They're just boobs again.

They're just boobs again.

Now, despite how appropriate it would be to apply that statement to the English national football team, I'm afraid I really am talking about boobs.

After our failure to breast feed and my only solution to express a bit, I'd been cursing the pump since day dot.  I went through three different pumps trying to maintain or increase my supply.  I sat in different rooms, different chairs, trying different food / drink combinations, all the while feeling like a methane-filled farm animal named 'Bessie' whose sole vocabulary word is 'moo'.  Not pretty.

Even uglier was as the supply kept dropping anyway, I started dwelling on the anger I had for all the tunnel-visioned midwives and postnatal nurses who were so eager to push breastfeeding on me when they should have been promoting breast MILK - any way you can get it.  Had they bothered to tell me to start expressing every three hours from the beginning we would have had a much better go of it.  Not to say I didn't try - good lord did I try.  But they all need a swift foot in the ass and a nice round of re-educating to identify where they again went wrong.

Anyway, although the pumping came into play late, it worked for four and a half months so not too shabby at all.  Unfortunately the supply started to dwindle and after trying to increase pumping frequency which was near impossible, plus trying the Fenugreek 'eau de maple syrup' fiasco I decided to throw in the towel.  When you work an hour at something for so little reward it becomes almost a joke.  Kind of like a mathematically challenged person doing a Sudoku.  Or doing crunches without cardio.  Or trying to pluck your own eyebrows into a nice arch.

Digressing again.  How unusual.  Or not.  These days it's all I can do to remember my name, where I live and that my teeth need regular brushing, let alone follow a train of thought.

But back to boobs, because that's really why you're still reading, right?  Yes, it was taking me an hour of pumping to express some measly 20 ml, which needed about 4 or 5 friends in the fridge before it was even remotely close to enough.  Then the trouble started.  The small amounts were starting to mess with Rukai's belly so much that he'd start off a feed completely stopped up, before the laxative effect of the breast milk would get his innards churning and gas bubbling away.  But it wasn't enough to finish the job, which made him rip into a shriek so loud it quite probably shattered space junk, after which he'd pass out on my shoulder and fart for the next half hour in his sleep.  My poor chicken.

He'd be ok when he woke up, blinking and grinning and oblivious and hungry and wind free.  But we'd spend the next two hours trying to recover our hearing and feeling so shit that there didn't seem to be any clear way to help the situation.

I tell you, it's a wonder I have any wine glasses left.  I mean from the shattering caused by a high note, but then again the drinking of wine has also been in play here.

In all truth, I do count us seriously fortunate that he hasn't been an incessant screamer from birth - the screaming out of our wee bubba has actually been so infrequent that it startles us into a frenzy when it does happen.  Combine that surprise upset shriek with his 'joy scream' that comes out during play - every one is like an alarm that keeps our 'fight or flight' reaction on red alert 24/7.

So we are freaking exhausted.

But the good news is, we've tried a new formula that for the past 24 hours has been a small miracle.  Rukai is content and napping, and I am able to sit still and observe all the housework I have been putting off while trying to solve the gas-plosion problem.  I am not typing one-handed with my Spectra 3 churning away beside me.  And I'm able to think clearly.

I clearly deserve that glass of wine.  You know, while I still have a glass to put it in.