Traveling with(out) a nursing toddler

Although it's been over a month since I weaned from the pump, I do still nurse Littles twice a day -- once in the morning when she first wakes up, and once in the evening, a little before dinner. I enjoy nursing, Littles is still interested (although I often feel that she enjoys the cuddles and the 1:1 time with Mom more than the milk, not that there's anything wrong with that!), and so I have no plans to drop either of these sessions anytime soon.

Of course, this posed a dilemma during my travels this past week. Since nursing is a supply-and-demand system, I knew I couldn't skip nursing all week and expect to pick up where I left off when I got home.

This meant that if I wanted to continue nursing, I would have to (gasp!) start pumping again.

It actually was not too bad. There were two main reasons why I hated full-time pumping:

1. I hated the awkwardness of either telling co-workers about pumping or finding excuses to take pump breaks during the workday.
   
2. I hated the day-to-day "am I pumping enough?" stress.

Pumping for a nursing toddler elimates both of these problems. I only needed to pump before and after work, so there was no awkwardness during the workday. And I really didn't care how much I pumped; honestly, I'm not even sure we'll end up using the milk I pumped, as Littles should be able to do whole milk exclusively by the time of my next trip at the end of July.

I refused to bring my Medela Pump in Style out of retirement, so I took along my Medela Harmony manual pump instead. I was pleasantly surprised by how much milk I was able to get. I've been feeling fairly "deflated" and I've wondered whether I really have any milk left. To my surprise, I averaged about 4-5 oz per session, which is a pretty decent amount.

Transporting the milk home was a breeze, since I only had the two pump sessions. Back in my full-time pumping days, I would have pumped probably around 100 oz on a trip of this length. Getting all that milk home would be a huge pain! This time, I only pumped about 35 oz, so I didn't have any difficulty fitting it into two cooler bags and carrying it on.

I have no goals around nursing or pumping right now, so I don't know whether or not I'll go through all of this again during my next trip. But if I do decide to do it, it's nice to know it's not too much of a hassle.

The upside of traveling

Reading Littles' "comment" on my last blog entry reminded me of one of the benefits of traveling on business: Littles and Hubby will get plenty of quality daddy-daughter time together! I've talked to them a few times today, and it sounds like they're having a blast. I think the time alone together will be really good for both of them.

And it's sunny and in the low 70's here in Seattle, and I could see Mount Rainier this morning on my drive in to the office. Life is -- well, not great, but not so bad either.

I might just be the worst mom ever.

That's how working mom's guilt sometimes makes me feel.

Littles has had a rough time adjusting to Texas. First, her sleep schedule was all off, thanks to the time zone change. Then, on the Wednesday after we arrived, she came down with a double ear infection, which further threw off her sleep.

After a pretty rough day, she recovered well from that, and she started in her new nanny share last Wednesday. The first day went fine. On Thursday, the second day, I could see a tear running down her cheek when I came to pick her up, and Kristi (the nanny) said, "She's been fussy and clingy all day. I think she's missing you."

Sigh. At least Friday was better again.

But then, literally minutes before her first birthday party started on Saturday, I thought she felt a little warm. Sure enough, she was running a fever, which eventually spiked up to about 103 overnight.

We took her to urgent care midday Sunday, and the doctor said she looked fine and probably just had a virus or other infection. Her fever broke not long after that.

So I figured I'd proceed with my longstanding plans to catch a 7:30 AM flight to Seattle this morning. I was a little nervous, what with the bad day at Kristi's on Thursday and the fever over the weekend, but I figured I didn't really have a good reason not to go.

Until Littles refused to go to bed last night.

We're still not sure what that was about. She screamed whenever we put her in her crib, or tried to rock her, or tried to lay down with her. All of a sudden, around midnight, she calmed down and started running around and laughing and playing like it was the middle of the day. Strangest thing! I was finally able to nurse her to sleep at about 12:30 AM.

So I skipped the early-morning flight to see how Littles did today. She did just fine, settling down easily for her nap, so I felt better about proceeding with my Seattle plans.

I was able to stand by for an evening flight tonight at no charge, so that worked out well. But boy, I did not want to go. I think about her wanting her mommy, wondering where I am, wondering if I'll ever come home again, and I just want to cry :(

It's going to be a long week.

Child care options

We just finished our third search for child care, so I thought I'd write a couple of posts about the process we've gone through.

First, the options. Most people break down child care into three categories:

• Daycare centers. These tend to be large, with kids broken up into multiple classrooms by age. Biggest pro: Always available. If your teacher is ill, the center handles finding a backup. Biggest con: Lots of kids can mean less 1:1 attention... and more germs and illness.
  
