Full circle (cue Joni Mitchell and possibly barf bags, please)

Brace yourselves for a cheesy one, kidz.

For all the nursing woes I've had (and continue to have), the most difficult was being told that I wasn't making enough milk in those early, early days of Chickie's life. The thing is, most women don't make milk until day 3 at the earliest, and sometimes it doesn't come in until day 4 or 5 of the baby's life. So, what happens in the mean time? The baby loses weight and everyone freaks out, despite the fact that everyone knows how the human body works and that the mother's body was built to take care of the baby that just emerged from it. Mom is freaking out because her hormones are all over the place and she is entertaining the possibility of not being able to feed her child, and the feeling of needing to feed your child is definitely up there in the top 3 primal feelings a person can have, I think. (Don't ask me what the other 2 are-- needing to pee is definitely one of them, though). If you can't feed your child, what kind of mother are you? Oh, the drama.

This is the point at which my dad (knowing that I can spin a long yarn and eager for me to get to the point) would say, "OK, start in the middle..."

So, at this point in the nursing saga of my life, I still pump twice a day at work, but Chickie really doesn't drink any of that milk. Laura has been offering it to him in his straw cup for months, but he'll take a sip and just throw it on the floor. In fact, he stopped taking a bottle well at daycare back in April, so it seems as though he's not interested in my milk unless it's directly from the big (well, not really big-- more like saggy and deflated) old boob. So now, I still send a little bag of milk with him to daycare, knowing fully well that he won't drink it. I was actually thinking of no longer buying the stupid pump n' save bags (it's about $20 for 50 bags, and I pump twice a day 3 times a week, so you can do the math on the savings there...) Basically, I still pump to keep up my supply for the days that I'm home with him.

So, yesterday, I read my JP Moms list-serv digest, and lo and behold, there's a post from a new dad looking for some breastmilk for his 3 day-old little one. Apparently, his wife isn't making a lot of milk yet, and from what I understand, there are other complicating factors as well, and that's why they're choosing to supplement with breastmilk and not formula (I don't know the whole story, but that's what I know). It just so happens that they were working with none other than the famous and amazing Gail Levy, the LC who has saved my life and boobs and sanity about 80 times since Chickie was 8 days old.

I don't think many people would just take breastmilk from a random stranger-- it is, after all, a bodily fluid and carries communicable diseases. When I called this dad, I said, "Do you have any questions for me at all?" expecting him to ask me for my most recent blood work, HIV test, etc. He just said, "Well, do you have any communicable diseases?" And that was it. He came by last night around 6:30 and picked up the 8 oz of milk I had pumped in the last couple days-- 8 oz that were surely destined for the sink or garbage and definitely not for my baby. He came by on his bike and wrapped my bags of milk in a towel, along with a cold freezer pack. I wanted to tell him that the milk is fine at room temperature for 6 to 8 hours and didn't need to stay cold for his 10 minute bike ride back to the other side of JP, but you know, in those early days, you're super careful to do everything just right. I gave him my number in case he needs more milk for his son next week. And you know, his baby is so young that he doesn't even have a name-- and I remembered that Chickie wasn't Chickie til he was 2.5 days old. Everyone thought we were crazy, and we were totally at the top of the birth certificate lady's shitlist.

Gail always loves to talk about when women lived in caves and had babies in the wild. It's sort of funny and kooky (she's totally funny and kooky-- this is why she's saved my life and sanity), but it's also amazingly helpful. When women lived in caves, and even now in many parts of the world, what happens when a woman can't make milk for her baby? Another woman nurses her baby, and she doesn't need to worry about her baby not getting enough to eat. In other parts of the world, women aren't isolated from one another in their post-partum days, stuck inside tiny apartments, scared to go outside with their babies in case their babies cry too much or need to nurse or have explosive poopy blow-outs. I think there's a lot of interesting cultural anthropology research around post-partum depression-- from what I understand, it's nearly non-existent in certain cultures/parts of the world because of the ways in which women are connected to each other. (Yes, I'll look into that more before I go on and on about it).

I guess that's it. I guess I just loved that feeling of being connected to another family, and to feel like people can trust strangers enough to ask for things like breastmilk for their newborn.