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Why I don’t breastfeed on a schedule.

Whether a mom chooses to feed her baby on a schedule or not is one of those issues that I had no idea was such a hot topic that many people have a strong opinion about until I actually had a baby.  (I mean, before you have a baby, you certainly don’t sit around and think about these things!)  So, for the uneducated and childless, we’re basically talking about whether you feed your baby based-upon what time it is or upon their hunger cues.  (or a combination)  And of course, there are moms who take both sides to the extreme– some won’t feed their baby until the clock says a certain time, and some whip-out the boob any time there’s a little fussing, no matter how long it’s been since the baby last ate.  And I would guess most moms fall somewhere in between.  

I would say that currently I’m somewhere between a combination and a whip-it-out mom, although I expect that I’ll slide more toward the middle-of-the-road as Harris gets older as I did with Evelyne.  Much of the way I nurse Harris is very particular to his temperament and individual needs, and some of it is because it’s simply what works right now.  However, since I had such problems nursing both my kids in the beginning (low supply, slow weight gain, etc…) out of necessity I’ve done a lot of research and learning about how breastfeeding works.  One of my favorite resources is www.kellymom.com, a great evidence-based website written by a lactation consultant.  If you’ve ever wanted to know anything about nursing, this website probably has information on your particular question!  Another good one (with instructional videos that are helpful for beginners) is www.drjacknewman.com. 

So I’m going to hopefully write a short series on a few things I’ve learned regarding how God designed our bodies to function in a breastfeeding relationship and why scheduled feedings aren’t a part of that design:

*If you are a scheduled-feeding mom and it’s working for you (your baby is happy and gaining weight normally), then just consider this a little extra information to tuck away in case you ever need it.  I’m not trying to invalidate your experience, but depending on how much flexibility you allow in your schedule, there’s a good chance you don’t represent the experience of the majority of moms, and frankly, I think you probably just got lucky.  

Part 1: Storage Capacity

One of the beautiful things about breastfeeding is that God designed every mom and every baby differently.  There is no one-size-fits-all, and to try to fit your nursing patterns into a schedule that’s not led by your baby’s hunger patterns can really cause problems.  One big reason for this is the fact that moms have different storage capacities in their breasts.  It’s not like each and every one of us has, say, 3 oz. inside each breast and as long as the baby nurses 4 times a day, he’s guaranteed to get 24 oz., which might be plenty.  While you may have a 6 oz. storage capacity, I might have a 4 oz. capacity.  So if I try to hold my baby off and only let him nurse 4 times a day, he only gets 16 oz., which is not enough.  This is one reason why some women have no problems feeding their babies at longer intervals, their babies are naturally receiving more at each sitting.  But to those of us who might have smaller storage capacities, while we are still able to produce plenty of milk for our babies over a 24-hr. period, they need more frequent access to it in order to drink the total number of ounces they need for the day.  

I’m guessing my storage capacity is on the smaller side because Harris still nurses every 2-3 hours (usually only 3 if he’s been asleep, if he’s awake it’s 2).  And he’s hungry!!!  This doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with my milk supply, but it does mean that he needs more frequent meals throughout the day.  This also doesn’t mean that he’s “snacking” or not taking-in a full meal.  And doesn’t mean that he’s not accessing the fatty hind milk that comes at the end of a feeding.  As long as I allow him to fully finish one before the other, he’s getting everything he needs to get.  (And I’m still a little confused about why we know from nutritionists and doctors that humans are healthier and function better when we eat fewer small meals throughout the day, yet we seem to think that’s a bad thing when it comes to babies!  Why is it “better” to try to get them to eat more in one sitting only a few times a day?  Why is the goal for us to not have to feed our babies very often?) Because a mom with a smaller storage capacity will have breasts that become full in a sooner amount of time than if her capacity was larger, it’s necessary for her to go ahead and feed the baby then in order to keep-up her milk supply.  The longer the milk sits in the breast without removal, the slower her production and the lower her supply.  (More on that in the next post!)

