It's all about milk... *again?*

My little girl is coming to six months! Some people have been asking me when I am going to stop pumping. Before I was pregnant, I actually thought of feeding her for more than a year if possible. But somehow, things do not always go the way you plan... Anyway, I intend to give her breastmilk as long as possible (as long as my work permits too).

Being tired have made me drag my first pump of the day... From the daily 6 to 6.30am, I pumped at close to 10am during the weekend that just passed. Close to 9 hours of not expressing milk! If this were to happen during my confinement, I can guess I would not have the kind of supply I have now and my milk factories would have felt like two heavy stones... :P

Anyhow, while discussing with a fellow mother about fattening up our daughters, she told me that her PD had actually asked her to seperate her milk and supplement each feed with extra hind milk. Well, supposedly every time we breast feed, the milk comes in 2 phases - the fore milk (thin thin one) and the hind milk (thick thick). Every pump's composition of the 2 types of milk will vary. According to my research (and my experience), the longer you take till your next feed/expression, the more foremilk there is... And that's where you'll notice that breastmilk expressed 6hrly will look more watery than breastmilk expressed 4hrly (4hrs since the last pump).

Okay, I digressed... I read up in various websites on the composition of the foremilk and hindmilk and I was shocked. This is because I had actually dumped the foremilk of a few of my pumps! Anyway according to the websites, the foremilk has actually the most nutrients and protein which is needed for the child's growth while the hindmilk has the most calorie (which makes the baby full). Some information I gathered also includes: drinking too much hindmilk will cause the baby to have poo-poo problems (this seems true because my girl actually could not poo after 2 days of drinking hindmilk only).

In my last post, I mentioned that my little girl was sick? I fell sick too (with high fever and flu) after she sneezed into my face... So the flu bug passed from my nephew to my girl then to me! *Argh!* Took some medication which were safe for breastfeeding but I realised that my breastmilk seem to be thinner than usual (even for the 4hrly pumps!). So today, my little girl survived on the frozen expressed breast milk... :P