Freedom

For the past three weeks, I have been stuck in the house with Witten. Even when my mom was here on Tuesdays, I was trying to nurse him, and I ended up not being able to get much done. All of that has changed. I'm not thinking that I'm going to try to nurse anymore. I only have one week left with Witten before school starts back up, and I want to get him on a real eating/sleeping schedule. When I'm working on nursing, it ends up taking too long to eat, and he's pretty agitated when it's all over. I nursed him, follow it up with a bottle, then had to pump. I generally had about an hour and then it was time to start it all over again. Then I decided to change it up. I started to nurse exclusively during the day and bottle feed at night. That way he didn't have an out, and he had to nurse in order to get food, but he still got his nutrients at night. I did this for two days, followed by one day off. Well, that made for VERY long days. I just wanted to make sure that I would be able to produce enough milk for him to last once school starts, and when I'm only pumping, I'm barely keeping up with him now. I have about 2 weeks worth of storage in the freezer, but I want to boost that supply so that the milk lasts longer. Because Witten wasn't getting enough milk at a time due to his screaming and flailing during the feeding process, he wanted to eat ALL the time. That's all I did on the days that I was nursing was feed him. It was stressful for both of us.

Yesterday was supposed to be a nursing day, but I HAD to get out of the house! We went to church for the first time since he came home. We pulled away at 8:03, and I made a comment to Mitch about how I didn't understand why people always got to church late and blamed it on their kids. After all, we had to get a baby ready as well as ourselves, pack his diaper bag, prepare bottle with a mixture of breast milk and formula to add extra calories, get his travel oxygen ready, unplug his apnea monitor and plug it in in the car, grab my pump, and get us all settled in, and my pump hooked to me. Just as I was finishing that statement, I realized that we had forgotten Witten's blanket, a necessity for cold buildings, and keeping the sun out of his eyes at church. At 8:20, we were pulling out of the drive again, and texting friends to save us a seat. This is ironic because although we live the furthest from church, we always get there the earliest to save a pew for everyone. We still ended up getting to our seats with 8 minutes to spare, but if you know me, you'll know that we may as well have been late!

I meant to get a picture of our first day at church but forgot my camera. I decided that a church day wasn't a good day to nurse, so I packed along 3 bottles and we decided to run errands after church.

We stopped at BRU where I bought some necessities as well as WAY too many clothes for this fall. (It wasn't actually too many clothes, it's just that that's not what we went there for.) Luckily, we still had/have tons of BRU as well as Visa gift cards left thanks to the generosity of Mitch's office.

Next we ran next door to Petco where we had a coupon for dog food, and we decided to get one of those dog faucet thingies (I'm pretty sure that that's the official term for them) where the dog pushes it with their nose and water comes out. It keeps you from having to water them all the time. That's especially good for us since Riley plays with the water in the bowls as soon as they have gotten a drink and then they don't have water for later. So much for Pavlov and his theory! I thought dogs were supposed to learn cause and effect.

Anyway, we continued on to my parents house where Witten met his great grandparents for the first time. We took lots of pictures, and he couldn't take his eyes off of Grandma Shelfer!
Once my dad took her home, GranJan finally got her hands on Witten, just in time to change a VERY dirty diaper! Aren'ts parents great?!?

At 4:30, Witten was still doing well, and we had a couple more errands to run, so we stopped by the bank to deposit some checks, and headed to Target for groceries.

We pulled in the drive around 6, 10 hours after we left home. Witten was such a trooper.