Here’s what KellyMom says:  

Storage capacity: Another factor that affects milk production and breastfeeding management is mom’s milk storage capacity. Storage capacity is the amount of milk that the breast can store between feedings. This can vary widely from mom to mom and also between breasts for the same mom. Storage capacity is not determined by breast size, although breast size can certainly limit the amount of milk that can be stored. Moms with large or small storage capacities can produce plenty of milk for baby. A mother with a larger milk storage capacity may be able to go longer between feedings without impacting milk supply and baby’s growth. A mother with a smaller storage capacity, however, will need to nurse baby more often to satisfy baby’s appetite and maintain milk supply since her breasts will become full (slowing production) more quickly.

 Think of storage capacity as a cup – you can easily drink a large amount of water throughout the day usingany size of cup – small, medium or large – but if you use a smaller cup it will be refilled more often.

Here’s what another lactation consultant said: 

Dr. Hartmann is a researcher in Perth, Australia, specializing in human milk production. In his laboratories, Dr. Hartmann has studied mothers before and after nursing sessions by making topographical-type maps of lactating breasts using video cameras and computer equipment in order to analyze changes. Their accuracy has been assessed at +/- 5%, an excellent percentage for this type of work. Dr. Hartmann has discovered, through this work, that the breast does not make all of the milk at nursing time, but rather is making milk around the clock. The rate of milk production between feedings varies according to the degree of fullness of the breast; the fuller the breast, the slower the milk production rate, and conversely the emptier the breast, the faster the rate of production for replacement.

Even more fascinating, Dr. Hartmann has also quantified differences in the maximum storage capacity of women’s breasts, identifying at least a 300% difference between the most one woman could store versus the most another could store in his study. Further, Dr. Hartmann noted that the women who had larger storage capacities often nursed at longer intervals, whereas women with smaller storage capacities nursed naturally at more frequent intervals [Comment: breast size appearance is not always a good predictor of production or storage capacity]. Most importantly, it was noted that all of these women had the ability to produce plenty of milk over 24 hours; what varied was the maximum amount that they could deliver at one sitting.

The implication for scheduled feeding is quite evident, as noted in one of Daly and Hartmann’s papers:

“At an historical level the typical four hourly breastfeeding schedule that
was once widely favoured in the western world [citations removed] may
not have caused problems for women with larger storage capacities but might
have had disastrous consequences for women with smaller storage capacities.
Such women, who needed to breastfeed more frequently, would have been
aware that their provision of milk was inadequate on a four hourly breast-
feeding schedule. However, rather than dispensing with the schedule, it is
clear that such mothers more often doubted their ability to provide milk for
their infants and instead introduced artificial milks.”

 

Aside from the actual physiology of how human milk is made and how that relates to the demand of the baby (more on that in the next post), storage capacity is one basic reason why breastfeeding according to the time on the clock and not the hunger of your baby is not a great idea.  It also gives reason to why some women generally don’t have any problem with it, their storage capacity is naturally larger.  But for the woman who has a smaller storage capacity and yet tries to nurse on a schedule with longer intervals (and yes, every 3 hours is too long for some babies, including mine!), it could be dangerous to the infant’s growth and spell the end of the nursing relationship as the mom’s supply plummets.  (as stated in the above quote, what really makes me sad is when the mom thinks that there is something inherently wrong with her body rather than the schedule she was putting her body under)

I plan to write another post detailing some more information about how milk is made and stored.  My intention is just that this will be an educational series of posts, whether you’re currently a nursing mom or not.  There are lots of opinions out there about how to feed your baby, and I’m not trying to add my voice to the many who are militant about any one particular way.  But I do think great consideration should be given to the way God designed our bodies to function and how we can best work with it instead of against it in order to feed our babies.  The human race has thrived for thousands of years as mothers nursed their babies with no idea of the time but simply paid attention to the baby’s hunger cues, and I’m guessing that everything will be ok if we ignore the time on our modern clocks and do the same.

