You've come a Long way, baby

Warning: This blog post may not be suitable for everyone. Male members of my family, this means you. Read at your own risk.

Tonight Larkin wouldn't nurse.

All sorts of scenarios flooded my mind - Is she through with me? Not interested in nursing anymore? - until Matt and I tried to give her a bottle, then a syringe of breast milk. She turned them both down. She just wasn't hungry, I guess.

That, plus she chomped down on her tongue today while at daycare, so her fussiness and basic disinterest in eating tonight could be attributed to a sore tongue.

Left me in a quandry, she did.

You see, I am down to one pumping session a day while I'm at work. Because I nurse Larkin in the morning and at night, there's no reason anymore to bring my breast pump home.

I just leave it in the pumping room and carry home my little cooler and ice pack with whatever I pumped that day, then return each morning with an empty cooler and fresh tubes.

And tonight, because my body knows precisely when it is supposed to produce milk, a baby unwilling to nurse and not having my breast pump handy was a problem - to say the least.

So what's a lactating mother to do?

Well, I guess you could say I took matters into my own hands. Literally.

I, ahem, manually expressed my milk into a plastic tube.

What usually takes 15 minutes with Larkin or 20-25 minutes with my breast pump took about 50 minutes.

All for a measley 1.5 ounces of liquid gold.