Milk Production - Part I

Milk supply normally varies somewhat throughout the day and over weeks and months. As long as baby is allowed to nurse on cue, your milk supply will accommodate baby's needs. However, when mom is pumping part-time or full-time, pumping output can become an issue due to a few factors:

· The ability to measure how much milk you are pumping makes any decrease in pumping output more obvious and more worrying, even if it's a normal variation.

· Pumping moms generally need to pump x amount of milk for baby for a particular day, and it can be quite stressful when mom does not pump this amount.

· No pump can remove milk from the breast as well as an effectively nursing baby, so pumping does not maintain milk supply as well as a nursing baby. Because of this, the greater the percentage of baby's nourishment provided by pumping (rather than direct breastfeeding), the greater the possibility that mom may have to work harder to maintain supply.

I understood that I shouldn’t keep on measuring how much breastmilk I have everyday. But I really failed to latch on Bryan for the first few weeks. No choice I have to pump out the breastmilk for him. Mmm… Definitely will record the amount of milk I pumped ^_^

My breastmilk came on the 6th day after I deliver Bryan. For the first 3 days, it was about 3oz - 5oz only. On the 9th day, started to jolt down the volumn I pumped everyday. Here the list for the amount of breaskmilk I have for a day, which I was failed to fully breastfed Bryan.

9th Day - 8.5oz

10th Day - 10oz

11th Day - 12oz

12th Day - 12.5oz

18th Day - 20oz

Started from 18th day, which was 7th July 2009, I was able to fully breastfeed him till now. I am no longer keep recording the breastmilk I had everyday, but took some pictures of the breastmilk I had pumped in the early morning – around 7am.

4^th July 2009 – This was the first time I pumped more than 6oz of breastmilk in ONE PUMPING, which is a little bit more than 7oz. I was so excited and took some pictures of my production.

8^th July 2009 – After 4 days, the production increase 1oz to 8oz! This excited me again.

15^th July 2009 – A little bit more than 9oz after 1 week ^_^

5^th Aug 2009 – Haha… The bottle is not big enough for my breastmilk. After this, I no longer took any pictures of my production, as it is more than the bottle can contain. Averagely about 12oz / 13oz. Hahaha……

1^st Nov 2009 – This morning was the HIGHEST in my record, which was 16.5oz!!!! My breastmilk is more than enough for Bryan now >0<