Romance in the Baby Stage

It’s amazing, I’m actually the only one awake in the house right now.  Both kids are sleeping.  Actually, I think I hear some quiet babbling coming from Harris’ room, so I think he’s awake now.  (I LOVE it when they reach the stage when they babble when they wake-up instead of shriek and you have time to actually finish what you’re doing and go to the bathroom before getting them instead of running at full-speed to rescue them from the bed!)  It’s 7:30 a.m. and Clay just left for work and I woke-up about 15 minutes ago.  Harris and Clay, on the other hand, woke-up at about 5 a.m. this morning.  Harris is a bit of an early bird these days.  He always wakes-up in the 5 o’clock hour, sometimes even as early as 4:30 a few times a week.  (Yeah, I KNOW.)  Since I still feed him twice a night (and he often wakes-up yet another time besides that), I’m pretty tired and my night doesn’t feel over by the time 5 a.m. rolls around.  So my dear Clay, wonderful husband and parent that he is, wakes-up with Harris on the weekdays and lets me sleep-in until he leaves around 7 a.m.  (I get-up with Harris on the weekends and let Clay sleep-in and then I take a nap when he wakes-up.)  Having that extra hour or two of sleep makes ALL the difference in how I feel when I get up for the day.  

So let’s just say that what I consider to be romantic and what stirs my heart in love for Clay is really different these days.  I still love romantic gestures like flowers and backrubs, but what I NEED is a husband who is wiling to be an active co-parent.  And Clay is awesome at that.  He is a GREAT dad.  From the time Evelyne was a baby, we’ve shared much of the responsibilities of parenthood.  Of course most of it still falls to me since I’m breastfeeding and at home 95% of the time while he has another full-time job, but Clay has always made the most of his role as dad. When the babies are little, he gets-up in the middle of the night with them when he’s able.  When Evelyne was little and waking-up twice a night, he would give her a bottle once a night 4 or 5 days out of the week so I could have a longer stretch of sleep.  Harris won’t take a bottle in the middle of the night, but Clay gets-up to give him a paci and help him get back to sleep, and he wakes-up in the morning with him.  He’s always encouraged me to go out with friends when I can, even wanting me to go away for the weekend and leaving him as a solo parent.

 I think we first did that when Evelyne was 7 months old, I left for the weekend to go to an out-of-town wedding, and I remember feeling grateful that I could be so confident that everything was perfectly under control at home and Clay knew exactly what to do with her.  And now on the weekends when I get in the bed to take a nap (at least once a day when he’s home!) or have some alone time, I really don’t have any worries that he won’t know what to do with the kids.   He is an actively involved parent to the max.  He knows all the foods Evelyne likes and doesn’t like, he knows what Harris needs to nap and what times to put him down to sleep, he remembers to change their diapers, change their clothes, and sing their favorite songs.  Putting Evelyne to bed every night has been his job for about the past year or so. He reads her books, prays with her, rocks her, and sings songs. Every. Night.

I’m pretty aware that not all dads are like this, many are much less involved in the daily nuances of their kids.  Maybe this is also because I tend to talk his ear off about every little thing involving them, but he does a great job of really paying attention and learning what they need.  In a few weeks I’ll be leaving town again for a few days and Harris will be staying here with Clay.  The longest I’ve left him before is just a few hours, and while I”ll miss him a lot, I’m not worried in the least.  (I’m actually kinda worried about Clay, but not about Harris!  Surviving the sleep deprivation usually takes some teamwork!)  

Our lives really aren’t that exciting or super fun these days, mostly just because we’re pretty housebound since Harris can’t really sleep anywhere but in a dark room with a loud fan (not even the car, people!  I can count on one hand the times he’s fallen asleep in the car in his entire life, even as a newborn!) and needs to nap more frequently than we’d like.  Not to mention, by the time the weekend rolls around, I’m so excited to have an opportunity to take a nap and do something by myself (usually just reading a book or going to the store) that we don’t do much as a family or a couple. We still get out, but it can’t be for long or very far from home or else we’ll pay for with even less sleep that night!  It’s just the season we’re in, it was like this with Evelyne, too, and the older she got the more rested we got and the more we did fun things.