• In-home daycares. These are usually smaller. In Texas, for example, in-home daycares can have no more than 12 children at one time, regardless of the number of providers -- that's the size of one classroom at many daycare centers! Most in-home providers also accept kids of all ages, from infant to preschool. Biggest pro: Most in-home daycares have only one provider, so your child is able to really bond with that provider, rather than seeing multiple teachers over the course of his/her day. Biggest con: You'll usually find yourself scrambling for backup care if your provider is sick or goes on vacation.
  
• Nannies. A nanny comes to your home to watch your child. Biggest pro: Tons of 1:1 attention. Biggest con: Cost. A good nanny can easily cost more than your mortgage payment.

When I first started looking for child care, when I was pregnant, I thought these were the only options available. And, personally, I don't like any of these options, at least at Littles' age. I think that 1:1 attention is so important for infants/toddlers, but at all of the daycare centers and in-home daycares that I've looked at, Littles would be one of four or five children assigned to one caregiver.

A nanny certainly provides 1:1 attention, but the cost is prohibitive for us. Plus, Littles really does enjoy interacting with other kids, and I don't think she would get enough of that interaction if she were home alone all day with a nanny.

For me, the "sweet spot" is 2 or 3 children with one caregiver -- enough so that each child gets plenty of attention from the caregiver, but also plenty of interaction with other kids.

So I am lucky to have stumbled upon a couple of additional options, both of which hit my "sweet spot" for the number of children, at a reasonable cost:

• Nannies who bring their own child. This gives your child a built-in playmate. Also, the nanny usually charges a little less, since she's essentially getting free child care.
  
• Nanny shares. One nanny, two families. This is what we did in California, and it worked out to be about the same price as a daycare center.
  
• Stay-at-home moms. Some stay-at-home moms look to watch an extra child or two to make some extra money. This is what we will be doing in Texas. The mom who we'll be leaving Littles with is actually on the high end as far as what she charges, compared to other stay-at-home moms providing child care, but we feel she's worth it. And she's still cheaper than a daycare center.

In my next post, I'll talk more about my process of searching for child care.

The milk made it safely :)

Hubby said the milk made it safely, still frozen solid. In fact, he said it was probably colder than when I took it out of the freezer! 10 lbs of dry ice was definitely enough :)

Shipping breastmilk

I still have about 160 oz of frozen breastmilk in the freezer. With our pending move, I was prepared to dump whatever Littles didn't drink this week. After all, transporting frozen breastmilk is a huge pain, because it must stay frozen -- if it thaws, it must be used within 24 hours, which would obviously be a problem if it's 160 oz that has thawed. And with Littles moving on to cow's milk and taking less and less breastmilk during the day, it didn't really seem necessary to have breastmilk available in Texas.

So the other day, I told Hubby that I would probably dump my frozen milk before we left California. He said, "Heck no! I've supported your breastfeeding for a year! We are not dumping any milk!"

Sometimes I love my husband :)

I knew that I had two options for getting the milk to Texas: 1) transport it myself when we fly out on Sunday, or 2) ship it ahead of time.

Transporting it myself didn't seem like a good option. After all, that is a lot of milk, and we will have plenty of other things to deal with (Littles, our cat Monessa, etc.) on Sunday.

So I decided to ship it ahead. Since Hubby will be coming home tomorrow night to help with the move, I had to get it off to him today.

It turned out to be fairly easy.

Since all my milk is frozen in glass bottles, I wrapped each bottle in bubble wrap.

I found a small hard-sided cooler in the garage that looked to be the perfect size. (You can also use a styrofoam cooler packaged in a cardboard box, but this site suggests that a hard-sided cooler does a better job of keeping the milk safe.)

I used DryIceDirectory.com to locate a nearby dry ice supplier. This turned out to be an ice cream shop!

I purchased 10 pounds of dry ice, which cost $8.50. This may be overkill, as this site says that you only need 5-9 pounds of dry ice to keep a cooler full of milk frozen, but I figured better safe than sorry.

I split the dry ice into two pieces using a hammer. I wrapped the first piece in packing paper, put it at the bottom of the cooler, and put more packing paper at the bottom of the cooler for additional padding:


Then I put the bubble-wrapped bottles into the cooler:


I wrapped the other half of the dry ice in more packing paper and put that on top. I stuffed packing paper into any holes I could find in order to make sure everything stays nice and secure in transit:


Then I wrapped tape around the cooler a few times to secure the lid in place.

Since dry ice is classified as dangerous goods, I called FedEx to double-check that they would have no problems shipping it. The phone rep sent me a label to place on the cooler to identify it as containing dry ice. I also printed out this flyer to identify the cooler as containing human milk. I edited it to add that it contained glass as well:


Then I headed over to FedEx. I had to make sure I dropped it off at a location that accepts dangerous goods. (You can identify these locations by selecting the "dangerous goods" option under "Filter your search by FedEx services" on the Find FedEx Locations screen.)

