Theme Thursday: My boobs could have won a 4-H competition

Before my son was born, I made the decision to breastfeed. Mostly because it’s convenient and free. I was lucky because my son took all of one feeding to figure out how it worked which was a good thing because I sure the hell didn’t know what I was doing. The first time,  the nurse at the hospital basically grabbed my boob and positioned it the right way, which was something before childbirth I would have objected to (having a strange woman grope me, that is). But after pushing almost 9 pounds of human being out of my body in front of various medical professionals who saw way more of me than I’m sure anyone has ever seen, or WANTED to see, getting my breast and nipple pawed and adjusted was really no big deal.

Fortunately, my son took to breast-feeding like a fish to water, and he was very efficient about the whole thing (10-15 minutes, start to finish). Unfortunately he was hungry ALL THE TIME and he ate so fast you could hear him gulping and snarfing down milk from the other room. I had been warned that babies usually spit up a little after a feeding but I was not prepared for the metric ton of breast milk he’d happily hoark up on me after every feeding. I walked around with 3 layers of burp cloth permanently attached to my shoulder, but I should have just worn a garbage bag to save on laundry.

I mentioned the frantic gulping and the tsunami of subsequent spit-up top the nurse at the breast feeding clinic…I liked taking him twice a week because I got all OCD about how much weight he gained (lots) and what size percentile he was in (always at the very large end). She suggested I feed him in front of her, so she could see what the deal was, and did I think I could get him to breastfeed right then. Not a problem, lady…it’s lunchtime in his world every 45 minutes or less.

So I fed him and he gulped and snarfled and belched like miniature sailor who just pounded back a six-pack of baby-beer and we ended the performance with a spectacular display of spit-up, which partly landed on the nurse’s shoes. After a brief moment of silence that I think was a bit of shock and awe, she asked me a bunch of questions about my milk supply (massively abundant) and his feeding habits (all the fucking time) and concluded that I was producing enough milk for twins, possibly triplets. And the milk was coming out so fast that my son had to gulp frantically to keep up, which was why about a third of it ended up all down my back every time. Also, my kid was a glutton and the reason I was producing so much milk was because he was sucking so much out at a time. It was a vicious circle. And it also explained why my boobs ballooned up 2 cup sizes and why I could shoot milk about half the length of my house.

Thankfully the milk production eventually slowed down and I could stop worrying that I was going to drown my son with an unstoppable wave of boob-juice, or that he would weight 500 lbs by the time his first birthday rolled around.

Come to think of it, at 13 he still eats like a starving person…just minus the spit up.

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