 And in this season, what I really need is a partner, someone to be there on my team.  Someone that I can turn to in the middle of the night and say, “I just fed him an hour ago and he’s awake again… Can you please deal with this?”  Someone that always says, “Sure! Go!” when I ask him if he minds if I go get in the bed and read while he watches the kids.  And Clay is the perfect person for me to be doing this parenting gig with.  So when you’re in the throes of young family life, romance takes a different form, and when I woke-up this morning after a couple of extra hours of sleep to a quiet house and Harris already taking his first nap…. I felt very loved and thought, “Wow, I definitely married the right guy!”

Where have I been?

So I’m totally aware that I’ve more or less taken a major blogging hiatus.  That was never my intention, but somehow I’ve become totally MIA when it comes to this.  For the past 4.5 months I’ve been sucked into motherhood in a way that has left me barely able to focus on much else.  Somewhere along the way I’m certain my brain has officially turned to mush.  It takes effort for me to make myself watch Good Morning, America or read some news stories just so I can make myself think about something other than what is immediately before me: diapers, a very chatty two year-old, and sleeplessness.  

When I was pregnant with Harris I really didn’t expect to have any kind of identity crisis once he was born since I had already been a stay-at-home mom for two years and was pretty used to the gig.  But somehow the reality of my 24/7 job hit me in a new way.  I think part of is it just the season that we’re in and the demanding needs of two young children, but there are just so many times that I look around and think, “My world is so small.”  

And yeah, when it comes down to it, I know how significant and blessed this job of motherhood is, and often I’m moved to tears when I realize how short these years are and I want my babies to be babies forever.  And I love that even the most monotonous day affords me an opportunity to incarnationally live the love of Jesus and unite with Him.  But still.  That’s all on the one hand.  In the other hand are the parts of me that aren’t currently very alive.  The parts that used to be some of the strongest pieces of my personality but have been pressed down to make room for all the mothering I’m doing.  Things that I used to spend so much time thinking about and learning have barely gotten a second glance in the past few months.  I’ve found myself thinking lately that there is so much more of me beyond my role as a mother, but for some reason it’s hard for me to be in touch with it right now.  I feel very one-dimensional.  And that makes me sad because I used to think things and write things and talk about things….things that had nothing to do with parenting.  Or rather, things that had nothing to do with the daily monotony of parenting like naps and pacifiers and chicken nuggets.

In some ways I long to be the person I used to be, or the person that is somehow hidden inside of me.  To engage in the things that make me feel like ME.  

But since I’ve gotten to a better place, I realize this reverse ID crisis just supports my contentions about the “integrated life” we need to strive for. We need to have things in our lives that are just for us—that are ours. We need to do things and be things that God made us to do and be. We can’t deny who we are once we become moms. But, I think once we are moms, our mommy roles and resposibilities become so intertwined with who we are, that we can’t deny the ways that makes us more “ourselves” either. We need it all—meshed or intertwined or mashed up or whatever word suits you—to feel like and to be the real us.

I’m not saying we should have our kids at our sides at every waking moment or that time away from any one facet of our identities can’t be really good for us, but I’d love to hear about ways women have been successful at integrating their lives in the day to day……

No single part of our lives represents the whole of who we are, no matter how great or fulfilling or miserable it is. There is such a temptation to talk about life, ourselves, motherhood as a single entity, as something that stands alone. It’s certainly easier to give advice and make decisions and write articles and preach sermons when we distill something to a single point, but that doesn’t reflect the true integration and complexity of real life.

This is true for what’s best in us and what’s not. We can be a combination of success and failure, confidence and uncertainty, strength and weakness. That’s the beauty of being human.       –The Mommy Revolution

 

I love that.  I’ve thought several times lately about how I’m so much more than a mother.  Yes, I am a mom, and that part of me is deep and defining and will last for the rest of my life.  But there’s more, that’s not ALL of me.  Being a mom is so wonderful, and I would hate to minimize its importance, but at the same time I wonder if there’s also the tendency to exalt it to a status of “the greatest thing you ever could dream of being in the whole entire universe no matter what and you’d better not even think of letting anything else get in the way.”  In some ways it is the greatest thing I’ll ever do, but in other ways it’s probably not.  I don’t think there’s as much of this tension in the role of being a father.  Most fathers I know aren’t made to feel guilty if they aspire to more than just fathering their children.  In fact, dads are usually expected to have other ambitions in life.  While there’s nothing unambitious about wanting to dedicate all time and effort toward mothering and being a homemaker, I can’t help but feel that if we’re not pursuing a career alongside being a mom, we should at the very least try to regularly engage those parts of us that have nothing to do with mothering.  I haven’t been doing that, and sometimes it feels like my soul is shriveling-up.  

