1 year wrap up: Breastfeeding

I guess we got off to a little bit of a rough start with breastfeeding but luckily I didn't realize it at the time. Maybe everyone gets off to a rough start with it because everything is rough with a newborn? I'm not sure if I should share all the gory details since I am pro-breastfeeding and don't want to discourage people. Plus I am, for the most part, anti-grossing out internet strangers with personal details. I say "for the most part" because I already shared the story of my bloody bra and that's pretty hard to come back from.

The main issue I had at first was that my body made a small accounting error. My uterus submitted the new baby forms, in triplicate, to my boobs just to make sure the message was received. Unfortunately my boobs took this to mean there were three babies to feed and ramped up production accordingly. Because sometimes talking around things is less gross I will describe the situation in metaphor. Imagine B showed up to his local self serve froyo shop for every meal and pulled down the little lever to fill his cup with his favorite flavor. Rather than dispensing a reasonable amount of yogurt at a normal rate, the machine would flip out and spray copious amounts of yogurt everywhere. He was able to catch what he needed in his cup while the rest of the yogurt flew around the store, landing on his face, in his hair, all over his clothes, and on the floor behind him. As a first time purveyor of frozen yogurt, I didn't know the machine was broken.

I wondered how other moms were able to nurse in public without drenching the entire park bench/grocery store/women's lounge at Nordstrom or why other moms thought that nursing bras were a good idea since obviously they were designed to catch and soak up all of the overflow so that you walked around with a wet shirt and got diaper rash on your boobs.

Once things settled down a bit, it became clear to me that my issues were not normal and if you actually make the right amount of milk for the number of babies you have, breastfeeding is super easy and convenient. It also became clear to me why for the first few months I could eat an entire jar of peanut butter with a side of cake every day and still lose weight.

Sorry, I guess that wasn't really a recap of the first year, just the first few months. After that it got really easy and there is nothing to say. B has always nursed relatively frequently for his age which was annoying at first, when it was every hour, and is now no big deal since he can go 4ish hours without a hit.

At almost a year we are still going strong and B has no complaints which means we are going to continue to go strong for probably quite a while still. If others have any complaints about that they should kindly keep them to themselves.