Got Milk?

Shortly before Kyle was discharged from the NICU, Jeremy and I went freezer shopping. We had discussed purchasing a freezer to put in our garage for well over two years. We always decided it could wait, but with needing somewhere to store extra breast milk, it tipped a freezer purchase from the "luxury" category to the "necessity" category.

Jeremy immediately started making plans for freezer meals and purchasing a quarter of a cow from a local farm. I told him he needed to slow his roll.

This is what our freezer looks like:

That isn't 100% milk, underneath somewhere is a freezer meal or two. Other than that, it is all milk.

We are storing milk in preparation for when I stop pumping. Because Kyle's surgery is tentatively scheduled for around one year, I am not sure what he will need for nutrition. Will he take to eating relatively easily, or will we have a very long road ahead of us? I do plan on him having his tube for a long time, but the tube stays in for awhile to help with liquids and hydration even after the child can take most of their nutrition orally. I don't see the point of pumping for a year and then having to start formula because he needed a few more months of a liquid diet. So, we have a 14.7 cu.ft freezer almost completely full of breast milk.

Obviously, all this milk won't be good when he'll need it, so I have been rotating the milk out by donating to the Mother's Milk Bank based out of Denver. They take my milk, mix it with other donor milk, pasteurize it, and then mail it out to NICUs to feed the preemie babies whose moms don't have an established supply yet. The screening system to sign up for being a donor is quite thorough. The questionnaire was long and they drew blood to screen for disease. I am happy to donate my milk because I know I appreciated Kyle receiving donor milk the first few days he was in the hospital. And if I am going through all the work of pumping, I want my milk to be useful to someone.

Let's be honest though, the real draw of pumping is the freedom it gives me to eat double burgers from Burgerville and oreos all the time.

Bath time

This video makes me happy. It shows how far we've come since we brought Kyle home from the hospital. The first few baths we gave Kyle were quite complicated. He was relatively fresh from his surgery and hated being naked. Kyle had a longer tube that was permanently attached to his little body. The surgeon told us to always keep it stabilized so the tract into his belly would heal properly. When Kyle was dressed, we had it safety pinned to his diaper, but, when naked, the weight of the port would tug down on his belly. Jeremy would stabilize the tube on a wiggling and screaming Kyle while I tried to hurry and wash his little body. I remember being so proud of myself when I successfully bathed Kyle solo for the first time. Swapping out the long tube for the button made baths much easier. Also, Kyle grew calmer during bath time and now he loves it...until we take his naked body out of the warm water. He squeals until we wrap him up all warm in his towel.