At the same time, I also wonder if this is a process that God is using to strip away those parts of myself that were nothing more than a false identity.  When I’m not “that Emily,” then who am I?  When all else gets lost in the busyness of family life, where did I go?  Was that really me to begin with?  Was I ever really “that Emily” or was it just a neat label that I was happy to identify myself by?  

Something else I’ve been thinking about for awhile is this:

I discovered that the path to God is the path of agape, of self-giving love. When John wrote in Chapter 4 of his first Epistle, “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love,” he wasn’t talking about just any kind of love. I “loved” traveling and sleeping in on weekends and pretty much anything that involved me doing things for me without having to make sacrifices. But that’s not the kind of love John was talking about. The kind of love that leads to God, that God is, is agape: self-emptying, other-focused, inconvenient, sometimes-painful love.

When I started to seek God by seeking agape, everything changed. For one thing, the carrot stick disappeared; that siren song of the self-focused glory days to come when I no longer had children in diapers was silenced, the tension gone. My life as a mom of little ones was no longer in such sharp contrast to my future life without young children: either way, I’d be serving others. I found that this was the meaning of life, the secret to lasting happiness, the hidden key that unlocked the mysteries of the spiritual realm that I’d spent my whole life trying to find.

And, ironically, after I came to embrace the idea of a life dedicated to agape, I actually ended up with more time for myself. Because in my secular mindset the other-focusedness of the childbearing years was a temporary situation that you would extricate yourself from as soon as possible, my mentality was to just hold my nose and plow through it. I would have thought that to further embrace selflessness would lead to mental and physical collapse! But what I realized, through Christianity, was that a life of agape is not a life of running yourself ragged. To truly serve God and others to the best of your ability is to humbly accept that you are only human, and that there are limits to what you can do. Using the Rules of Life of religious orders as examples (I once posted the daily schedule of the Missionaries of Charity here), I began to see that it was simply not optional that I regularly find time for rest and prayer. I saw that the other-focused life doesn’t mean that you can never take a time for recreation and relaxation — quite the opposite, in fact. It means that you must regularly take time for recreation and relaxation, but that you put these activities in their proper place, realizing that they’re not the meaning of life.   — Conversion Diary

So maybe my truest identity is made up of the parts of me that reflect the life of Jesus.  And the best way to know God and imitate Jesus is to live as a servant.  And right now, that looks like serving my kids.   That “life’s vocation isn’t as much what you do as much as it is whom you serve. This worldview basically said that each of us is put on this earth to serve others, and your vocation is simply a matter of discerning whom you’ll serve and how you’ll serve them. In other words, there is no living for yourself. There’s no optimizing your entire life around what you feel like doing.”

And I’m thinking that perhaps the point is that that kind of serving and agape love is what God is trying to develop in me so I become another kind of “that Emily.”  Not in a way that diminishes the other parts of myself that God has created and gifted me in, but in a way that shows me how to prioritize the needs of the day while still using what available time I DO have to be proactive in doing things that are nourishing to my soul instead of meaningless worrying and chattering about Harris’ sleeping patterns.  Maybe motherhood isn’t the point, it’s just the current vehicle for my spiritual journey.  

I’m not thrilled to be in this place, but I have the feeling that it’s really a good thing.  In some ways I think my discontent is a gift because it’s stirring me to ask some hard questions that I probably wouldn’t have thought of if everything in my life as a mom was great!!! and wonderful!!! and I’ve never been happier and more fulfilled!!!!  It’s funny how I’ve moved through seasons of my life where I feel like I finally have it all figured-out, who I am and where I’m going.  And then a few months later—BOOM!  I just have no idea.  But again, I think maybe God is stripping away things that were never as much ME as I thought they were and creating and revealing a new part of my soul.  

Well.  Here we go.