more pictures!!! but first, a very wet story from early this morning (12:42 a.m. December 14) This is a story about fluid. Feel free to skip it if you're squeamish. One of the things we're doing to help Blake gain weight is to encourage my milk supply with pumping and herbs (blessed thistle & fenugreek). After our Day 5 visit with Hectate today I started taking three capsules of each three times a day. And I pump after each feeding (topping up the "Blake top up" with formula when I absolutely have to. Grrr. Hate hate hate that formula can.) Tonight we went to a party, and like all of my social occasions in the past week, I overdid it. I got home aching in a place where you do not want to ache. So I decided to take a warm bath & relax. I got into the tub. The Boy wandered in with a dozing Blake, who was curled Sproutlike in his lap. We goggled and cooed at him for awhile while I floated...and then I felt something trickle down my chest. That's weird, I thought. I didn't think the water was that high. Trickle. Trickle. Now the other side of my chest. Trickle. Trickle. I was visited by a horrid suspicion. "Boy, is there milk running out of me?!" He checked. There was. Now, if you hated formula as much as I do, what would you do? Think on it for awhile. I'll wait. Back? Here's what I did. I immediately hoisted myself out of the tub & wrapped a towel around my waist. "Honey, you're in charge of my clothes!" I hollered, and I scrambled to the basement (one of the things I love most about the Boy is that he can be trusted with these kinds of instructions.) I got downstairs & grabbed the mechanical breast pump. I decided to stay standing to take the weight off my stitches, and I began to pump in the nude. The Boy soon appeared with a semi-sleepy baby. It was then that I started to leak from the other breast, even as one was being sucked dry at a steady rate. We panicked. I thought about grabbing the manual pump & catching the (ahem) run off, but the Boy had a better idea. Okay, so now I'm naked, wet from a bath, sleep-deprived, aching down below and starting to feel woozy from the exertion of staying on my feet. I have a working breast pump on the left breast, and a suckling infant in a football hold (which I'd never tried before) securely latched on my right breast. My uterus, feeling a flood of breast-feeding related hormones, is contracting like crazy and blood is running down my legs. Sex. Eee. It was 45 minutes before my apartment returned from 15 000 BCE & I was anything other than a cavewoman. This is what childbirth does to you, my chickens.

I took a whole series of pictures after this morning's first feeding. Here's one of me, looking exhausted. It's an act. I'm doing fine. Better than fine; I had more than 6 hours of sleep last night!

Why. Are. You. Putting. Me. Down. Mommy?!?!?!?!

Big mouth strikes again.

Why did I throw away the receipt for these parents? They're SO STUPID!!

This is my favourite of the Blake sequence. Who's a pensive puppy??

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- Rocketbride's adventure of 12/14/2003 09:45:00 a.m.