Weaning off the pump

Holy cow. I thought this day would never come.

As of right now, I have 226.75 ounces of milk in my freezer. There are 32 days left until Littles' first birthday, when it's OK to start giving cow's milk in place of breastmilk.

As of late, Littles has been drinking only about 10 oz of milk on average while she's with Maria. That means that if I don't pump another drop of milk, I should be able to make it to June 12th just on my frozen milk alone. If my milk supply holds up on weekends/holidays/vacation days even when I quit pumping on workdays (and it's likely that it will, at least for a while), then I'll be able to easily make it all the way to June 18th!

So I'm starting to cut back on my pumping. I'm down to just one pumping session most days. This week, I may start to cut back on how long I pump during that session, to gradually get the message to my body that it doesn't need to produce quite so much milk.

Surprisingly, I'm a litle sad about all this. Oh, sure, it will be nice not having to stress on a daily basis about whether and how I'll find time to pump, whether I'll be able to keep up with Littles' consumption, etc. But at the same time, this means my little baby is growing up.

Littles and I spent this afternoon organizing the clothes in her room, which is a pretty big endeavor because this child has a lot of clothes. I have two big boxes into which I've been throwing outgrown clothes, so I went through and organized them a little better. I came across the outfit she came home from the hospital in. The outfit she wore to her first doctor's visit. The pajamas that she practically swam in the first time I put them on. As Littles cruised and toddled around and pushed over my carefully-sorted piles, I remembered the days when I put her down and walked away and came back to find her in the same place.

Where did my little baby go?