ChezPerky

At some point, it got too confusing to explain which kind of bottles were for whom to Seth and the nanny each morning before I left for work. Abby gets 4oz bottles, Sam gets 5oz bottles, Ellie gets special 28-calorie bottles… It's a lot to keep track of. Finally, one night I gave up and just labeled everything. The best part is, that's just the bottles that I made up that I store on the door. You can't see INTO the fridge in this picture. Inside the fridge there were a bunch of bottles of breastmilk and DOZENS of bottles of water for mommy. Because making milk takes LOTS of water.

Seriously, people wonder why I feel like such a freaking cow. Could it be that I'm as big as a freaking cow? Could it be the udders I've got? No. I think it's this PILE of milk in my fridge! Amazingly, it's still not enough. Ellie's moved to 5oz bottles since this picture was taken and Sam is now clamoring for 6oz bottles. Abby waffles between wanting 4oz or 5oz per feeding, so she's a little harder to predict, but she's mostly still solidly in the 4oz camp. But I figure with all the feedings they take by bottle, plus all the nursing that they do while I'm actually home, they're consuming about 100 oz of milk per day.** I'm falling short of that by a bit, but you know what? It's still astounding how much I produce each day. It really is. Were humans really meant to do this?I'm thinking not so much.

**Edited to Add** I'm getting questioned on my math, and I do admit that math is not my strong suit, but I'll tell you how I came up with that number. Abby eats 4-5 ounces per feeding and eats 6-7 times per day. So that's about 30 ounces per day for her. Ellie eats 5 ounces per bottle feeding (4) and 5-6 ounces per breastfeeding (2), so that's a minimum of 30 ounces per day for her, and really closer to 32 ounces per day (though she's eating a caloric equivalent of closer to 40 ounces per day). Sam eats now 6 ounces per bottle feeding (4) plus he breastfeeds CONSTANTLY when I'm around. He only gets about 3 ounces per breastfeeding session, but he's constantly attached to me. So my guess is his total intake per day is roughly 35-40 ounces per day. That puts their minimum total consumption at about 95-100 ounces per day. So maybe I rounded up by 5 ounces, but it's still roughly 100 ounces per day. Incidentally, my research into how much milk a breastfed baby eats per day is not as low as Ewokmama's research shows. My research comes up with numbers that suggest that most babies top out at 40 ounces per day which would mean that eventually we'll be looking at 120 ounces per day between the three babies. I won't be able to keep up with that demand, but that's okay. My babies got 5 months of exclusive breastmilk and I'm pretty darned proud of that, and they're continuing to get a whole lot of breastmilk, considering the circumstances.**

I pulled a bunch of photos off my camera at long last, but now I'm embarrassed to post them, because they just completely suck compared to anything Jess took. (Hey, did I mention that she gave me some MORE? Wow, an embarrassment of riches!) I may never be able to post my own photos again! But just for fun, I'll leave you with JUST one.