Over the hill

I think we're at the beginning of the end of my pumping.

The girls will be 6 months soon and in the last couple of weeks, their demand has caught up to, and sometimes surpassed, my supply.  It doesn't help that my supply has slightly dropped.  I've gone from averaging around 60oz per day to just under 50oz.

I'm not too worried about it though.  We're now introducing solid foods.  For the time being, it's not for nutrition or meal replacement, we're just learning how to eat from a spoon with about a tablespoon of rice split between the girls per day.  We might try oatmeal tonight, and I've got a few veggie purees ready to to be tasted next week.  As their solid food intake increases, their breast milk intake will decrease.

Initially, the goal was to pump for the first 6 months and then see where we are and decide if we want to continue.  Now that we're coming up on 6 months, it seems kind of silly not to just go ahead and bring it on home to have breast milk for the whole first year.

Now we're dealing with milk management.  Some of the milk in the freezer stash is threatening to get old.  For the last week, we've been thawing part of the freezer stash and replacing it with newer milk.  Rotating out the June and July and freezing the November.

At my record, I had 1,188oz of milk frozen but that's now down to 1,068.  Keeping track of how much comes out and how much goes back in has been a challenge.

I think it's going to be another 2 months of pumping 5 times a day to try to keep up with the girls demand.  Around that time, I'm hoping that the solid foods will start to decrease their milk intake and I'll start seeing that freezer stash build up again.  Once I start putting more in than I'm taking out, that will be my signal that it's time to start weaning off the pump.  I figure it will take about 5 weeks to wean, dropping one pump a day for a week at a time.  So I'm looking at returning my rental pump in January or February, and relying on my less powerful pump for any of my pumping needs beyond that, probably fully stopping in March.  From then on out, we'll just go through the freezer stash until it's gone, and hopefully that will coincide with the time that the girls are on a full solid diet around the 1 year mark.

Of course, if my supply continues to drop, my body might have other plans for us.  In relation to my supply dropping, my weight is creeping back up.  While I haven't stepped on a scale, I suspect I'm now back to pre-IVF-induced-diet-from-hell weight.  My jeans were a bit snug yesterday and I might have to break out the wardrobe I was in before I started all this craziness.  Does that mean I'm back to normal?

In other bodily news, I think I've resprained my ankles again.  I had perpetually sprained ankles for years and did some physical therapy to deal with it a while back.  But now they're feeling like they did before so I'm assuming they are back to being perpetually sprained again.  Pretty sure I've developed carpel tunnel in my right wrist as it's giving me a lot of pain.  And a weird pain on the side of my groin every time I turn at all.  It's stopped me in my tracks a few times.  I'm assuming this all a part of ligaments and tendons and stuff tightening back up.  Maybe the bones of the hips and pelvis are doing some maneuvering to recover from the pregnancy.  I dunno.  I'm just kind of a sore, achy, ouchy mess.