I chose the priority overnight option, so the package will arrive by 10:00 AM tomorrow. Again, this is probably overkill -- standard overnight, with a 3:00 PM arrival time, would be fine, but I erred on the side of caution.

The woman asked me if the value was more than $100, and I answered, "No." Although I was thinking in my head, "Well, really, it's priceless..."

The cooler with 17 glass bottles and about 135 oz of milk (I kept some out for Littles to drink during the rest of this week) weighed in at 28 lbs. It cost $175 to ship.

After shipping the cooler, I went to pick up Littles, and found out that she'd been having tummy troubles all day. We're guessing it's from the cow's milk. (Hubby is lactose-intolerant, so this is not a complete surprise.) So now I'm really glad that I went through the trouble of shipping the breastmilk, since it takes a lot of pressure off -- we can take our time with weaning.

Now I just have to cross my fingers and hope all that milk is still frozen when it arrives in Texas tomorrow!

Hanging up the horns

I'm heading in to San Francisco tomorrow. My old team is having a "team meeting," and Brian, my old boss, invited me to come along. See, because that team travels so much, you can easily go for weeks or months without seeing your teammates, or even Brian, for that matter. So roughly once a quarter, Brian blocks everyone's calendars so that they won't have customer visits, and holds a team meeting. The meeting is usually light on business and heavy on fun. (And alcohol.) Tomorrow, for example, there is a 1-hour meeting in the morning, and then we're taking the ferry to Sausalito for lunch (with drinks), followed by a cruise on San Francisco Bay (with drinks). I'm looking forward to seeing my old teammates again and saying goodbye.

And I'm really looking forward to not pumping.

That's right. My last pumping session was on Thursday, May 22nd -- 7 months to the day after my return to work. I have officially hung up the horns.

Tomorrow's team meeting will be a perfect bookend to my working-and-pumping career. I remember another team meeting, on October 15. It was one week before my official first day back, but as I said, these team meetings are pretty infrequent, and for this particular one, two of our senior managers came along, in addition to the rest of the team. So I made a point of attending.

That was the first day I left Littles alone with Maria, and it was very, very hard. I remember sitting on BART heading in to the office, listening to Rob Thomas' "Little Wonders," remembering how I used to sing that while dancing around the living room with Littles when she was a newborn, when my return to work seemed so far away. I couldn't believe that I had just left my little baby with someone I had only met twice.

And then there was pumping. The plans for that day were similar to the plans for tomorrow: Brief meeting in the morning, followed by a ferry to Sausalito for lunch and hanging out, then a ferry back to the office. I had hoped to arrive early to have some time to pump, but that didn't work out. I ended up excusing myself on the ferry and pumping in the bathroom. At the time, I thought that was awful. Now that I have more bathroom-pumping experience, I can honestly say that I wish all bathrooms were like the ones on the ferry. At least it was clean and had an electrical outlet.

That was at around 11 AM. I wasn't able to break away to pump for the rest of the day. I decided to forego pumping on the return ferry trip, opting to pump when we returned to the office instead. At that point, it was 5:30 PM and my breasts were about to explode. Unfortunately, the receptionist goes home at 5:30 PM, so I wasn't able to get the key to the pump room. I ended up ducking under a table in a conference room and hoping that no one would walk in on me.

This is why I'm really looking forward to not pumping tomorrow :)

It's been a long and crazy 7 months, but I've made it through, somehow carving out time and space to pump where there was none, day in and day out. Littles will go straight from breastmilk to cow's milk. No formula for my little girl.

On one of the mommy message boards that I frequent, there was a discussion a few months ago about whether moms should feel proud for making it to a year on breastmilk alone, no formula. Some respondents pointed out, "Women have been breastfeeding for millenia, so why should you feel proud if you breastfeed too?"

OK, point taken, but I doubt that my great-great-great-great-grandmother had to slip into a bathroom on a ferry and hook herself up to a plastic contraption to provide breastmilk for her baby. And I know she didn't have the lure of an almost-(but-not-quite)-as-good breastmilk alternative staring her in the face every time she went to the grocery store.

So yeah, I'm proud that I woke up every morning and turned myself inside out to give my baby the best. It was not easy, and I certainly don't look down on moms who do choose to supplement with formula or even switch completely, now that I know what goes into keeping a baby on breastmilk for a year. That doesn't mean I can't feel proud of myself for successfully taking the hard road.

Although I'm done pumping, I'm not done nursing. Littles still nurses once in the morning and once in the evening, and due to our impending move, I have no plans to wean her further in the coming weeks. I may even end up pumping again, during my business trips to Seattle, to maintain my milk supply for those morning and evening feedings.

Still, as I put my pump parts away this morning (at least temporarily) and prepared to give Littles cow's milk for the first time, I couldn't help but realize that this is the end of a big chapter in her life, and in mine.

On to the next one :)