positive spins, like "my daughter's kidney is so awesome her body decided to make a little extra." It worked. Kind of.

4. They also saw a teeny tiny cyst on her ovary (my baby has ovaries?? I mean, I know she does . . . it's just weird to think about a 10-month-old's ovaries). Also normal, apparently, in breastfed babies. It's a result of the hormones she's still getting from me. It should go away once she's weaned. Huh.

5. I'm not a big fan of all the stuff they find when they go looking for something else. Another reason those whole body scan things are probably not a good idea. The saying "ignorance is bliss" is rooted in solid philosophical truth.

6. We've had a crazy busy summer. We've either been traveling or having people visiting us pretty much every other weekend for two months now. On the weekends we are actually at home, alone, we spend so much time trying to catch up from the previous weekend and prepare for the next weekend that there's not a lot of time left for anything resembling a calm, relaxing life together. So we're taking the entire month of August off. No family visits. No traveling. Nada. Puttin' up the "Closed for Business" sign. Adios. Time to focus on just us, and spending time together, and hanging out with our friends (if we still have any left after being totally MIA for months). This coming weekend is our first weekend of our month off and I'm already giddy with excitement.

7. My IL's were not happy to hear about our month-off plan. They said that they were going to come visit my BIL (who lives about 20 minutes from us), and "of course you'll see us if we're in town, right?" Um. No. I think you're missing the point. YOU PEOPLE ARE DRIVING US CRAZY. You don't get to "get around" our boundary by trying some passive aggressive, underhanded, indirect way of visiting us without actually staying with us. We told them, encouraged them, to come and visit BIL. And that we would see them if we didn't have plans. Guess what? I can already tell you we'll have plans. Whenever it is. We have plans.

8. My MIL already bought baby girl a potty-training seat. She asked me last weekend if I thought it was too early to start using it.

9. I should start a blog just devoted to documenting all the crazy shit my ILs do. I could make millions by selling the memoirs. It would be like the Russian Jewish version of Everybody Loves Raymond.

10. I'm pretty sure they'd be offended by the contents. Maybe then we could get some time off from their visits.

11. Work has sucked this summer. I was supposed to be in charge of one project. I've been in charge of three projects. All of which have been their own unique clusterfuck. (Hello, no time to blog at work!) It's amazing how much stress at work affects how much I'm able to pump at work. Luckily I've been really successful at not really caring how much I pump at work. I worked really hard (woke up to pump at midnight for SIX MONTHS, remember?) to build our freezer stash, and she's got plenty of milk to go on. Even if I weaned her today, she'd still get nothing but breastmilk well beyond 12 months. So it sucks to have work negatively impacting my supply, but it's great that all my hard work in the beginning is paying off so well now. Aces.

12. On breastfeeding. I'm still doing it! My daughter is almost 11 months old and I'm still nursing her! I can't tell you how amazed and joyful I feel about this. When I had her, we had such a hard time getting started. She was so slow to gain weight. She was such a slow eater. I told myself I'd be happy if we made it three months, and ecstatic if we made it to six. I told myself just to make it 'til I went back to work, because pumping is such a game changer. And then everything just kept going along just fine. My new goal was nine months. Then once we hit 10, I just stopped setting goals. Even if she self-weaned at 10 months, I would have been satisfied with the job we did. But here we are. Approaching 11. Still going strong. Almost an entire year of breastfeeding while being a working, pumping mom. I. am. thrilled. !!!

13. In other aspects of feeding, she's almost entirely off purees now. On the one hand, yay, what a big girl! On the other hand, uggghhhhh. Purees were so easy. I could make several batches on the weekend and just freeze them into serving-sized chunks. Grab a few out of the freezer and voila! Meal. Done. No mess, no fuss. But now with finger foods, real food, I have to constantly worry about having fresh food on hand. It's hard, yo.

14. Baby girl's favorite veggie: green beans, followed closely by black beans (are those even veggies? meats??). Favorite meal: spaghetti with meat sauce. She loves anything with lots and lots of flavor--shredded chicken with mild pico de gallo, pasta in pepper cream sauce. She is definitely her mother's daughter when it comes to food.

15. She picks up the spaghetti daintily, one noodle at a time. But then when she gets it to her mouth, she shoves her whole fist inside.

15. She is pulling up on everything, even things that have nothing to hold onto, like the front of the dishwasher. She is moving from furniture to furniture. She is walking behind her lion-walker thing. We are relishing these last few days/weeks of non-walking. Rel-ish-ing.

16. She said her first word! "Book." You'd better believe this former English-teacher-turned-editor mommy's heart just about burst. She also said her second word. "No!" Or really, "Nonononono!!!" accompanied by a vigorous shaking of her head. We get this when we offer her a food she doesn't want, when she's pointing to something she wants and we guess wrong, when we try to do something (put her down, take a toy) that she doesn't like. There was considerably less heart-bursting going on with the second word.

17. She's signing "all done" when she finishes her meals and when we get to the end of her books.

18. Remember how she makes the "Ah!" sound after she drinks (or nurses)? She now makes the "Ah!" sound when she's thirsty and is asking for water. Does that count as her third word?

19. This month. Freaking amazing. Communication. Mobility. Real food. Good bye, baby. Hello, almost toddler. I was looking at some of her itty-bitty pictures, and for the first time, instead of relief that we are out of that phase, felt a pang of nostalgia.

20. We want our kids to be relatively close in age. Our baby is almost one, almost not a baby anymore. I felt nostalgic when looking at her infant pictures. You'll never guess what that means . . .