Me and My Dairy Cow Schemes

I know I've done a lot of posts involving my status as dairy cow, but it's a BIG part of being a mom for me and it's been littered with little battles here and there but I think I'm finally winning the war on this one. As my doctor said, and I love this, "Breastfeeding is like learning to ride a bike. Anybody can do it, but you might fall down a lot in the process."

 A thought occurred to me the other day...when I start school I will have one heck of a schedule. I have class four days a week; two of them aren't bad at only 4 hours long but the other two...I will be occupied for 10 hours! TEN HOURS. Eight of them are school and two of them are the hour long (or 45 minute if there aren't any cops around) drive to and from another town. I really want to wait until 6 months to get Roxas going on solid foods but this means having to make sure he has enough milk for those long days I'm at school. That's when I realized I'm going to have to really get in touch with my inner dairy cow if this plan is going to work.

 So I've come up with my strict "Dairy Cow Bootcamp" in hopes of increasing my freezer stash which I guard as if that stuff is liquid platinum. I say platinum because it's more expensive than gold. I've been taking fenugreek by the handful three times a day and occasionally getting the ol' milking machine out but I have to really hunker down on this and get with the program. I started looking into lactation cookies. After all...I like cookies. I found this great recipe for butterscotch and chocolate chip cookies through a post on The Leaky B@@b's Facebook page. I will post a link at the bottom of the blog because truthfully they are pretty tasty even if you aren't of the cow persuasion. I hunted down all the ingredients and whipped up a batch yesterday. The best part is now all I have to do is stuff my face with 3-4 of them a day and hopefully see a bit of an increase in my supply. So to clarify: Eat cookies = increase milk. I can do that.

 So I've got the fenugreek and my tasty milk cookies but the real meat and potatoes of the whole scheme is my good ol' buddy the milking machine. Nothing makes you feel more like a cow than hooking up to this machine. Sometimes I want to get a pair of cow ears just to really set the whole thing off nicely. As much as it's silly looking and feeling though, it's the biggest factor in achieving my goals. I have to give huge thanks to the people at the WIC program. I had no clue how helpful they are with breastfeeding. Any time I had a question or needed a little help they were available to answer me. They also provided me with a nice pump that I could never have afforded on my own. I had a rather cheap one that did not work very well and if I never looked into WIC I probably would have had to supplement as a result of returning to work. I owe this program a lot of thanks in their support and determination to get me to my goals.

 So with that I am going to go stuff another cookie in my mouth and tend to my little calf who just woke up from his nap.

Here is the link to those cookies! Butterscotch Lactation Cookies