Weekend Mornings

Now that I'm back at work, as I have mentioned, I am totally exhausted. Even if I sleep 7 hours each night, which is similar to the amount of sleep I got before Sam was born, I am just totally exhausted. On my first few weekends back at work, I found myself getting quite resentful on weekend mornings when I woke up with the baby (which makes sense, since I'm the one who fed her) and Matt (to no fault of his own - I would do the same thing) would sleep. After a few weeks, I decided to try to figure out a solution.

Luckily we live in a country that has a two day weekend - for most people. And there are two of us. Hm...perfect match for splitting the mornings. So, for the last month or so, we have each taken one weekend morning, and it has changed my life. On Matt's morning, he brings her in to eat, and then he sweeps her off to Daddy-land where everything is fun and wonderful. And I stick a pillow over my head so I don't hear the excited voices of Daddy-land, and I sleep. This situation has completely changed my life.

In other news, Sam has developed a new language with lots of new sounds. It's as if she's telling a story - with different tones and sounds - all the time. It's quite cute. She's still totally not interested in eating solids, though yesterday was the first time we have tried in two weeks, and it was a wee bit more successful. This is going to be a slow ride. She watches me eat food like a tennis game. She wants to get her hands on everything on my plate. But the doc said we probably shouldn't give her spicy Indian food until at least ten months. Sorry Sam.

Warning - if you're not into talking about breastfeeding, stop reading.
We also took a big step yesterday and got our first tin of formula. I had planned to go without it for 12 months, but when I made that decision I really didn't know what I was talking about. I had never done this before - it was just from books. Now I know (and everyone else who has a baby knows too) that books aren't exactly always reality, but they give you some interesting guidelines.

It sort of seems like my entire life is pumping (five times a day for 20 minutes each time, plus the cleaning, etc.). At work I don't feel comfortable leaving the office for lunch since I leave three times to pump. At night I still have an hour before I can go to sleep once I decide I need to go to sleep. In the morning I almost wish that Sam doesn't wake up before I go to work, because then I have to feed her and pump which adds another 20 minutes before I can leave for work, and I already wake up at 6:30 (I don't think I can stomach earlier) just to get to work by 8:30 or 8:45. In addition, without providing too much detail - though I'm sorry that probably many of you already think that I provided too much detail - I'm not the most productive pumper, so I'm constantly stressed that I don't have enough for tomorrow, and each day I use about 8oz from the freezer, so I spend weekends and days that I work from home trying to stock up as much as I can. I think and worry about this limited supply all the time, and I'm just not sure it's all worth it. It's been 6.5 months, and I think that's fantastic enough. I am not going cold turkey at all, but I think we will start supplementing just to take some of the pressure off, and I may cut out one pumping session and we'll take it from there.