Post Partum PMS & (De)attachment Parenting

Today is a day.  It's the kind of day where you wake up and promptly realize that you really should go right back to bed.

I woke up cranky and in pain.  My phone was still MIA from yesterday as it disappeared somewhere in between Aria's school party and the Trick or Treating Night of Doom (see yesterdays post).  The living room was (and still is) a mess as Aria likes to destroy everything I own and I seem to be the only one with any interest it keeping the house looking at least somewhat clean.  And everyone and everything is just annoying the piss out of me

I need a job just to get out of the house and away from my family.  I think a major part of being an attached family is everyone getting time to themselves.  Nate has work, Aria has school.  They get to get away from this house for a few hours a few times a week.  I'm stuck here and when I try to slip away to grab some ME TIME, I get chastised by Nate because he can't handle taking care of Parker for more than fifteen minutes at a time.  I haven't taken a bath alone in weeks.  And if I do its at 3 am and I know the baby is going to wake up any second. I seriously need a job. 

I freaked out on my family today because of a mix of PMS (for the first time since before concieving Parker) and just needing some time.  I hate myself when I'm super cranky and irritated at everyone.  And I'm pretty sure my family doesn't like it either.

In order for me to properly stay attached, I'm going to have to detach. 

Even if it's just long enough to finally wash my hair.

Trick Or Treat - - - No Boobs To Eat?

Today I grappled with the age old dilemma most parents face at some point or another during the adventure that is parenting.

How  the do you keep a breastfed baby happy while trick or treating with older children?

It seems like it wouldn't be too hard really, but let me tell you.  It is.  Older kids RUN from house to house, cutting through yards, leaping over landscaping, and pushing each other to get to the front of the line at each door with a lit porchlight and a pumpkin on the doorstep.  Babies don't run.  They demand to be fed when THEY want to be fed.  They don't care that their preschool aged sisters want to cram as much free candy into a pillowcase as they possibly can.  And preschool aged sisters don't care that their baby brothers want to stop and drink some Momma Milk.

We feed our son (who experienced his first Halloween at the ripe old age of not-quite-eight-weeks-old) the occasional bottle of formula.  So we thought we'd be ok.  Until we ran out of formula in a cul-de-sac fifteen minutes away from home (and the emergency can of Similac).  Our children also tend to dislike pacifiers, and the adorable generic Nemo one we brought was locked in the diaper bag in the car several culs-de-sac away (yes the plural of cul-de-sac IS, in fact, culs-de-sac).

So needless to say, by the end of the night, after a lot of butt patting, finger sucking, empty bottle nipple sucking, and cuddly bouncy walking, we (and by we I mean my husband and my best friend who took turns carrying the baby while I carried the candy bags- for security purposes of course) were exhausted and Parker was ready for some DAMNED MOMMA MILK!  If babies could talk, I'm fairly certain he would have screamed those exact words.

Next year he will be a year old.  He will probably go more than 30 minutes between feedings.  So any advice you can give me on this topic is moot for him.  However, what happens when we have another tiny baby joining us on our Trick Or Treating Extravaganza ( we were the first to start at 5pm and the last out at 9pm)?  So I've decided to throw out a few ideas I thought of after we were warm in our home for the night.

@  Learn to walk and breastfeed at the same time.  (I figured this one out right as we were hitting our last house of the night- Grandma & Papa's.)

@  Figure out a way to force the older children to take breaks. (Please tell me how in the comments section.  Please!)

@  Make sure you bring not just one bottle of formula or expressed milk, but two... or three... or maybe twenty.

Of course, I'm fairly certain that not all parents take their kids (and the neighbors kids, and the old neighbors kids) Trick Or Treating for FOUR, eff-ohhh-yooo-arr, FOUR hours straight.  But those who don't are definitely jealous of baby Parker's candy stash.

And since baby Parker is only 8 weeks old and he can't really eat candy...  He will be having Reese's, Kit Kat, and Hershey flavored breastmilk (without interruption) for the next few weeks.  :)

So, if any of you lovelies out there have any tips/suggestions/ideas on how to deal with breastfeeding and non-stop trick or treating, please, for the love of God (or whomever you choose to fill in that blank with), please, PLEASE, feel free to share in the comments!


Oh, and in case you were wondering, Parker was a Banana for Halloween.

A little bit nurture, a little bit nature, and a little bit nuts.

But since this is the first post, most of you wont see this warning until it's too late.

Today I learned about Power Pumping.  There are different definitions of power pumping but the basic idea is to pump frequently for a set amount of time to get your supply up (or maintain your supply if you suffer from a chronic low supply).

One of the websites I looked at suggested pumping for 10 minutes, resting for 10, repeat, repeat.  I tried this tonight but I think I was timing the pumping sessions a little too close together.  Tomorrow I'm going to try pumping, resting for a half hour, then pumping again and repeating for about two to three hours.  This is, of course, in addition to my usual pumping "schedule" (it's still a work in progress).

Baby Parker eats on a very random schedule.  It's usually every hour and forty-five minutes but then he will go on random cluster feeding sprees during the day as well. Nighttime is a completely different story but I'll get more into that in a later post.