Why am I doing this?

I started this blog about a year ago when I found myself with slightly fewer tasks than hours in the day. I'd just been hired to a new job and was actually waiting to be placed with the group within the company that actually hired me (big companies = lots of paperwork). At the time my daughter was not quite 6 months old, and I'd been playing at being a stay-at-home-mom since she was born. She was still exclusively breastfed and I didn't have any interest in switching her to formula to make my work day more convenient. So I started my first day on the job hauling a breastpump around between orientation events, perching on the edge of a toilet at one point in order to pump. I found several forums online full of women like me who spent quality time with a breastpump for their lunch hour and breaks every day, and took a lot of comfort from the camaraderie.

I decided that it would be an interesting experiment to start a blog to journal my experiences, but that got derailed in a hurry. Shortly after I started, I got transferred to my current department, where I do not have internet access at my fingertips all day long. That's worse than stopping a caffeine addiction cold turkey, btw--this is the first job since college (mid/late 90's) where I haven't been online at work all the time.

Recently I decided that it might be an interesting experiment to try this again. So where are the original blog posts about the pumping, you might ask? I deleted them a while ago thinking that I would start over fresh. So all you get is a very abbreviated summary. I managed to pump till Charlotte's first birthday, including over a 2 day business trip out of town. She took to cow's milk and sippy cups with no problems, and transitioning her off the bottle at daycare went pretty smoothly. I think she may have been the first at our daycare to get mother's milk in a sippy cup during the transition, but they apparently don't have a lot of kids still breastfed by a year, let alone after. We're still nursing morning and night (mostly just at bedtime these days--in the AM only if she requests it). Charlotte's nearly 18 months old now, and we never had to give her formula.

If anyone else is interested, I highly recommend the PumpMoms group on yahoo, and of course, La Leche League. Both were great for moral support during the year. I would do it all again in a heartbeat, btw, and probably will at some unknown point in the future--and No, that's not an announcement of any sort :)