The Boobs Revisited

I'd like to revisit the status of my boobs.

When last I left you here these babies were producing...and spraying....milk like there was no tomorrow.

And they were big.  Full D's.  That was big for me folks, I know some of you have like HH's or some other crazy letter with your new mama boobs, but D's were big for me!

Everyone told me that things would calm down and settle somewhere around the 12 week mark.

Well 12 weeks came and went and we were STILL making enough milk for me to provide for my own baby, pump 5 oz bottles even after a feeding and also donate to several women in my midwife group who didn't produce enough milk.  

I was convinced it was all a bunch of crap and that I was just going to make tons of milk forever.  I was going to be like the Mother Teresa of Nursing and just continue to donate milk to women with low supply everywhere.

And then FINALLY somewhere around Week 16, 4 months in to this whole breastfeeding thing, the boobs got the message that I didn't give birth to triplets and relaxed.

It was such a subtle change that I wouldn't have noticed it except for the fact that my brand new bras suddenly didn't fit.

I found these really pretty nursing bras whist in London and bought them in D's.  I tried them on, amusingly spraying everywhere all over the dressing room while trying them on and they fit beautifully.

source

Two weeks later after we'd returned home my beautiful new bras suddenly didn't fit anymore.

Sad face.

So, here we are 4 months of nursing and my boobs have shrunk back to their pre-pregnancy size of 34C and they are now just kind of always full of a certain amount of milk.  Engorgement is rare and deflation is rare, they are just sort of always semi-full , so much so that I have a lot of trouble remembering which boob baby last fed on.  Before it was easy because one boob was huge and the other was not, now they always feel the same!

Annoyingly, pumping now only gets me 3-4 oz. and that's every drop and takes half an hour.  I used to be able to pump 5 oz. in 20 minutes and that was with me choosing to stop the pump because pumping is tedious and boring, not because my boob was done giving milk.  

In hindsight I should have built up more of a freezer stock in those first 4 months...but they would of been tainted with dairy...so nevermind!  Advice to new mamas though, build up your freezer stock before your milk regulates!

I already miss my D cups.

So there you have it, oversupply or not, things DO eventually regulate in the milk department!!!  How long did it take some of you other new mamas???  Longer than the 3 months they promised?

Breastfeeding - A Timeline

I didn't read a damn thing about breastfeeding before baby came.  I bought a book and had every intention of at least glancing at it before I hit 40 weeks, but we all know how that turned out. So when Baby Jett arrived I had no idea exactly how breastfeeding was going to go down, but I knew it was happening whether I was ready or not.

I find this information would have been helpful to me over the first few days, so here you go, here's how the beginning of breastfeeding goes.  Of course everyone is a little different with how your milk comes in, but this timeline would have saved me from a bit of anxiety!

The first 24 hours baby doesn't eat AT ALL.  You put them to your boob like all the time, let them sit there for hours with their mouth at your nipple, smelling and rooting and licking...but baby doesn't eat anything.  My baby literally didn't leave my boob for the first 12 hours of life except for 15 minutes when he was escorted by his father down to the nursery for his newborn check and not once did he eat anything.  It's weird...but they don't, they don't need to eat in that first 24 hours. As long as you put boob and baby together a lot, so they can get used to eat other...it's fine.

The second 24 hours baby is still very interested in eating but still doesn't really eat and you have to express colostrum and hope that's enough.  Baby would lick off the colostrum and go back to sleep, BUT everyone assured me he was getting enough and that he needs just a taste every two hours or so and that was enough.  I HATED expressing the colostrum, it feels totally gross to squeeze your own nipple the way you have to to get the colostrum out.  This is also the point when baby gets weighed and you find out that baby weighs less than they did at birth.  If you have a normal size baby this probably doesn't stress you out too much, but if your baby started out at 6 lbs and gets down to 5 lbs. 6 oz, this is when you're like EAT BABY, EAT!  But it's ok, baby will eat...I promise.

