Yes, I Love My Bessie....She's My Fav-o-rite Cow!

I am starting to feel a bit like Bessie, having to produce milk for the bottles that Harvey's babysitter, Jan, gives him when I go to teach piano lessons. Lately I have been a bit busy feeding the baby, so there is very little time to "pump" inbetween. What puzzles me is that I talk to so many women who "stockpiled" their milk. One mother had to throw a whole freezer full of milk away because her daughter wouldn't take milk from a bottler. I figured that maybe I needed something more aggressive than the "cheap" $50 hand-pump by Avent. So I purchased a state-of-the-art pump from Medela - the Steinway of breast pumps. It is electric and goes "choom, choom, choom - a - laka". You are supposed to empty the breasts within 10 minutes keep the milk cold with the handy cool-pouch, wipe it clean and go back to work. I don't know how the career women do it because I tried it the other day and got about 15 drops of milk and was feeling like a bad cow. What if I get "put out to pasture?" So I called the company and after listening to about 15 minutes of pre-recorded messages advertising all of the accessories and fancy pump gear, I finally got an operator. What was astounding was how much this woman really knew about the specifics of pumping. She said that because I was switching from a manual single pump (one breast) to a double pump, that my let-down had to get acclamated to the new pumping mechanism and the fact that it is a double pump. After picking this woman's brains for a few minutes I found out that there is a BETTER pump out there that mimics the baby's suckling patterns (also put out by Medela). So I said, "Well if this pump doesn't do the trick, I guess I'll just have to resort to the old-fashioned method of pumping." The woman said, "Oh, you mean hand expression?" "No," I replied, "I'll just use the baby when I need to pump."