Maternity Leave
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Maternity Leave

I was planning to miss only one update during labor, but then feeding my baby turned out to be more challenging than I anticipated. I wasn't making enough milk, and he was crying nonstop. His weight dropped too fast, so we had to give him formula. Thankfully, it looks like we'll only have to supplement with formula for a little while. The pediatrician gave us a hospital-grade breast pump and a complicated routine that should get him back to regular nursing once my milk actually comes in.

Not having enough milk came as a surprise to me. I induced lactation for fun in 2016 and continued making milk until 2019 when I released the first chapters of this story. I only made a tablespoon of milk every four hours since I didn't have any pregnancy hormones, but this time around, I was really confident that I would have lots of milk since people rarely have that level of success with inducing lactation.

I'm actually not using the breast pump because I'm already an expert at manual expression. Manual expression is far faster and more effective than pumping. The advantage of pumping is that one can sit at the computer and do other things with a harness. I might use the pump later down the road, and I've used pumps before, but I gave this one a try, and it wasn't doing shit, so I switched to manual expression, and I've already seen rapid improvement.

"Michael" is doing an amazing job with his part of the routine and changing diapers, too!

Regularly scheduled updates will resume once things settle down, but right now, I have to put my baby first. I have several more chapters typed but not edited, and I have a huge stock of drafts in my paper notebooks. In the meantime, please bear with me.

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