The third 24 hours baby finally starts to eat but it hurts like hell and you have to watch baby's latch carefully to make sure they are latched on correctly...it's very confusing because it all hurts, even a correct latch.  A correct latch hurts DIFFERENTLY than a bad latch...but it all hurts.  Baby also seems to want to eat a ton here as there isn't much colostrum that he gets and this is like a test to see how committed you are to breastfeeding because your nipples hurt from the nearly constant sucking and the rest of your boobs hurt because they're getting ready to grow an insane amount and fill with milk.  This was a very painful day.

The fourth 24 hours your boobs hurt like crazy as the milk has finally come in and you're convinced that your boobs will always hurt and you just have to get used to it if you want to keep nursing.  They're also massively huge...and I was small chested when I started this, I imagine if you were already busty they would be INSANE!  But the pain in the nipples has at least subsided as they get used to nursing and baby gets more efficient at latching properly.  Somewhere in here you may also find out that your amazingly huge boobs that finally have milk in them have helped baby grow again and your amazed that you are doing this...sustaining him on the outside just like you did when he was on the inside.  Baby also feeds a bit less since he gets way more milk in eat feeding than he was getting when it was just colostrum.

The fifth 24 hours...relief.  The boobs don't hurt anymore...and breastfeeding finally works.  The latching barely hurts, the actual feeding doesn't hurt at all and the crazy engorgement only happens if baby has gone too long between feedings.  But rather than have to sit there with painful boobs, you just wake baby up, pop him on the boob and VOILA, instant relief from the huge boob.

And every day after that things just get easier and easier (when it comes to breastfeeding anyway!) The whole thing is absolutely amazing, the symbiotic relationship between baby and boob is NEATO.  I wake up easily when I know baby needs to eat and they start leaking if he cries in pain.  And the boobs are even down to a more comfortable and more reasonable size...they're still D's, just like when I was pregnant.  They were DD's for like 3 days right when my milk came in but didn't stay that huge.

At 17 days in we're exclusively on demand feeding.  If baby shows ANY signs of being hungry, onto the boob he goes.  He has never had a pacifier and I have never tried to pump.  We will continue this way for AT LEAST a full month before I give pumping a whirl just to appease my husband who wants to feed the baby.

Baby is still an "efficient" nurser and doesn't dawdle on the boob.  Feedings are 7-10 minutes with a rare 15 minute feed thrown in every once in awhile.  I definitely have a quick let down and he gulps and gulps to deal with the gush of milk, but he's getting better at it.  There's still a lot of pausing for spit ups and pooping, so nursing sessions are never less than half an hour, but the actual time on the boob is short.

Books say feeds of 15 minutes on each boob is ideal.  Which means...I still stress a bit that baby only nurses for short periods of time AND very rarely makes it to the 2nd boob.  If he's managed 10 minutes on one boob he's usually out for the count and not interested in the 2nd boob.

But as far as I know he's still growing and he always seems satisfied with his short sessions, usually lasting 2-3 hours between feeds, with a cluster of one hour sessions in the morning and evening.  And OMG he lasted a full 4 hours between feeds last night!  Baby is also peeing and pooping like nobody's business, so again everything appears to be working even with his less than "ideal" feeding schedule.

So, books be damned...stressing about baby NOT being attached to my boob 24/7 is the LAST thing I want to be worrying about on such a small amount of sleep.

Anyone else find their baby to be nursing well but very very differently than what is considered "ideal"?

My drooly spitup baby with his EYES OPEN.  

You can't beat waking up to that little face right in front of you.

Dressing the Ladies

Let's talk about boobs again.

My boobs are wreaking havoc on my daily outfit choices.

Everything in my closet fits just fine over the bump.

I have dresses that emphasize the bump, dresses that hide the bump, dresses that I can wear over the bump for MONTHS still.

But the girls, the girls not so much.

