The Rest of the Story

I realize that I never shared the conclusion, more or less, of my breastfeeding journey. Having shared the rest of this struggle in such detail, it's only fair that I share the end of the story. I guess it was early in November that I felt like we had reached a crisis point, again, and the breastfeeding clinic had given us all the help they could offer. I got tired of Andrew's constant rejection of the breast and finally decided to bottlefeed all day.

Since then I have been pumping twice a day, getting between 10 and 15 oz of breastmilk. He gets two breastmilk bottles and two formula bottles each day, and, until recently, at least, he nursed once overnight and once first thing in the morning. The past few weeks he has been losing interest in the morning nursing session, however, and since he's been sick he's been refusing to nurse at night as well.

Sooo... I guess my breastfeeding days are over. And I think I'm going to stop pumping when my current prescription for domperidone runs out in a few weeks. I have a great deal of regret and disappointment about the way things turned out, but I have made peace with the decision to stop. I did the best I knew how to do. Maybe, if I had it to do over, I could have done better. Or maybe not.

An interesting side note to the end of my lactation is that my cycles may or may not resume, and we'll need to make some decisions about TTC#2. Since I believe it was the removal of my minor endo that allowed me to conceive Andrew, I think our best chance at conceiving again without intervention will be sooner rather than later. While I am terrified at the prospect of being responsible for two very young children, I'm sure we'd manage, just as millions of families do every single day, and I'd be beyond thrilled to get a BFP in the months to come.