At some point it abruptly occurred to me I wouldn’t be breastfeeding (well, pumping my milk out) for like, forever. At 10 months 3 weeks, Her Highness is big on solid food (very determined to mash things with her gums and 5 teeth) and our freezer is chock-full with frozen breast milk. You’d have thought winding down is easy, but well I expected it to be easier. First of all, apparently you can’t just tell your breasts to stop. Secondly, while thinking you can do that, you get really clogged up which ends in a vicious cycle of you pumping it out, thereby signaling to your body you’d like it to produce more, please.
Damn it’s the last thing I want but all I’ve been able to bring myself to do so far is cut the Fenugreek. I have 3 unopened bottles, if anyone out there wants to breastfeed, please. Damn you, bulk buying.
I couldn’t bring myself to actually take something to make it stop. Psychologically, I can’t get over the “guilt” of knowing I can produce and simply choose not to, out of “convenience,” when I already don’t work. (Which is also bullshit since of course you do work when you’re an SAHM, you work bloody hard and without a thank you – and yet we do this to ourselves. I do, anyway.)
So I keep hoping my supply dwindles, like a lucky, lucky girlfriend of mine, so I’m off the breastfeeding hook. After lots and lots and lots of negotiations and reluctant pumping outs and re-negotiations (with my boobs, people – d-uh) I’m down to about 12-14 ounces a day. Shut up. This is an achievement. I was at 27 ounces a day, at the height of my pumping regimen.
Meantime, it’s a constant reshuffling of frozen breast milk bags, replacing the older ones with freshly frozen good stuff, checking all the dates… Also, it’d be nice to have more freezer space again. Somehow I couldn’t bring myself to buy an additional freezer for the milk just like another mum friend of mine did…..
You should be very proud of yourself for all those bm. Fenugreek did not work for my friend at all and she gave up on breast feeding just after a few days.
When you said you had a lot of frozen milk, I never expected *that* much! 😉
Well done for doing such an ace job and don’t beat yourself up for wanting to and needing to stop making milk. Miss Rockstar has already decided she wants “real” food she can get her teeth and gums into and since I doubt that hospitals in HK accept donated breast milk to give to babies in need, you don’t really have any choice.
So, what did you do with all that milk? I would really like to donate some before it looks like what your freezer looked like!