It would seem that small chested girls dress differently than large chested girls.  Perhaps all you large chested girls were already aware of this, but it never occurred to me that I would grow out of clothes because of MY BOOBS.  I was preparing for a bump explosion out of the clothes, not a boob explosion.

Small chested girls can flaunt what they got without looking slutty, tight tops and low cut tops we can get away with easily because we don't have much chest to show off.  But large chested girls, large chested girls gotta keep those babies under wraps APPARENTLY, or buy clothes that are bigger than size S just to fit the knockers in comfortably and to keep from straining their clothes to within an inch of their life.

I'm discovering that I without fail dress for my FORMER small chested body and that all of my small chested girl dresses have a little bit of a theme going on.

They're tight on top.

And looser on the bottom.

This is of course on purpose, at least I know now I dress for my body type.  Tight on top (or low cut) because I'm small and I'm emphasizing the smallest part of me, then flowing on the bottom because I hate my thighs.

I'm a fan of empire waists and baby doll dresses.

Totally perfect style for a bump btw.

But my wardrobe has no room for giant ta-tas.  The tops are SO TIGHT.  So tight that the dresses start to dig into my armpits.  Or the girls are so squished in there that I have cleavage coming out of what used to be a very cleavage less dress.  In a nutshell, the yabbos are making me UNCOMFORTABLE on a daily basis.

I'm not sure what the solution is to this.

I don't think maternity clothes are the answer, my bump is tiny and have you seen how much fabric maternity dresses have???  I know they are also a bit roomier in the chest for just the situation I'm describing but I gotta have a bump to match the bosom for maternity dresses to really be the answer.

It seems a bunch of you other preggos already belonged to the big booby club, are you running into this problem as well or are your clothes so well designed for giant ta tas that they have room for extra growth?  And small chested preggos what about you?  Are your boobs making your clothes uncomfortable long before the bump?

Clearly a shopping trip is in order I'm just very undecided as to what style of dress I should now be looking for.  Or is a bigger size the answer?  Ugh, so many questions!!  What's a formerly small chested turned large chested girl to do?

Life With the D Cups

It happened again.

The girls made a break for it.

At 2 days shy of 15 weeks the girls are no longer happy in their pretty little C cup bras and have decided they want to be D's!

Are you kidding me?

You guys remember how surprised I was with my rapid boob growth in the first pregnancy?

Well this time the boob growth was so slow that I think I had decided they were going to stop at the C's.

Ridiculous and illogical?  Perhaps.

But I wasn't expecting to be buying new bras at 15 weeks and I wasn't expecting them to be D's!

In all honesty I was completely OK with the C's, in my opinion a C is the most desirable cup size, not too small, but not too BIG.

Pretty.

C's are pretty.

But D's?  Not even halfway through the pregnancy?

D's are BIG!

Guys, if you didn't know, I am not a busty lady.  I've never been a busty lady.  I spent all of my teenage years loathing my small chest, wearing padded bras and wishing I had cleavage.  By college and my 20's the girls were finally a full B and I was finally comfortable with them.  I had accepted that I was never going to have a large chest and I discovered that it didn't really matter.  Never again did I wish my chest size was anything different than what it was.

But the C's were still pretty.

And I'm already missing them.

Everyone who's farther in your pregnancy, HOW MUCH BIGGER ARE YOUR BOOBS FROM THE STARTING POINT?

A full 2 cup sizes bigger not even halfway through the pregnancy and I'm scared!

And in other news, I have to show you these dramatic pictures of the difference in the bump from day to night.

We went out to eat last night and when we came home and I got ready for bed my belly was HUGE, I was like what the hell is this thing?! And had to take a picture.

Then I took another picture this morning with the bump back down to it's normal size.

Prepare to be amazed!

10pm, ready for bed...gotta love the maternity leggings!

8am, just got up...where'd the bump go?

My other preggy ladies, do you have this dramatic bump difference between night and day???