I applied for a new job when I was 36 weeks pregnant with Ana Lia, and my starting date was five weeks after she was born. Since I would be working full time in an office, I knew I would have to pump while I was at work. I started reading about how to get a breastfed baby to take a bottle, and the first night we tried it, I was so nervous. I read that I may need to leave the room or even the house and that she may refuse several times. We didn’t have much time to practice before I went back to work, so I had a lot of anxiety about how successful we should be. Like so many times, my anxiety was unwarranted. Ana Lia took her first bottle, drank all of it while I pumped, and went right back to nursing the next session. She was a champ at nursing and at bottle feeding. 

I gradually built in two or three pumping sessions a day immediately after nursing before I returned to work because I thought that I would need a freezer full of milk before I left. Logically, as long as you are pumping regularly while at work, you only need one or two days worth in the freezer because you are going to restock it when you get home. My anxiety is always at its height during pregnancy and postpartum, so I made myself pump more than 100 ounces to feel secure to leave home. To be clear, if she took three bottles while I was at work, that would have been 12 ounces in total. There’s no reason I needed 100 ounces of milk at any time. But, it made me feel less anxious, so I did it.

When I started work, it was at a brand new job, and the one thing I learned from this experience was to speak up. Ask questions. Ask for what you need. My manager, who soon became a dear friend, made sure that I had access to the pumping room on our floor, but my first week of training was in a completely different building. We didn’t have very long breaks from training, so I didn’t have time to go to the room in the other building. Do note, I also never asked for longer breaks, which after later pregnancies, I would have done. I tried to get access to the nursing room on the floor where we were training, but there were so many women assigned to it that there were no open spots through the day. I had a converter in my car to make the cigarette lighter into an AC/DC plug, so that first week, I did most of my pumping in my car.

Because I was working in a new part of town, I was not accustomed to the drive or the traffic. It took a while to figure out when to give Ana Lia her bottles so that she was hungry when I got home but not starving, and to figure out how much to thaw each day. There was definitely some trial and error, as there is with almost every part of parenting. I had to be very patient with myself, with my baby, and with my mother in law, who was babysitting her. Eventually we got into a routine. I pumped three times a day at work, which made my work day a little longer, but ensured I was comfortable through the day, and she took three bottles while I worked. 

On good days, I had a very regular schedule for my pumping sessions. One pumping session a day, usually the morning one, I used for resting. I would call my mom, listen to a podcast, or sometimes sleep (when you’re a new mom, you get it whenever you can!). I would usually use one to eat lunch, and then use one for answering emails or doing other work on my laptop. On bad days, I did whatever I needed to in order to get through the day. On one particularly challenging day, I wasn’t pumping as many ounces as normal, and things were stressful at work. Right as I went to pour the milk into the storage bags, I hit something wrong, and the little milk that I had pumped spilled all over the floor. I was absolutely distraught. I had all sorts of awful thoughts about how I wasn’t a good mother and how could I take care of her if I couldn’t even get the milk into the bag properly. Of course, none of this was true, but it can be hard to separate the lies in those emotional moments. I went home and told Afa everything, especially about the specific negative thoughts I had about myself. Sometimes, it helps to say those things out loud to someone else. He helped me find the truth, and then he opened the freezer and showed me how much we had in there – Ana Lia was just fine. And so was I. Again, patience and grace need to be present in abundance in motherhood.

I had lots of practice, a great pump, and flanges that fit; so I pumped lots of milk – between 16-24 ounces a day. Ana Lia usually only ate about 12 ounces, so I looked into donating milk. I was privileged enough to be able to donate through Mother’s Milk Bank in Arvada, and I loved it. It is long and complicated to get approved, so I only recommend going through this method if you are pumping and storing lots of excess milk. We ended up donating about 750 ounces of milk to the milk bank by the time I was done pumping with Ana Lia. In so many ways, Ana Lia was a very easy baby. She took a bottle while I was away, nursed while I was at home, and was content no matter how she was fed. It was an amazing way to start our feeding journey. 

Eliam was born when Ana Lia was 15 months old, so she was still nursing, but I had stopped pumping when she was 12 months old, which I did with all the kids. When Eliam was born, I assumed that nursing would be easy because I had 15 months of practice; but he didn’t have a great latch, and we struggled quite a bit the first few days. I was very sore for almost a week because I couldn’t get him to latch properly, and I’m not sure he ever really figured it out. I had three months of maternity leave with Eliam, so I waited until he was about 8 weeks old to introduce a bottle. 

Eliam never liked the bottle. I was still able to pump a lot with Eliam, usually 10-12 ounces a day. The difference was that Eliam only drank 3-4 ounces of milk for the whole 10 hours that I was gone during the day. He had plenty of milk in his bottles but refused to drink it. When I would get home from work, he would nurse multiple times between arrival and bed time. Then he would nurse once or twice in the middle of the night, and twice before I went to work. Then go the whole stretch of the day eating very little. This is the example to remind me that not all babies fit the mold. Eliam was a healthy baby who consistently gained weight, so there was no reason to worry about him eating so little during the day. He just did it differently – and that’s okay. 

Because he ate so little, we had lots of milk leftover again, so I went through the clearance process and donated through the Milk Bank. Again, this process is long and involved. It includes a long application, a blood test, and documentation from the OBGYN and from the pediatrician. To me, it was worth it because it took the place of donating blood, which had always been one of my favorite things to do…but you can’t do that while you are pregnant or nursing. So I was grateful to have a chance to donate my milk. With Eliam, we donated a little over 250 ounces.

Finiasi was born the month Eliam turned two. I nursed the older two until I was about four months pregnant, but I hadn’t pumped in a long time. I had five months of maternity leave with Fin, but I also had two toddlers; so I didn’t pump much at all. There just wasn’t time. If I was doing it again, I might have gotten one of the Willow or Elvie pumps, but they were very new and expensive at the time. It might have helped me pump more when I eventually went back to work. I also worked from home a few days a week, even when I returned, so Fin didn’t need many bottles at all. The first day I went to work, I probably had 30 ounces in total in the freezer, and that was stored from my whole five months on leave.

Fin, much like Ana Lia, was happy to take a bottle or to nurse. And I had a very flexible pumping schedule at my new office. In Denver, there were six or seven of us sharing a single mother’s room, so the schedule was very tight. In San Francisco, at one point, I was the only one using the room, and that maxed out at three. It made scheduling easy and relaxed. I was accustomed to pumping, so it became a good break from work, and I had an absolutely fantastic nanny who took great care of all the kids. 

Because I didn’t pump much with Fin, I didn’t have enough milk to donate through a milk bank, so I used Human Milk 4 Human Babies on Facebook instead. It’s still milk donation. You are not allowed to charge anything, but it easily connects local moms who need milk to moms who have extra. I had about 40 ounces extra when Fin turned one, and I donated it to a mom who was going back to work and wanted to make sure she had a good freezer supply first.

Pumping, like nursing, was a different journey for each of my kids. I’m grateful that I was able to nurse and to pump for all the kids, that I had a job that made it easy to schedule my pumping sessions, and that all the kids always grew, despite their varying eating habits. Pumping was not easy; it was a lot of work and a lot of lugging equipment back and forth; and LOTS of snacks. But, for us, it was worth the journey and the work and the emotions of the bad days. Because there will be bad days, but hopefully, they will vastly outnumbered by the good ones.