Breastfeeding Resources

I didn’t expect that analytical skills would be useful during motherhood. But I’ve found keeping logs useful several times already. Think about it. You’re exhausted, sleep deprived, and don’t know whether your worries are grounded or irrational. Sometimes a dose of hard data can give you an objective picture of a situation that eases your worrying mind.

Collecting and relying on data does require some balance. You have to be prepared to not get freaked out if your numbers look bad once or twice. (Okay, I still get freaked out. I just resolve not to do anything about one data point. Or two data points.) But I’ve found looking at the trends of the data can be enormously comforting for showing you are actually making progess.

The first logs I kept were to track Aaron’s volume of eating and his weight. I’ll blog about our first challenging six weeks in another post, but basically we were tracking his weight before and after breastfeeding to determine how much breast milk he ate, how much supplemented donor milk he ate, and how much milk I was pumping. I was doing lots of different things to increase my milk supply, and the logs showed the gradual but clear trend of the increasing milk he got from me, rather than the bottle. It also clearly showed the dramatic increase in my milk supply after going to acupuncture.

My first week at work full-time, I started tracking how much I was pumping at each session. I wanted to know how closely I was producing milk to Aaron’s consumption, and I wanted to know whether to worry that my production was up or down during the day or on different days. I wanted to know if I skipped a pumping, if it would immediately affect my supply. Here’s the result from one week:

(I don’t work Wednesdays)

The trends are interesting: skipping a morning pumping Tuesday didn’t seem to decrease the day’s total. (But my lactation consultant mom says I shouldn’t depend on my ability to skip a session, since every day will be different. The warning is always that it’s easier to prevent a decrease in milk supply than it is to work it back up.) Afternoon sessions tend to get less productive, but even that’s not a cardinal rule.

And the end result: 5 ounces of extra milk returned from the day care provider on the first Friday. 6 ounces the second Friday. Job well done, and no more pumping logs for now.