Recovering

I'm writing this from my hotel room in Dallas, with Finn sleeping beside me and Nanny M in the other bed.  I have a work conference for the next few days and so we all are here - and Nanny M got to fly for the first time today.  Finn was a champ on the plane, a seasoned traveler already!

My mastitis is finally better.  Yesterday morning was the last of the icky goop coming out, and now it's just a little tender.  I've been taking probiotics since Tuesday, since so many of you thought it would help.  It's too early to tell if it will help keep a yeast infection at bay, but the lower GI side effects that started Tuesday have gone away completely.  Yay!

I know that the mastitis was caused by not pumping at all over the holiday weekend.  Most work days I pump twice what Finn eats during the day.  And since he was born, he always eats his fill off just one breast.  So during the week I feed him off one side in the early morning hours, he usually gets a light "snack" from the other side before I leave for work, and then I pump at noon and around 3, and he nurses again when I get home, around 6pm.  When I'm home with him, we skip the morning snack and he nurses a full meal around 10am, and then again around 2pm.  But since he only nurses on one side, that means that one breast goes a long time (4am to 2pm) between nursing.  So I either need to start nursing on both sides on weekends, or pumping at least once in the morning to keep this from happening again.

And of course I'm off work and with him for another 4 days (though most of it I'll be in lectures) and need to start doing something like that now.  Meagan recommended the manual Harmony pump by Medela to me in November after my blog post about being so engorged at the wedding a few months ago, so I took her advice and bought one for this trip.  I used it tonight, and have to say that it's awesome!

And finally, I can't end this post without a picture of Finn - this time with his picture with Santa.  The guys taking the picture was so great - he kept Finn's attention while I put him in Santa's lap, so he didn't even know who was holding him until well after this picture was taken.  Isn't this guy the best Santa ever?