The Great Milk Debate

At least it is at my house, at least internally with me, it is The Great Milk Debate.

The debatable questions being: when can I stop pumping?  When will there be enough milk in that freezer to get Katy through 1 year of breast-milk?  Well ladies and Tim, that time has come.

If this is already too much information for you, then please - stop reading now.

So we've done a count, I have a handy dandy spreadsheet with a count of breast-milk bags by week that are in our deep freezer and I believe that time is NOW!

I started "weaning" this past Sunday.  I was pumping 5 times per day, my "normal" schedule would be

1-2am
6-6:30am
10:30 - 11am
3 - 3:30pm
8-9pm

As of Sunday night I was pumping 4x per day.  The easiest pumping for me to cut out was the middle of the night one, since I am less likely to want to do that one anyway.  Usually the pain would wake me up at night, but at this point, it hasn't.  I pumped at these times:

6am
1030- 11am
3-3:30pm
9-10pm

Since I made it Sunday night, Monday, Tuesday and Tuesday night on this schedule, I thought maybe I'd go ahead and drop another pumping just to see if I can get down to 3x per day without super pains.  Today is the first day of this.  I am pumping now:

6am
2pm
9:30-10 pm

I made it through to 2pm, it was a bit painful, but nothing terrible.  I hope to follow up by dropping the 2pm pumping on Friday.  Then this weekend, I hope to only pump a few minutes only when I feel like I cannot take it anymore.

When I did this process with Cooper, I went cold turkey and stopped pumping and it was very painful and very difficult.  I didn't want that again this time, so I have been trying to think of a way to gently ease up and this seemed like a good starting place.  I will try to follow up once I'm completely done with any changes that I made to this process just in case anyone out there in www land could ever use any advice - as it was difficult for me to find any!