A couple of weeks ago, I received an email from my good friend who lives in China.  She was asking for some advice on dealing with some of the challenges of caring for a young baby as her baby is less than two-months-old.  Apparently most of the Chinese parenting books are written from the perspective [...]

4:52am.  The iPhone alarm begins to chime. I press snooze. 5:00am. Try again. I rub my eyes and get out of bed. I try and focus my eyes while I have my moment in the bathroom. There is a slight stirring in the nursery.  She knows I need her. A light from the other room [...]

Today I returned to the working world.  Before I say anything more, a huge thanks to everyone who wrote comments, sent emails, texted me, wrote tweets, visited me in my cube and called me offering your support on this difficult day.  While a few of them did lead to me shedding some tears, I wholeheartedly [...]

There are still many changes my body will make to get itself back to normal. Hopefully it will be able to do the majority of them in the next two to three months, however I don’t expect to be able to lose the weight for awhile longer. My new coping mechanism for anytime I start to become frustrated with a lack of progress is to compare where I am now to being pregnant. That train of thought snaps me right back to a very positive state of mind…this is 1000% better!

So that’s the bad. The three good takeaways from this weekend are:

1) I had my stitches removed on Friday which also removed all of the uncomfortable itchiness I was experiencing. Apparently the stitches the pinch hitter doc used to sew me up after labor were quite wirey and probably would not have dissolved for a long time which causes me to wonder WHY AND THE HELL THEY WERE USED but whatever, it’s over.

2) We have still been able to spend a lot of time with Chrissy and Andy’s family which has been a lot of fun.

3) Any uncomfortableness around discussing boobs with any member of Andy’s family is now gone and it has been fully exonerated from the list of awkward conversation topics. Then again, with his family I am not sure that there are many things left on that list.

5. PUMP WHEN YOUR MILK COMES IN UNTIL BABY’S THREE WEEK GROWTH SPURT

This final tip is something I figured out on my own this past month. It is not something I have discussed with my doctor or with a lactation consultant so take this as Alecia’s breastfeeding tip and not something that other people would necessarily recommend. It is probably most applicable to working mom’s who generate a lot of milk when their milk first comes in.

When my milk came in, I for one had ginormous knockers which my husband quickly named stripper boobs. They were SO HUGE and SO FULL OF MILK, it was often very uncomfortable. The same thing happened with I had Belén and I just lived through it and decided not to pump any of the milk out in fear that I would be training my boobs they needed to make THAT much milk and perpetuating the problem.

This time around, knowing somewhere down the line, Eloise would go through a growth spurt that would cause my boobs to not be producing enough milk for her needs, I decided to try and start putting some milk away early. I didn’t want to pump too much and trick my boobs into thinking they were feeding twins so I decided to pump up to 4-6 ounces in the morning after a full night of milk production and and night to try and get my boobs more comfortable before bed. Both times I would feed Eloise and then pump some of the excess milk out. On only one day, I allowed myself a noon pumping as well for comfort.

Anyway, as always, I would love it others have more data/details on this abstract concept. I finally get what 15 year-old boys knew from the get go…boobs really are so fascinating.

I cannot believe I am going to do this, but I am going to talk about milk, ONE MORE TIME. That’s it. Other than making a mention of when Belén is 100% on cow milk, I promise not to talk about milk again for the rest of the year. Do you ever find yourself in a conversation about something and take a moment to view the conversation from the outside rather than simply participate in it? While doing that, do you ever hear yourself talking and get annoyed with yourself? That is TOTALLY how I feel about writing another milk most, the third in one week, in fact. If I am annoying myself, I must be annoying all of you. But…I know there are a couple of soon-to-be weaners (what a great name!) so alas, despite my annoyance, I forge ahead…but it will be short.

After a good 15 stressful kilometers on the Express Way, I saw the light of tall skyscrapers in the distance and knew I must be arriving downtown. We (GPS lady and me) took the correct exit and then somehow managed to get pretty lost trying to get on the street the hotel is on. At one point, the GPS lady told me to take a left turn on a street that does not allow left turns between certain hours and this took me in a direction in which I eventually became way off course trying to stay out of the way of the other competent drivers on the street, electric trolley cars and the stream of pedestrians.